The Woman Who Waited

Teacher’s Edition · History & Background

The clever wife, and the last word

In Homer’s Odyssey, while Odysseus is away for two decades, his wife Penelope is besieged in Ithaca by more than a hundred suitors who assume he is dead and demand she remarry. Her famous stratagem: she promises to choose a husband once she has finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s aged father, Laertes — but each night she secretly unravels the day’s work, stalling for three years until a servant betrays her. She is celebrated for fidelity and cleverness, yet the epic keeps her in the domestic sphere; at one point her own son, Telemachus, tells her that speech is men’s business and sends her back upstairs to her loom. We admire Penelope — but we mostly hear about her from others. In the excerpt below, it is a suitor, Antinous, who mockingly tells the story of her trick.

Dorothy Parker’s “Penelope” (1928) hands the loom-bound wife her own voice at last. Parker — the razor-witted American poet and critic of the Algonquin Round Table — writes a short, cool, deadpan poem in Penelope’s first person. She lays Odysseus’s glamorous voyage (“the silver seas,” “the glittering wave”) beside her own small, endless domestic tasks (sit and rock, answer the door, brew tea, bleach the linen) — and closes on a single devastating line: “They will call him brave.”

Context worth having ready

This opening module introduces the idea that runs through the whole course: re-vision — retelling a myth from the point of view it silenced. The Odyssey frames its women from the outside; here Penelope is admired, yet described (in the excerpt below) by one of the very suitors she is outwitting. Dorothy Parker hands her a microphone. Parker’s irony is the engine: her final line says the world will honour his adventure, and leaves hanging — loudly — the fact that no one will call her anything at all, though her patient endurance may be the braver act. The course deliberately closes by returning to this same epic and doing exactly this for its most famous monster — the Siren (Pairing X).

A note on the form of Pope’s translation

Homer’s original Greek is unrhymed dactylic hexameter — six metrical feet per line, chanted aloud by oral poets. Alexander Pope’s 1725 English translation, printed here, doesn’t attempt that Greek meter; instead it’s written in heroic couplets, the dominant English verse form of Pope’s own era. The rule is simple and strict: lines are paired and rhymed AA, BB, CC… (“gives / deceives,” “roll’d / behold”), and each line is iambic pentameter — ten syllables, five unstressed-then-stressed “iambs” per line (“the SPAcious LOOM, and MIXED the VARious THREAD”). The clipped, closed couplets give Pope’s Homer a witty, epigrammatic snap that the sprawling Greek original doesn’t have — worth noticing, since it’s Pope’s voice as much as Homer’s that students are hearing here.

How to run the close reading

Two portraits of the same waiting woman

1. Notice who holds the microphone. As in Pairing I, point of view is the lesson. In Homer, Penelope is talked about — and, pointedly, by Antinous, one of the very suitors she is outwitting. Her cleverness reaches us secondhand, filtered through a hostile man’s scorn (“the royal fraud,” “female wiles”). Parker removes the filter: the whole poem is Penelope’s own “I.”

2. Weigh the two kinds of labour. Build the contrast physically. Odysseus’s world is vast and glamorous — sun, breeze, silver seas, the glittering wave. Penelope’s is small and repetitive — rock, answer a knock, brew tea, snip thread, bleach linen. Ask students which list took more years, more endurance, more self-control. The poem never says; it makes you feel it.

3. Land the final line. “They will call him brave” is the whole poem’s hinge. Have students articulate everything it implies without stating: that the world’s admiration flows to the one who leaves; that Penelope’s harder, unglamorous constancy will go unnamed; that “brave” may be exactly the wrong word, or the right word aimed at the wrong person. The irony lives in the silence after the line.

4. Plant a seed for the finale. Tell students the course will end back in this same epic with another silenced woman — the Siren (Pairing X), where a modern poet, Margaret Atwood, does to the monster exactly what Parker does here to the wife. Two re-visions of the Odyssey will bracket the whole year, each exposing what the epic’s point of view left out: the inner life, the resentment, the cost.

Guiding questions · with what to listen for

1. Why does it matter that the suitor Antinous, not Penelope, narrates the weaving trick in Homer? Listen for the recognition that her cleverness is being described by an enemy who resents it — “fraud,” “wiles.” The same act could be told as heroism; the framing controls how we judge her.
2. Parker gives Odysseus grand, open images and Penelope small, closed ones. What does that contrast argue? Listen for how diction and scale carry the theme: his verbs are sweeping (ride, cut); hers are modest and domestic (rock, brew, snip, bleach). The poem values her labour precisely by refusing to glamorize it.
3. What is left unsaid after “They will call him brave”? Listen for the implied second half: “…and they will call me nothing.” The poem’s power is in the omission — the reader supplies the injustice.
4. Is Penelope’s waiting passive, or is it its own kind of heroism? Listen for a real debate. Homer’s ruse shows active cunning; Parker’s chores look passive but demand years of endurance. Students often arrive at: constancy is a quieter courage the culture forgets to honour.
5. This course ends with another woman from the Odyssey — the Siren, its most famous monster. Based on Penelope, what do you predict a modern poet might do with her? Listen for predictions that a modern poet would give the Siren an inner life and a grievance too — which is exactly what Atwood does in the course’s finale. The Odyssey is full of women framed from the outside, waiting to be re-voiced.

Annotation prompts · hand these to students

On the Homer

Underline every word Antinous uses to judge Penelope (“elusive,” “deceives,” “fraud,” “wiles”). In the margin, rewrite one of those words as an admirer would put it. How much of our view of her depends on the speaker?

On the Parker

Draw a line down the poem separating “his” lines from “her” lines. Circle every verb. Then cover the last line and predict it; uncover it and mark what the single short line does to everything above it.