The Heroism Of Penelope In Homer's The Odyssey

In the vast tellings of Homer’s The Odyssey, many character comparisons can be made. Few are more pressing however, than the heroism of Odysseus and his wife, Penelope. Although both Penelope and Odysseus displayed heroic characteristics in The Odyssey, Odysseus was more of a hero than his wife was in the epic. Penelope, while somewhat of a heroine, simply was not depicted by Homer to be the hero that her husband was. To start, Odysseus was developed with standard Greek heroic traits. First, Odysseus was courageous in the face of opposition, as shown by his encounter with Charybdis and Scylla. The protagonist of The Odyssey commanded his crew to row onwards in the face of the monsters, showing his courage. He was also intelligent, as he devised a plan to escape the wrath of Polyphemus. Odysseus made the Cyclops drunk with his liquor before blinding him and allowing his crew to escape on the underside of the sheep of the island. Finally, the main hero of the story was perseverant, as illustrated when he left Ogygia, battled Poseidon’s storms, and made it to King Alcinous’s island.
Odysseus’s main flaw was hubris, or his excessive pride. His hubris was revealed when he taunted Polyphemus after escaping the island. Odysseus’s yells of triumph gave the monster a final chance to kill the crew with a boulder, which he nearly did. More importantly, though, was the fact that the hero stated his name to the beast, allowing Polyphemus to pray to his father, Poseidon, to make Odysseus’s journey as treacherous as possible. In contrast, Penelope was never illustrated as flawed. While she was deeply saddened by Odysseus’s absence, this never directly resulted to any misfortune. This demonstrates yet again that Penelope simply was not developed as a heroine in the way that Odysseus was a