Penelope And Sita In The Odyssey

In both Homer’s Odyssey and Valmiki’s Ramanyana, Penelope and Sita are both held up to be role models for their separate cultures. If it is true mythological heroes are to be ideal people whom men should model themselves after, their wives must be examples of perfection for our women to look up to. While they are both fiercely loyal to their husbands, they each possess qualities that their separate cultures held up as the most important. In the Odyssey, Penelope suffers twenty years of separation from her beloved husband, in which she must hold off over a hundred suitors with no tools but her cunning. Meanwhile, her husband, Odysseus, adventures his way back home from Sparta. To say he is taking the scenic route would be a devastating understatement.

Every day she sows a death shawl for her father in law, and each night she unwinds her progress, telling the suitors that she will choose a husband when she is done sowing. She tricks the cunning Odysseus into revealing himself. Penelope knows that as a woman in her own right, she has no political or economic power. It is, ultimately, her father’s decision whom she will marry, and her own son pressures her into remarriage so he can inherit his father’s land. If Penelope had been able to be a powerful single woman, would she have remained loyal to Odysseus? She most likely would have remained single until such a time that a man who deserved her decided to court her. Her suitors were less intellectual than her and almost all of them abused the privilege of staying in Odysseus’s house, eating his livestock, sleeping with his servants. They did not deserve her. Maybe Penelope had ulterior motives in not marrying one of them in that she simply didn’t want to. Whether she held them away because of her loyalty or her own disgust with them, Penelope did it through her own trickery, proving that she was every ounce as cunning as her husband. Penelope is one of the better, less harmful role models to come from a patriarchal