Granted that the suitors are not less in love with the good cheer they enjoy at Telemachus's expense, than they are with his mother; but this mixture of perfect lover and perfect sponger is so impossible that no one could have recourse to it unless aware that he (or she) was in extreme difficulty. If men are in love they will not sponge; if they sponge they are not in love; we may have it either way but not both; when, therefore, the writer of the Odyssey not only attributes such impossible conduct to the suitors, but asks us also to believe that a clever woman could not keep at any rate some few of her hundred lovers out of the house, although their presence had been for many years in a high degree distasteful to her, we may know that we are being hoodwinked as far as the writer can hoodwink us, and shall be very inclinable to believe that the suitors were not so black, nor Penelope so white, as we are being given to understand.
As for her being overawed by the suitors, she talks very plainly to them at times, as for example in xviii. 274-280, and again in xix. 322 where she speaks as though she were perfectly able to get rid of any suitor who was obnoxious to her.
Over and above this we may infer that the writer who can tell us such a story with a grave face cannot have even the faintest conception of the way in which a man feels towards a woman he is in love with, nor yet much (so far as I may venture to form an opinion) of what women commonly feel towards the man of their choice; I conclude, therefore, that she was still very young, and unmarried. At any rate the story told above cannot have been written by Homer; if it is by a man at all it must be by some prehistoric Fra Angelico, who had known less in his youth, or forgotten more in his old age, than the writer of the Iliad is at all likely to have done. If he had still known enough to be able to write the Odyssey, he would have remembered more than the writer of the Odyssey shows any signs of having ever known.
A man, if he had taken it into his head (as the late Lord Tennyson might very conceivably have done) to represent Penelope as virtuous in spite of current scandalous stories to the contrary—a man, would not have made the suitors a band of lovers at all. He would have seen at once that this was out of the question, and would have made them mere marauders, who overawed Penelope by their threats, and were only held in check by her mother wit and by, say, some three or four covert allies among the suitors themselves. Do what he might he could not make the permanent daily presence of the suitors plausible, but it would be possible; whereas the combination of perfect sponger and perfect lover which is offered us by the writer of the Odyssey is grotesquely impossible, nor do I imagine that she would have asked us to accept it, but for her desire to exalt her sex by showing how a clever woman can bring any number of men to her feet, hoodwink them, spoil them, and in the end destroy them. This, however, is surely a woman's theme rather than a man's—at least I know of no male writer who has attempted anything like it.
We have now seen the story as told from Penelope's point of view; let us proceed to hear it from that of the suitors. We find this at the beginning of Book ii., and I will give Antinous's speech at fuller length than I have done in my abridgement. After saying that Penelope had for years been encouraging every single suitor by sending him flattering messages (in which, by the way, Minerva fully corroborated him in Book xiii. 379-381) he continues:—
"And then there was that other trick she played us. She set up a great tambour frame in her room, and began to work on an enormous piece of fine needlework. 'Sweethearts,' said she, 'Ulysses is indeed dead, still, do not press me to marry again immediately; wait—for I would not have my skill in needlework perish unrecorded—till I have completed a pall for the hero Laertes, to be ready against the time when death shall take him. He is very rich, and the women of the place will talk if he is laid out without a pall.'
"This was what she said, and we assented; whereon we could see her, working on her great web all day, but at night she would unpick the stiches again by torchlight. She fooled us in this way for three years and we never found her out, but as time wore on and she was now in her fourth year, one of her maids, who knew what she was doing, told us, and we caught her in the act of undoing her work; so she had to finish it, whether she would or no.
"The suitors, therefore, make you this answer, that both you and the Achæans may understand: 'Send your mother away, and bid her marry the man of her own and her father's choice,' for I do not know what will happen if she goes on plaguing us much longer with the airs she gives herself on the score of the accomplishments Minerva has taught her, and because she is so clever. We never yet heard of such a woman. We know all about Tyro, Alcmena, Mycene, and the famous women of old, but they were nothing to your mother any one of them. It was not fair of her to treat us in that way, and as long as she continues in the mind with which heaven has now endowed her, so long shall we go on eating up your estate; and I do not see why she should change, for it is she who gets the honour and glory, and it is you, not she, who lose all this substance. We however, will not go about our business, nor anywhere else, till she has made her choice and married some one or other of us" (ii. 93-128).
Roughly, then, the authoress's version is that Penelope is an injured innocent, and the suitors', that she is an artful heartless flirt who prefers having a hundred admirers rather than one husband. Which comes nearest, not to the truth—for we may be sure the suitors could have said a great deal more than the writer chooses to say they said—but to the original story which she was sophisticating, and retelling in a way that was more to her liking? The reader will have noted that on this occasion the suitors seem to have been in the house after nightfall.