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Finding Meaning In Homer's The Odyssey

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The pain of parting is nothing like the satisfaction of meeting again. In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Penelope waits twenty long years for the return of Odysseus as the suitors plague her home and struggle to marry her. By devising a contest, with a two-fold plan, she ensures the safety of her home and husband. With each challenge Penelope faces, she continues to demonstrate her mêtis. The emotional pain Penelope feels from being separated from her husband, and being plagued by suitors, forces her to use her mêtis. There are many ways Penelope is forced to rely on her mêtis in the absence of Odysseus. By using her mêtis and great weaving talents, Penelope tricks the suitors. Before Book One of The Odyssey, Penelope devises a plan to keep the …show more content…
Every day Penelope works on the shroud, and unravels her work every night, stalling her marriage. While Telemachus shares his plan to find information about his father, he scolds the suitors for their behavior towards Penelope. Antinous redirects Telemachus, explaining the need to be more concerned with his mother’s behavior than the suitors’s. Antinous complains “By day she’d weave at her great and growing web--/ by night, by the light of the torches set beside her,/ she would unravel all she’d done. Three whole years/ she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme…/” (Od. 2. 115-118). When Penelope realizes she will have to pick a suitor to marry soon, she devises a plan to stall her marriage, by weaving a shroud for Laertes, and unraveling her work every night. By using her great talent of weaving, she ensures the success of her plan. After all, she has deceive the suitors for three long years. Penelope’s use of her weaving ability is not the only way she uses her mêtis to trick the suitors in The Odyssey. Penelope opens the door that leads to Odysseus’s great bow, and takes the bow out of the case. She cradles the bow as if it is her baby, walking out of the room to share the rules of the contest. Penelope explains “The hand that can string

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