“The Heroism of the Stuck”: Gender, Class, and Ambiguous Loss in the Odyssey

The Odyssey is a poem keenly attuned to the affective experiences of certain characters’ grief, ambiguous loss, endurance, and resilience. This article shows that the Odyssey represents Penelope’s affective “stuckedness” in the face of uncertain loss through its use of narrative and verbal repetition, interruptions, symbols, and similes. In addition, it demonstrates that the poem portrays Penelope’s strategy of waiting the suitors out in Books 18–21 as heroic and parallel to Odysseus’ heroic endurance and resilience. Anthropologist Ghassan Hage has argued that this discourse of “heroized stuckedness” in modern contexts is no neutral representation of affect but maintains political hierarchies and social structures. This article argues that the Odyssey’s depiction of Penelope’s heroized immobility and resilience likewise works to maintain both the patriarchal ideology of the poem and a class hierarchy that recognizes Odysseus’ and Penelope’s grief and endurance as a good kind of “waiting,” while vilifying the decisions that enslaved characters make in order to survive.