As published on CLAUDIA

Among all the women in The Odyssey, none embodies a more fascinating contradiction than Penelope. For nearly three thousand years, she has occupied a central place in one of the foundational stories of Western civilization. Yet, for centuries, she has too often been reduced to a single image: the faithful wife who waits.

Penelope is the Queen of Ithaca, the wife of Odysseus (Ulysses in the Roman tradition), and the mother of Telemachus. When her husband departs for the Trojan War, he leaves behind a young son and a kingdom that, within the political logic of the ancient world, depends on the presence of its king. The war lasted ten years. His journey home takes another ten. For two decades, Penelope remains in Ithaca, never knowing for certain whether her husband is alive, dead, or destined never to return.

In Homer’s poem, she is already far more complex than many later interpretations would suggest. Penelope is intelligent, prudent, and remarkably cunning, qualities that mirror those of Odysseus himself. While he becomes famous for surviving through wit rather than brute force, she deploys that same intelligence within a far more restricted world. Surrounded by suitors who occupy her palace, consume its wealth, and pressure her to choose a new husband, Penelope repeatedly finds ways to postpone a decision that would mean not only accepting Odysseus’ death but also surrendering the throne of Ithaca to another man.

Even so, the image that survived through the centuries was primarily that of the woman who waited. It is understandable. Odysseus travels, fights, confronts monsters, gods, storms, witches, and the possibility of never seeing home again. Penelope remains where she is. If we instinctively associate movement with action and permanence with passivity, it seems easy to decide who the hero is and who simply waits for his return.

But perhaps that is precisely the trap. Penelope is not simply waiting for Odysseus. She is governing.

Christopher Nolan seems to understand this distinction perfectly. One of the film’s most striking moments comes when someone suggests that Ithaca’s throne has remained empty throughout Odysseus’ absence. Penelope immediately pushes back. Empty? She has been there all along.

That single exchange says almost everything. The kingdom was not without a government. It was without a male king, and those are two very different things.

This interpretation also helps explain why Penelope continues to be reimagined. For generations, literature, painting, television, and cinema emphasized her marital fidelity above everything else. She became almost the archetype of the wife who patiently endures absence, resists temptation, and preserves the household until her husband returns.

More recent adaptations, however, have begun to explore everything that existed beneath that waiting.

In The Return (2024), Juliette Binoche portrayed Penelope opposite Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus. Rather than focusing on the hero’s adventures, the film explores the moment he finally returns to Ithaca after twenty years and encounters a woman who has also been profoundly changed by his absence.

Binoche’s Penelope is not simply the emotional reward awaiting the victorious hero. She carries resentment, exhaustion, grief, and an uncomfortable question: What does it mean to welcome back a man who spent two decades living experiences she could never share? Perhaps that is one of the most significant shifts in the modern understanding of Penelope. For centuries, audiences asked what happened to Odysseus while he was away. Only much later did we begin asking, with equal seriousness, what happened to the woman who stayed behind.

Because remaining is also an experience.

Penelope did not spend twenty years frozen in time. Yet her authority is never fully recognized. She continues to be expected to legitimize her rule through the presence of another man. It is remarkable that a story nearly three thousand years old already contains a question that continues to shape women’s lives well into the twenty-first century. Women can sustain families, businesses, governments, and institutions through times of crisis, and yet their authority is still too often regarded as temporary. It is here that the image of Penelope as a passive woman begins to collapse.

Unlike Odysseus, Penelope has no freedom to leave. She cannot abandon Ithaca or simply remove the men demanding that she choose another husband. Nor can she postpone that decision forever, because Odysseus’ prolonged absence creates a growing political crisis. So she does what countless women throughout history have learned to do within systems that deny them formal power: she finds an opening.

She promises to choose a husband only after finishing a funeral shroud. By day, she weaves before everyone. By night, she secretly unravels everything she has woven, only to begin again the next morning.

This gesture became one of the defining images of Western literature because it transforms a domestic, traditionally feminine task into an act of political resistance. Unable to stop the system confronting her directly, Penelope interrupts time itself. During the day, she performs obedience. At night, she quietly undoes the progress everyone believes has been made.

There is extraordinary psychological power in that image. Her endless weaving and unweaving can be understood as an attempt to suspend an impossible decision. Choosing another husband would mean finally accepting Odysseus’ death. Refusing to choose means remaining suspended in an endless uncertainty. That is precisely why Penelope remains such a recognizable figure. How many women throughout history have exercised power without ever being allowed to call it power? How many have governed spaces officially reserved for men? How many have learned to negotiate, delay, maneuver, and outwit because direct confrontation simply was not an option?

Odysseus’ return does not transform Penelope back into a passive figure either. She does not simply accept that the man standing before her is her husband because someone says so. She needs to recognize him, test him, and determine who has actually returned after twenty years.

In Homer’s poem, that recognition revolves around a secret known only to the two of them: their marriage bed, built around the trunk of a living olive tree rooted within their home. Penelope orders that the bed be moved. Odysseus immediately reacts, revealing knowledge that only the true husband could possess. Penelope does not welcome the hero simply because he has returned. She decides whether he truly is Odysseus.

We often forget something equally important: over those twenty years, Penelope changed too.

Stories tend to focus all transformation on the hero who journeys into the world, faces danger, and returns altered. Yet those who remain are transformed as well. Living for two decades with hope and uncertainty leaves its own scars.

Penelope is not, of course, the only important woman in The Odyssey. One of the epic’s great strengths lies in the way different female figures represent distinct forms of power, desire, memory, and resistance.

Helen of Troy is perhaps the clearest example of history assigning women responsibility for decisions made by men. For centuries, she has carried the reputation of being the woman who started a war. Her beauty and her departure with Paris became the popular explanation for Troy’s destruction.

Nolan, however, challenges that interpretation by presenting a war driven as much by political ambition, commerce, and power as by personal relationships. Helen becomes the face of a conflict she did not create. Men waged the war. Cities burned. Kingdoms sought power. Yet history chose to remember a woman as the cause of it all.

Athena occupies a completely different place. As the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and war, she becomes Odysseus’ greatest protector. It is no coincidence that she favors a hero whose greatest weapon is intelligence rather than physical strength. Athena guides, protects, and intervenes throughout the journey, while Penelope embodies another kind of wisdom altogether: one exercised within the constraints imposed upon mortal women.

Calypso represents yet another form of feminine power. The nymph keeps Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years, offering him what appears to be an irresistible alternative: to remain with her, free from war, responsibility, and even mortality.

Calypso can be understood as desire, temptation, and suspended time, but also as imprisonment. She offers Odysseus the possibility of never returning, never confronting the consequences of his past, and living forever outside the demands of ordinary life. In that sense, she stands almost as Penelope’s opposite.

While Calypso offers escape from time, Penelope embodies the time that continued to pass in his absence.

For that reason, although The Odyssey is filled with extraordinary women, Penelope remains its most complex female figure. Helen unfairly bears the blame for a war. Athena possesses divine authority. Calypso can hold Odysseus outside the world itself. Penelope alone must survive within a society ruled by men, without divine powers, without the freedom to leave, and without ever having her authority fully acknowledged.

That is precisely why Christopher Nolan’s interpretation feels so contemporary. He restores to Penelope a strength that has always existed within the character but has too often gone unnoticed.

It is also why Anne Hathaway’s performance becomes, for me, one of the film’s disappointments. Not because she fails to understand Penelope’s importance, but because her performance shifts between registers that never fully cohere. At times she seems overly theatrical; at others she pursues an almost calculated delicacy, softening her voice in ways that never feel entirely natural. In several emotionally demanding scenes, her vulnerability simply does not carry the weight the character deserves.

The contrast becomes even more apparent because Penelope is Odysseus’ emotional counterpart. Matt Damon carries every contradiction of Odysseus in his body. Anne Hathaway, for me, never quite reaches that same level of truth.

That does not mean she is poor or that she weakens the film. She brings dignity and presence to the role and is especially convincing whenever Penelope must assert herself. But considering the symbolic richness of the character and everything Hathaway has already proven capable of throughout her career, I expected something deeper and less visibly constructed.

Still, Christopher Nolan deserves enormous credit for giving Penelope back a strength that has always belonged to her but has too often been overlooked by adaptations—and by the culture itself.

Perhaps what we have long called passivity was never passivity at all. Perhaps it was simply power that history refused to recognize.