Penelope in Davos

Deutsche Version

This text was published in German and Italian:

Penelope a Davos, in: Ina Praetorius, Penelope a Davos. Idee femministe per un'economia globale, Milano 2011, 61-74
Penelope in Davos, in: Ina Praetorius, Immer wieder Anfang. Texte zum geburtlichen Denken, Ostfildern 2011, 105-116

 

 

Penelope appeared before me in January 2006, when I participated for the second time, as a critical observer, in the "Open Forum", the public part of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos (Praetorius 2005, 2006). Between jaded bankers and concerned anti-globalization demonstrators, clattering helicopters and a picturesque snowy backdrop she suddenly stood before me, the Queen of Ithaca, in the midst of the richest and most powerful people of the twenty-first century that come together here, in the Swiss mountains, once a year for talks, banquets, parties and more.

 

They had already told me in my childhood about King Odysseus who leaves his island, first to go to war and then to travel the world. I had heard of his wife, too, the faithful and bored queen, who is waiting at home for the return of the man. But I had forgotten them both. In my rebellious years we had kept ourselves busy with Antigone and Penthesilea, with Artemis and the Thracian maid as they fit better into the feminist worldview than the waiting wife.

But then, suddenly, she was back again.

 

Down in the hall the prospective husbands are quaffing. They want to convince Penelope that her renegade husband has long since perished, somewhere on the oceans. She should kindly marry again, in order to let another man inherit the throne of Ithaca. But she does not want to. She finds a pretext to which the pretenders have nothing to oppose, because it is rooted in tradition. Before she can bind to a man again, Penelope says, she has to weave the shroud for her old father-in-law Laertes. Together with her maidservants, she begins to work in the weaving room. At night, they undo the fabric in order to gain time. Penelope weaves and separates already woven fabric, unravels and weaves, weaves and separates, for years. Her ploy is first disclosed just before her husband’s return. She has endured, the man returns. Happy End.

 

What about women at looms sitting down here in Davos, in front of the police reinforced entrances to the convention center?  We could undo and weave, weave and separate and unravel and weave, silent, without comment. And then maybe we would be able to enter a conversation with the multi-million dollar global players that are often simply called "Davosmen": in a serious, an uncynical dialogue about the meaning of the whole. About the question of what it means to be alive as a human being and why life is worth living. About the fragile fabric, the complex text that is the world. About the need to carefully unravel the simplistic pattern that’s been created and invent better ones. - The bankers and managers, the Chinese, Indians, Americans, the celebrities and billionaires from all sides would, perhaps, stand still, look, listen and wonder - an impossibility for any who knows what is going on in late January in Davos. But my thoughts are free, at least. And after all, David once defeated Goliath (1 Sam 17). Why shouldn’t Penelope come into conversation with the Davosmen? - I hope we will really do it some day. Then the Davosman would listen to us and finally turn around. Just as the tax collector Zacchaeus did after he had met Jesus (Luke 19, 1-10). Happy End.

Such a campaign "Penelope in Davos,", however, has not come into being yet.

 

Tying on

 

At least, some women who shared my half-baked interest in the distant ancestor came together. They were needlework teachers, with whom I'd been on the move for years. My collaboration with the professional plight of these modern weavers had begun in the nineties. When the economy was booming and everybody was to learn English and become computer adept, politicians had begun to abolish the "typical female" school subjects needlework and housekeeping. We therefore had launched a public debate about the value and importance of these seemingly outdated and useless subjects. On November 4^th , 2000, a large conference on "life skills" (Daseinskompetenz) had taken place in Kreuzlingen on the Lake of Constance (Praetorius 2002). More than five thousand people had subsequently signed the resolution "life skills are essential in education", which we handed to the Swiss Conference of Education Secretaries in May 2001. It was a success. Meanwhile, the question of the future concept of education is renegotiated in many commissions, texts and initiatives again and again, also at the conference "At the end of patriarchy - thinking again about the good life" in late summer 2002 in Salzburg (Senn-Bieri, Volkart-Annen, Wassmann 2003). On May 17^th, 2010, I read in a newspaper that the “female” subjects of life skills should be re-evaluated again. Happy end?

 

So, these needlework teachers understood my desire to befriend Penelope the weaver without much explanation. We set off on a journey together.

 

Separating

 

On March 1^st, 2006, we met in my living room in Wattwil. Should we dare travel to Davos in January 2007 and plant our looms right in the meeting of raging economic players?

 

First we had to get better acquainted with Penelope. We visualized the ancient story, as it vaguely remained in our memories since the days of childhood. We read the Odyssey, and we read what others had thought and written about Penelope:

Already in ancient times she was hailed as the archetype of the loyal, modest, domestic wife. In later times, this tradition of interpretation continued, up to the enthusiastic veneration of Ancient Greece in the 18th and 19th Century and beyond. The wife who remains at home was, a shining example, set against other mythological female figures, for example Clytemnestra who, along with her lover Aegisthus, murdered her husband Agamemnon, when he returned home from Troy. Or the beautiful Helena who, through her indecision, provoked the Trojan War. Or the covetous vamps of the Odyssey: the nymph Calypso, the sorceress Circe, the Sirens. In Plato's "Phaedon" (Platon 2001) Penelope comes into conflict with Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife: While, according to Plato, Xanthippe, in a "typically female" way, complains about the imminent death of her husband, Penelope is wise enough to “accept the separation”. Penelope’s separative work here becomes the metaphor for the philosophers’ love of death that is seen as the soul’s redemptive separation from the body.

 

Plato uses Penelope for a very strange purpose, but the example shows: she has always been more than the good-natured wife that, forced by a bunch of meddlesome men, conceives an absurd act of desperation. She is a single mother, as well, and, although she persistently waits for the return of her husband, she apparently is not ready to let herself be bossed around by any men. Obviously she does not care too much about a crowd of admirers. On the contrary, she leads these men who are interested in her and the throne of Ithaca around by the nose. Homer praises Penelope as wise, desirable, headstrong and cunning.

In our living room conversations preferences gradually crystallized around different aspects or dimensions of the figure: One is mainly interested in Penelope's slyness, another in her weaving and undoing as a reality and as a metaphor, and I myself have a special interest for her art of waiting: the patient endurance until something new will begin.

After all, Penelope is described as wise not only because she comes up with ruses to get what she wants. The ancient weavers must have been intelligent simply because their weaving patterns were based on complicated mathematical calculations (Harlizius-Klück 2006). We bade farewell to our initial idea that the shroud for Laertes was simple and plain. We came to know Penelope as a mathematician and an artist.

 

However, asking friends about their image of Penelope, we almost always got the same dismissive response: "She's the homebody, isn’t she, waiting forever for her hero ...?" Even feminist classicists confirm that Homer, in the figures of Odysseus and Penelope, shaped the emergence of the patriarchal marriage relationship and declared the corresponding image of the woman as normative: the image of the woman who, instead of following her own desires, leaves all the leadership to her husband, subordinating her own interests and wishes to his, limiting her sphere of influence to the household and the education of children (Josselyn-Wohl 1993).

To this newly invented norm it makes sense that it is Athena who protects Odysseus on his journey home. Athena is the goddess who was not born by a woman, but emerged from the head of Zeus. Thus, a brainchild watches over the couple Penelope and Odysseus, and at last ensures that everything is directed into orderly patriarchal forms: the man returns home and takes over the leadership. The woman is happily doing what he commands. Happy end?

 

Weaving new patterns

 

"I know from years of personal experience, that the Odyssey always holds new surprises, no matter how many times I read it again." (Van Sickle)

 

This statement by the American classicist Van Sickle encouraged us to go beyond the obvious. At the end of patriarchy, as all sorts of alleged securities break and reality opens up for an unimagined freedom to redesign human social life, as, at the same time, yearnings for new securities come up, we read the ancient text once again. Unimpressed by all the interpreters who want to see Penelope as nothing but a good wife. Unimpressed, too, by feminist researchers who have written off Penelope, because they accept the common interpretation.

 

Almost nothing is fixed, not even feminist beliefs. We don’t think, for example, that women have achieved their goal having rejected everything that patriarchy has trivialized as "typically female", care, housework, manual work, and having embraced  life patterns that are rated “higher”: management , the market, competition, adventure, the almost unlimited flexibility of the global player. We do not believe that humans can lead a good life without binding communities, focused on self-realization only. We think that there will be regulated relationships in postpatriarchal times as well, and we want to think about what they might look like. We do not believe that men are incurable Rambos, from whom women should keep away as far as possible. Penelope is too smart to wait for a good-for-nothing, just because a tradition has assigned her this role. Why should Odysseus actually not have changed during the war and on his long journey? True, after his return home he first turns to old methods again: his competitors are all massacred. But there are also signs that Penelope was right to wait for Odysseus, “the cunning”. As a young man, namely, Odysseus was not praised for his physical strength, but he, too, for his wisdom. A traditional story of the pair, for example, that was not told by Homer, but by another author, tells that Odysseus in vehemently resisting going to war against Troy would even have accepted being considered insane rather than enter the conflict (Merkel 1989). And he is a man who not only sleeps with his wife, but also speaks with her.

 

Can we imagine a Penelope who is waiting for Odysseus not in order to fulfill a patriarchal norm, but because she has good reasons to trust in this very man? Are we women of today, if we are honest, not waiting for men that have changed after their odysseys, too? As a new order cannot be achieved and shaped unless the members of the other sex want a good future, too, and out of love for the world are transformed from power-hungry warriors into something else? Into what? That’s what we are concerned about, just like Penelope. I myself, after all, felt much better in Davos from the moment I realized that even supposedly incurably greedy men and women are able to make a new beginning.

 

Postpatriarcal thinking has very much to do with the ability to be open to surprises, even beyond feminist taboos. We wonder what will happen in this world, after the supposed happy end patriarchy has proven to be a dead end from which we should find a way out again, if we want a future worth living. Homer does not tell us about the life of the grown-up couple Penelope and Odysseus after the happy reunion. Will they stay together? Or will Penelope prefer the mere company of women that she has become accustomed to while weaving for so long? Will she finally want to break her marriage? Will she be disappointed by Odysseus because he has not changed nor has he learned anything? Will he be driven by the spirit of adventure to go back on the road and find death in the sea, a version of the story that we can read in Dante's Divina Commedia? Or will he listen to Athena’s advice who, at the end of the Odyssey, calls for peace:

 

“Son of Laertes, sprung from Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, stay thy hand, and make the strife of equal war to cease, lest haply the son of Cronos be wroth with thee, even Zeus, whose voice is borne afar.” (Perseus Project 24, 540ff)

 

Athena is certainly a brainchild, but seemingly she does not want patriarchy for its own sake but for the sake of peace. Today we know that the bipartited world order does not bring peace. That is why we hear the call of the goddess anew - and think about how peace can be on this side of her notions.

 

Separating

 

In the eighties of the last century, Adriana Cavarero wrote a text about Penelope (Cavarero 1992) in which she reads The Odyssey against the grain, seen from the weaving. Her thoughts are focused on the question what happens in the women’s room. According to Cavareros interpretation Penelope is not a docile element, but a stranger in the patriarchal world construction. While the seemingly docile abandoned queen remains in her assigned room, she in fact marks out, through weaving and undoing, her own space, where she does not belong to any man as a wife. In the apparent absurdity of separating it becomes clear that she does not comply with patriarchy: Penelope does not fulfill her intended function. Instead of continuously producing useful things for an order that is hostile to her desires, she refuses the usurpation: again and again she destroys the useful thing. While resisting, Cavarero’s Penelope is not alone. Rather, in her actions, traces of another, a maternal symbolic order (Muraro 1993), appear. Together with her accomplices she keeps alive the memory of something that not even Homer can extinguish: the memory of another understanding of the human existence that is not measured by always new endeavors. The allusion to the modern feminist movement, which, as a community of accomplices, creates a time-space within which women can break away from the prevailing order, is easy to recognize:

 

"In the figure of Penelope, we find ... a reference to separatism as a political practice (viz. the Italian feminism) that chooses specifically female spaces and times. In the figure of Penelope we also find the feeling of alienation from the patriarchal patterns that can be openly expressed in these women's rooms, and this achievement of belonging to another order that finds its roots in a horizon shared with her own sex. " (188)

 

However, for Cavarero, it also remains undisputed that Odysseus’ return means the end of the resistant female practice. This return represents the restoration of the patriarchal order. So, Penelope's seemingly absurd resistance remains merely one single episode in Cavarero’s view. Cavarero does not dare touch Homer's authority. In order to give permanence to the weavers’ opposition she chooses Dante's version of the story letting Odysseus start a new journey after his return. For me, Cavarero succumbs to the temptation of two symbolic orders, one male and the other female, that, ultimately unable to change, are irreconcilable. In her interpretation the women really seem happy only after Odysseus is finally gone. Undisturbed by patriarchal claims, only committed to their own order, they can now, finally, cultivate their own life: Now that they have left the men to their adventures on the sea, they are finally able to acknowledge and recognize each other.

 

„They wove together and laughed, and the serenity of their room remained undisturbed. " (51)

 

This interpretation seems to be characteristic for the eighties of the last century, in which the practice of exclusive female spaces played an important role in the women's movement. It is not important for Cavarero that Penelope in fact does not wait for her husband’s new departure but for a new beginning in their relationship. She neglects this aspect of the story, since she is concerned about the space in which women can find and recognize each other and from which men are excluded.

 

Today the women's movement has reached another stage. We have come to the point that we take for granted that the exclusive women’s spaces Adriana Cavarero claims do actually exist. But these spaces aren’t ultimately exclusive. They open up again. We embrace the valuable insight that Penelope’s identity is not fulfilled in waiting for her man. We have experienced it ourselves: waiting for Prince Charming in order to deliver us to his desire is not the solution. Indeed we need the weaving rooms in which we can find another order, and we will continue to need them. However, we can now see that Penelope and her friends, while remembering and creating alternative rules of togetherness, at the same time are also waiting for and open to something happening outside the women’s room. They do not consider the order in which they try to live, and the order in which Odysseus fights, to be irreconcilable opposites. They now open up for new ideas. And Penelope knows: there is much at stake. Our future co-existence on the planet Earth is at stake.

 

Weaving the world in ending patriarchy

 

In January 2007 two of us were in Davos again. Still, we were not courageous enough to sit, with looms, before the gates of the convention center.

 

However, we noticed a distinct difference between the World Economic Forum 2006 and Davos 2007:

At the WEF 2007 climate change was the dominant theme. Everybody, really all seemed to have read Sir Nicholas Stern’s report (Stern 2006) and to have seen Al Gore’s film "An Inconvenient Truth". While in the past year most Davosmen had reassured each other that there was no connection between Hurricane Catrina, the extremely hot summers, the melting poles and the CO2 emissions of the six and a half billion world citizens, in 2007 everybody was sure that  "something had to be done. "

Will climate change come to Penelope’s rescue? Will it cause men to return to their women who have changed in the meantime? Will it perhaps be possible soon, that the Davosmen, at least some of them, will listen to us? Will Odysseus have learned from wars and journeys? Will he, together with Penelope, create something new - beyond the supposedly peaceful symbolic order we know?

 

According to Homer, Odysseus in fact listened to Penelope. Not only did he tell her about the twenty years that they had both lived separately, but also she told him:

 

“But when the two had had their fill of the joy of love, they took delight in tales, speaking each to the other. She, the fair lady, told of all that she had endured in the halls, looking upon the destructive throng of the wooers, who for her sake slew many beasts, cattle and goodly sheep.” (Perseus Project 23, 300ff)

 

What would we tell the bankers if they were prepared to listen to us? In April 2007, during a weekend, approximately thirty-five women thought about this question, weaving and undoing, separating and weaving both real tissue and the tissue of patriarchy, joining the loose threads into new patterns.

 

What have we endured in the halls?

What destructive throng have we been watching?

What have men - perhaps for our sake? - slaughtered and wasted?

 

In recent decades, critical women have separated many threads. We have understood the texture of the wrong order, carefully pulling out individual threads from this hard, dense tissue: the unpaid domestic work, violence against women and girls, sexual exploitation, genital mutilation, female poverty, sexism in schools, in the arts, in advertising, in jokes, the masculinized image of God, militarism, the concealment of female traditions, the continuous trivialization of female care work ...

Undoing carefully and patiently, one recognizes the weaving pattern. Disregarding it, one will tear the threads instead of assigning them in order to connect them, later, in a renewed order. We have recognized that not only the relationships between women and men obey patriarchal rules, rather the effects of disorder reach beyond gender relations. The notorious superordination of so-called „higher“ male spheres over the spheres of "lower" femininity permeates the whole cultural fabric, even today, in the era of emancipation. It defines our concept of education: mathematics and computers are considered to be far more important than manual work and housekeeping. It determines our conflict behavior: Attacking is still regarded to be the ideal solution of conflicts, both at home and in supposedly high politics. It determines our entire system of values: money is the focal point of economic activity, Davos is getting richer and equipped with more and more police while, gradually, the subjects of Daseinskompetenz are reinduced into curriculums again ...

 

Perhaps one day we, needlework teachers, philosophers and many others, will dare to sit in front of the guarded gates of the Davos Congress Centre with looms, unimpressed by all those important men, clattering helicopters, stone-throwing anti-globalization protesters and perplexed champagne-drinking journalists.

Or we will create something else...

 

 

Bibliography

 

Cavarero, Adriana, Platon zum Trotz, Berlin 1992

 

Harlizius-Klück, Ellen, „Nur nicht von einer Frau geboren werden...“ Genealogisches zu Mathematik und Weberei in der Antike, in: Penelope rekonstruiert. Geschichte und Deutung einer Frauenfigur, Katalog der gleichnamigen Ausstellung im Abgussmuseum München, München 2006, 121-133

Homer, Odyssee (übersetzt von Roland Hampe), Stuttgart 1984

Josselyn Wohl, Victoria, Standing by the Stathmos. The Creation of Sexual Ideology in the Odyssey, Arethusa Vol. 26 No 1, 1993, 19-50

 

Merkel, Inge, Eine ganz gewöhnliche Ehe. Odysseus und Penelope, Frankfurt 1989

Moser, Michaela, Ina Praetorius eds, Welt gestalten im ausgehenden Patriarchat, Königstein/Ts 2003

Muraro, Luisa, Die symbolische Ordnung der Mutter, Frankfurt/New York 1993

Perseus Project: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D23%3Acard%3D263

 

Platon, Phaidon (übersetzt von Friedrich Schleiermacher), Stuttgart 2001

Praetorius, Ina, Die Vernunft der Frau Hediger. Zur Philosophie der Daseinskompetenz, in: Dies., Die Welt ein Haushalt. Texte zur theologisch-politischen Neuorientierung, Mainz 2002, 108-122

Praetorius, Ina, Mit dem Mut und der Frömmigkeit Davids... Bericht über das „Open Forum“ Davos 2005, in: Neue Wege 6/2005, 184-191

Praetorius, Ina, No Balance. Bericht über das „Open Forum“ Davos 2006, in: Neue Wege 3/2006, 76-83

Senn-Bieri, Ursi, Elisabeth Volkart-Annen, Denise Wassmann, Daseinskompetenz ist unverzichtbar für die Bildung, in: Michaela Moser, Ina Praetorius eds 2003, 276-286

 

Stern, Sir Nicholas, The Economics of Climate Change. The Stern Review, Cambridge 2006

 

Van Sickle, John B., Adventures of Gender and Identity in Homer’s Odyssey http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/jvsickle/odlect.htm#C%20Male%20vs%20Female

25/11/2011

 Thank you Melissa!