Penelope and the Suitors by John William Waterhouse, 1912
Home is a place of comfort, safety and refuge. It is also a place of freedom where we can be at ease with ourselves. During the Coronavirus outbreak, the Government has taken drastic measures in order to reduce the risk of infection. People are prohibited from leaving their homes except for ‘very limited purposes’ and only ‘one form of exercise a day’ out of doors is allowed. Those who have the infection are told to ‘self-isolate’ at home. These restrictions make us question our relationship with our home and the issue of liberty.
While I am being a good citizen, sitting tight in my home as instructed by the Government and waiting for the frightening global pandemic to pass, I am reminded of the painting entitled Penelope and the Suitors by John William Waterhouse. The story is based on Homer’s epic poem, ‘The Odyssey’ in which Penelope has waited twenty years for her husband, Odysseus’ return. She sits at her loom weaving a shroud which she unpicks each night to deceive her importunate suitors who threaten the stability of her home. Thus she successfully stalls her suitors who press her to make a second marriage by insisting they must be patient until her weaving is finished.
Since antiquity, spinning and weaving have been associated with women’s work, and the ability to spin and weave was regarded as an essential skill of domesticity. In the painting, Waterhouse portrays Penelope as a self-sufficient woman, weaving at her loom, holding a shuttle and a thread in her hand, the latter signifying time and its passage. The hanging lantern is a symbol of night-time when Penelope undoes all her day’s work.
She is shown, in the company of her maids, in a confined space within her home. Her proximity to the outside world is no more than a view from her window which appears in the background. It is a situation which we can all relate to in these days of our own confinement.
Outside the rear window, far away beyond the distant trees, there is a community, represented by the white-washed buildings, scarcely perceptible to the viewer, set by the steel-blue Mediterranean Sea. Penelope turns her back on the suitors who are trying to take advantage of Odysseus’ absence and supposed death to claim her for marriage. Faced with this impasse, and failing to gain access into her innermost room (where weavers could isolate themselves to perform their art away from the public eye), the suitors bring her all sorts of bribes: flowers, jewellery and a musical instrument as declarations of love.
Penelope is confined to her home, indicated by the walls in place between her and the suitors, which not only separate her from the exterior world but also protect her from unwanted attention. She is an ‘Angel in the House’, a phrase coined by the Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, who preserves her innocence and familial order by distancing herself away from any potential bad influences and temptations.
The suitors are depicted as pests who have invaded the privacy of her home. A parallel may be drawn between them and the current dangers of thronging crowds, which now embody the risk of community transmission of Coronavirus. If we look at the origin of the word ‘pest’, it comes from the Latin pestilentia meaning ‘a plague, pestilence’.
Waterhouse clearly recognises Homer’s concern for two different notions of love of home and of homeland in the story of Penelope and Odysseus. He understands home is not only a place to inhabit but also a place to leave from in order to return. The idea of returning is more poignant in Odysseus’ decision to leave the island where the goddess Calypso promised him immortality.
But he renounces the offer of immortality in order to sail across the dangerous sea to reach his home and return to Penelope, his mortal wife, because this is where he belongs. In his 2014 book Green Philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet, the late philosopher Roger Scruton refers to it as a ‘homing instinct’ which is rooted in what Scruton called ‘oikophilia’ (in Greek oikos means home, phílos means love), the love of home.
During our days of lockdown, there will have to be some serious thinking about how to safeguard the wellbeing of our oikos which also means household, personal estate and economy and how to prepare for any future pandemic. Once the threat of the virus subsides, we can all leave the imposed social distancing behind and be reunited with our loved ones, families and friends and return our home to a place of liberty rather than quarantine.
