The idea that male power depends on female sexual fidelity is also central to the myth of Clytemnestra’s sister, Helen, whose abduction by Paris led to the Trojan War. In The Odyssey, we meet the beautiful and frighteningly intelligent Helen back home in Sparta, with her wealthy, blustering, and rather less intelligent husband, Menelaus. The affair between Helen and Paris, like the affair of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, can be seen as another alternative but parallel narrative, showing what might happen if Penelope decided to go off with one of the suitors. But this counternarrative complicates the idea that it would be a disaster if Penelope had an affair, since Helen and Menelaus seem to have suffered no obvious ill effects from her escapade—beyond the fact that so many people decided to engage in the war and died as a result. The marriage seems, if anything, cemented by a shared sense of regret and a shared interest in the wonderful consumer goods they have acquired through their foreign conquests. At the moment when Penelope and Odysseus are reunited, Penelope speaks of Helen, and draws a complex, confusing comparison between her own situation—vulnerable to any deceitful stranger who may show up—and that of Helen, who left her husband for Paris. Penelope seems to suggest that Helen was forced into adultery (because Aphrodite compelled her and Paris tricked her), and also that, insofar as she made a choice, it was informed, as perhaps most choices are, by limited knowledge of the outcome. She could not know that “the Greeks would march to war / and bring her home again.”
Should war, defined in The Iliad as “the work of men,” be seen as ultimately the fault of a woman—because Helen inspired Paris to abduct her? The question is left largely unanswered in Homer. In The Iliad, Helen tells Priam she wishes she had “chosen death” rather than leave her husband for Paris—suggesting that she did have some kind of choice, but also that her only alternative was suicide. The affair is not presented as something that she actually desired. In The Odyssey, a much more self-possessed and cheerful Helen declares that the Greeks made war “for the sake of” her face—a formulation that suggests that the woman’s appearance is the men’s supposed motive, but does not imply that it, let alone its owner, can be blamed for their actions.
Helen describes her face, the face that, in Christopher Marlowe’s famous words, “launched a thousand ships,” not as beautiful but as “doglike”; it is a face that (in this translation) “hounded” the Greeks to war. The idea that women or goddesses, especially desirable ones who sleep with men outside marriage, are like dogs, or have doglike faces, recurs at several moments in the poem: Hephaestus uses the same term of his unfaithful, divinely beautiful wife, Aphrodite; the dead Agamemnon calls his murderous wife a “she-dog”; and the pretty slave girl Melantho is called a “dog” by both Penelope and Odysseus. As a term of insult, “dog” is applied not only to women. Odysseus also calls the suitors “dogs” when he inveighs against their greedy, shameless consumption of his food supplies, and he suggests that the human belly is also always like a whining dog: it begs for food, even in circumstances where it is not appropriate or possible to eat. The night before the slaughter of the suitors, Odysseus feels his heart “bark” inside him, like a “mother dog” defending her puppies. Odysseus has to restrain his doglike heart, because it is nudging him to act too soon, rather than follow through carefully on his plan. In our culture, “bitch” is used as an insult term only for women, and it implies a kind of malice that is imagined as specifically feminine. In The Odyssey, to be “doglike” does not usually connote this kind of malice or cruelty (which is why “bitch” would be a misleading translation). Instead, it suggests an insistent drive, to be fed or satisfied or noticed, which is impatient and oblivious to social cues and constraints. Dogs are kept not as pets, but as guards of the house and for hunting; they are low on the household hierarchy, but valued for their persistence and quick powers of observation—shown most touchingly by Odysseus’ old dog, Argos, who recognizes his old master even after twenty years’ absence. Women, more than men, are like dogs, because they are put low on the social hierarchy, and because they might be scarily capable of seeing through social conventions, and might refuse to stay in their place. But the idea that it is not the woman or goddess herself, but her face, that is like a dog suggests that it might be male perceptions of women, rather than female desires themselves, that threaten the social fabric.
Characteristics that are ostensibly presented as particularly “feminine” often turn out to be rather more complicated in their metaphorical gendering. For example, female characters tend to achieve their ends by seduction, deceit, or witchcraft, rather than by open aggression. Helen, who has a particular power to control perceptions and see through appearances, puts a special drug in her guests’ cup which can enable them to forget all that they have suffered and even be numb to the greatest possible grief or loss:
Whoever drinks this mixture from the bowl
will shed no tears that day, not even if
her mother or her father die, nor even
if soldiers kill her brother or her darling
son with bronze spears before her very eyes. (4.223–27)
Helen’s drug is a frightening exaggeration of the normal cheering power of wine, and it hints at her witchlike powers of fascination: in Helen’s house, all eyes are always on Helen. The goddess Circe and the Sirens also have the power to trap their victims through enchantment. But it remains unclear whether deceit is being presented as a naturally feminine mode of operation, since Odysseus himself is the most prominent liar and trickster in the poem; nor is deceit necessarily seen as a bad thing in the world of The Odyssey.
Prudent, clever Penelope shows her capacity for clever deceit and false storytelling, as well as her technical expertise (as a weaver), which in many ways parallels the sharp wits and practical abilities of her husband. The suitors are attracted to her not only for her wealth and her beauty, but also for her mind; even the brashest of them, Antinous, can wax eloquent in describing Penelope’s abilities.