Penelope and the Poetics of Remembering

Abstract

Penelope's memory is celebrated within the Odyssey as the source of her fame and her husband's reputation, but it has failed to attract much scholarly attention. In this article, I examine Penelope's claim that she will remember her husband's house (19.581, 21.79) in the context of other statements (in the Odyssey and elsewhere) about female memory. I conclude that Penelope's remembering takes on monumental and epigrammatic qualities, making it not just worthy of epic kleos but also the secure foundation for a tradition of female memory, traces of which can be found in texts as diverse as Herodotus's Histories and Xenophon's Oikonomikos.

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