ABSTRACT
At the end of Book 19 in Homer’s Odyssey Penelope resolves to hold a contest to see who among her many suitors can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve ax handles. The man able to accomplish this feat will become her husband. This point in Homer’s classic has provoked a considerable amount of discussion in recent critical literature about the narrative purpose of the contest. Although the polemic is removed in time and place from René Fauchois’s and Gabriel Fauré’s Pénélope (1913), the premise of this essay is that this debate resonates with critical questions stimulated by the opera. Where does the essence of its drama really lie? Neither hero nor heroine undergoes a crisis of conscience. Since the suitors act collectively as a unitary dramatic agent they do not have the flesh and blood of the single operatic antagonist, and (notwithstanding the requirement of following Homer) the listener may plausibly wonder why Ulysse waits until the contest in act 3 to pick up his old bow and impale his enemies. This paper argues that Pénélope is principally about the gradual reintegration of Ulysse into his own environment. The most important element of that dynamic is Pénélope’s recognition of her husband after he wins the contest. Events lead ever closer to the final materialization of an image/voice that she carries within from the beginning, much like layers of tinted tracing paper covering a picture that are progressively removed. At each stage the picture is clearer but also cast in a new color. In tonality, motif, and texture, Fauré’s elusive late style works well to depict a heroine who stands astride dream and reality.
