Penelope's ‘Stout Hand’ and Odyssean Humour

Abstract:

Penelope's ‘stout hand’ (χειρί παχείηι) in Odyssey 21.6 has troubled readers with its implication that the 20 years Penelope has spent waiting, worrying and weaving have sapped her beauty. Attempts to redeem the verse have only been partially successful at best. By applying semiolinguistic models for jokes to both Odyssey 21.6 and Penelope's increase in stoutness at Odyssey 18.195, this paper pursues the possibility that both passages are humorous. Rather than deride Penelope, the humour celebrates her quintessentially human susceptibility to age and suffering, as well as the virtues she develops in parallel with her husband therefrom. The Odyssey regularly uses humour to similar effect by applying traditional epic formulaic structures to a broader range of subjects than they normally accommodate and thus redefining the heroic virtues that those structures encode so that they exalt mundane human experience.