17/07/2026
Christopher Nolan’s epic film ‘The Odyssey’ is out today. But the apprehension and excitement we may have felt in the buildup to its release is slight compared to the twenty-year wait of Penelope for her husband Odysseus’ return.
Caught between duty to her husband, her home, and her own desires, and with no knowledge of Odysseus, Penelope is kept suspended in a state between wife and widow.
Bourdelle’s masterpiece, Penelope Waiting, beautifully captures this burden of waiting, caught between sorrow and hope. Her striking, column-like stance which ripples into the folds of her dress, her defensive and pensive pose, and her distant, clouded expression evoke both the sharpness and grace with which she handles her liminal position.
The softness and fullness of her figure assumes a classical ‘earth mother’ trope, but Bourdelle refuses to present Penelope solely as a woman of respectable, aspirational maternity and fidelity. The focus is firmly on the strength of her mind. Like her husband, Penelope uses deceptive storytelling to evade capture. As Odysseus fashions himself as ‘No-man’ in before the cyclops Polyphemus, Penelope negates her identity by unpicking the tapestry upon the completion of which she has promised to remarry. Penelope weaves her way into a task that is always becoming, and never finished, and this combination of dexterity and elusiveness is reflected in the thinker’s pose which partially obscures her face. We can infer glimpses of her emotional pain, of the isolation of waiting, but she remains a mystery.
Her unreadability belies a guarded, strong mind, the state of which throughout the poem is never fully revealed to the suitors or the reader. One suitor complains that ‘all the while her mind moves somewhere else’, and Bourdelle presents passionate inner life contained within a gentle yet firm stance in an alluring, fascinating, beautiful form, whose character evades possession.
