Homer's Odyssey-Fabric, Interconnected Threads In The Odyssey

Homer’s The Odyssey

Introduction

Fabric, interconnected threads, can represent important moments in a person’s life and signify the creation of their fate. In The Odyssey, every woman and their mother weaves. Weaving is the act of putting threads together to create fabric. This has metaphorical significance in the context of the Greek Fates. By connecting threads, Homer uses materiality to signify the interpersonal nature of Odysseus’s journey home. Penelope weaves to preserve her home for Odysseus. As she creates and unravels the tapestry, she stalls for time to delay her impending marriage to one of many possible suitors who might take Odysseus’s wife, home, and resources. Aside from Penelope, the fates, other goddesses, and other mortals

Penelope connects her actions to fate in the hopes that Odysseus, like his father Laertes, has not yet met his “deadly” and final fate. In addition to the Fates, she also references the myth of Arachne. She tells the men courting her, “my suitors, now that King Odysseus is no more, go slowly, keen as you are to marry me, until / I can finish off this web … / so my weaving won’t all fray and come to nothing” (Homer 19. 157-160). Penelope refers to herself with mythical proportions, in terms of fate and Arachne, all of whom use textile skills to shape lives. A resident of the household recounts to Odysseus, “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” (Homer 24.153-156). Penelope’s tapestry keeps Odysseus in a liminal temporal zone between life and death. Her unraveling and reweaving speaks not only to Odysseus’s neverending quest stuck between the Trojan War and returning to his homeland but it also speaks to Penelope’s liminality at this time. Her husband is her life, her identity, and her status. She does not know if he is dead or alive. For her, every day is the same. She fends off the suitors by enacting a

The threads and textiles that they engage with present a feminine alternative to a masculine worldview and power structures based on distinction, separation, violence, and Othering by supporting a collaborative rather than individualist model of identity with threads representing discrete individuals. Greek mythology and the thread metaphors that proliferate in literature including Homer’s The Odyssey and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves provide a different conception of the cosmos. Cloth and fabric signify interpersonal relationships and community-building by combining individual life threads. Textiles convey the feminine powers of creation and creativity. Characters substitute hierarchical and linear phallogocentric worldviews with network-based and alternate time models through mortal and divine textile production. The wide application and cross-cultural mythological history of the thread narrative suggests a gentler, compelling surrogate worldview in which women always pull the