Hello Diane
Your mention of Penelope and weaving reminded me of a lecture I read some time ago here;
http://math.albany.edu:8000/~rn774/fall96/trag.html
The second part (which I have slightly edited ), is about the symbolism of weaving in Greek Tragedy , I found the ideas very striking when I came across it , what do you think ?
GREEK TRAGEDY: AESCHYLUS, WEAVING AND BIRTH Lecture by
Prof. Ricardo Nirenberg
"…the word “text” itself originally meant something woven. When we write, we weave; when we read, we weave and unweave. We also weave plots. These three tragedies can be read as dramas of weaving, where we must understand the word “weave” as a complex and extremely rich metaphor. In the remainder of this lecture I’ll try to justify this. Among the Greeks, as among many other ancient cultures, women were weavers; indeed, a possible but not certain etymology of our word “wife” derives it from “weaver”: a wife was originally a weaver. In the Iliad, when the Trojan hero Hector bids good-bye to his wife, his main fear is that she will end up weaving, as a slave, at some Greek loom. Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, was famous for her trick of keeping her suitors waiting while she wove a shroud for her father-in-law during the day and unwove it at night. Both Hector’s and Odysseus’ wives were good weavers, good wives. Clytemnestra, instead, was the evil weaver, and this not only in a metaphorical sense, because she wove an evil plot to kill her husband, but, in the literal, non-metaphorical sense, because she wove evil fabrics: the long blood-red or crimson silk drape on which Agamemnon is made to walk was dyed with the color extracted from a shell-fish coming from Phoenicia, and was extremely expensive;
The evil weaver is explicitly likened to the patient spider: Clytemnestra has waited ten years to trap her husband in her fatal web, to envelop him in that crimson robe; when the old men of the chorus see Agamemnon’s corpse at his wife’s feet, they lament (twice!) that “the king has been caught in a spider’s web.” Aeschylus uses six different Greek words to refer to webs and nets (something lost in translation), and nets and webs and spiders are an obsession running through the three plays. Try to count how many times they appear–my guess is at least thirty. Electra, on the other hand, is a good weaver, a good girl; one of the tokens by which she recognizes her brother is that he’s wearing the garment she has woven for him. Notice that bad weavers are selfish, while good weavers always weave for the benefit of others (mostly men): in the Odyssey too Penelope was weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, and Athena, whom the Greeks considered the master of all weavers, used to weave wonderful lies and deceptions for the benefit of her protégé Odysseus.
Horror of the spider, of the selfish, fatal weaver in the dark, is ever present in our three dramas. This horror is sometimes made explicit, sometimes not. So far we have talked about two main senses of the word “weave”: the literal sense of weaving fabrics, webs or nets, and the metaphorical sense of weaving texts, stories, plots, plans, lies, deceptions, etc. But there is still another metaphorical sense of the word “weave” which becomes a main theme only in the last of the three plays, when the god Apollo gives a lecture to the jury on how we, human beings, are conceived and born. We have seen that our word “text” comes from the Latin word for “weaving”: so does our word “tissue”. And tissue is our technical name for the substance of our bodies, for the basis of our identity, for our flesh.
Technology changes things so much that old ways and views of life become almost unintelligible for us: in our age of big factories and mechanical looms, we are well past the age of woman’s exclusive role as weaver of clothes. But until science finds a new technique, our tissues, our human identity, will be woven in the darkness of a woman’s womb. Apollo was a solar god, a god of light, and he couldn’t tolerate that mysterious weaving in the dark. The hard fact that our human identity is shaped where no one can see what’s going on, where, as we now know, the mother’s moods, the mother’s food and drink, the mother’s thoughts, maybe even the mother’s intestinal gas, affect the way the neurons of the fetus are wired and therefore its whole identity–for Apollo this hard fact was an outrage. Only for Apollo? Think about it: shouldn’t this fact be an outrage, too, for any technological mind, anyone bent on quality control?
So in the third play, the Eumenides, while defending Orestes, who had killed his own mother, Apollo makes an amazing statement: The mother is not the true parent of the child, the father is. The womb is just the place where the totally formed child–formed by the father–receives protection and nourishment until it’s born. To prove it, the god of light and logic points to Athena, who, the Greeks believed, had been born motherless, directly out of Zeus’ head, full grown. And of course, it is Athena, the goddess of wisdom whose statue graces our library, the virgin, the master weaver who did not need a mother, she’s the one who, near the end of The Eumenides, casts the deciding vote in favor of Orestes.
I could spend several hours telling you about the horror that philosophical reason, abstract thought–the lógos, as the Greeks called it–has always felt for the dark and patient weaving of the tissue of our bodies in our mother’s womb. I will restrict myself to Plotinus, the main thinker of the school called Neo-Platonism. Plotinus (AD 205-270) was the last great Greek philosopher, and his work is important to us not only in itself but also because it deeply influenced Saint Augustine and, through him, all later Christian thought. For Plotinus, matter is the root of all evil, and form is the vehicle of all good. We can see why: reason, science, logic, deal only with form and can deal with nothing else. For example, when modern physics speaks of atoms, electrons and so on, it really speaks of the quantitative, mathematical laws governing their motions: these laws are nothing but form, numerical or geometrical form. As regards our human identity, long before Plotinus, Aristotle had taught that the mother provides the matter and the father contributes the form of the child’s body. Now, for Plotinus, matter is usually not entirely evil because most of the time it has some form impressed on it (thus, this piece of chalk is not just matter, it has a roughly cylindrical form impressed on it). But sometimes matter can be thoroughly formless, and thus thoroughly evil–this, however, is hard if not impossible to imagine or visualize: where can we get matter with no form at all, purely chaotic? Plotinus gives (as far as I know) only one example: menstrual blood. The womb is the place of chaos. Thus you see: from at least Aeschylus to Plotinus, running like a thread through the entire flourishing of Greek thought, there is this horror of the womb and the horror of evil weavers in the dark. "
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How believable do you find that part of the story?