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truepenny(I do not have an icon for Garcia. I have yet to see one that tickles my fancy.)
Gideon
Hotch
Reid
JJ
Elle
Morgan
Prentiss
PENELOPE GARCIA
Garcia's last name, as we learn in "Machismo," is her stepfather's. This is the sum total of our knowledge about Garcia's background, so it's fairly important. It's also amusing since Garcia (a.) speaks no Spanish (also proven in "Machismo") and (b.) is, of course, Kirsten Vangsness, about the least Hispanic-looking woman on the planet. So Garcia's surname is a reminder that you can read too much into names; they can mislead as well as reveal.
Garcia is occasionally called Penelope, mostly by JJ. (It always throws me for a second--who's this Penelope chick?) And it's a given name with a certain amount of freight.
Withycombe saith:
Rule, who is cracktastic, saith:
And Spence saith:
We turn to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, which saith:
I find the link to Pan, however tenuous, weirdly appropriate, but what's really interesting here is something else. The appropriateness of Penelope as a namesake for Garcia is fairly obvious: she stays at Quantico while the rest of them go chasing all over the country; Penelope's literal weaving becomes Garcia's adeptness with the World Wide Web; Garcia is a trickster figure, much as both Penelope and Odysseus are. And then there's the thing that hit me as I was typing in Withycombe's entry.
We have, in CM, a character named for a Greek mythological hero, and a character named for a Greek mythological hero's wife. But the two don't match. This can, of course, be ascribed to practicality: people don't name their daughters Medea, and very few of them name their sons Odysseus or Ulysses. But there's also a very good reason to divert the classical parallels. Medea wouldn't be a bad archetype for Garcia, either. She was a sorceress, one of the most powerful women in Greek mythology: a trickster and a scholar. But Medea's story is about betrayal: she betrays her father for Jason, Jason then betrays her, and Medea wreaks revenge. Penelope's story is about loyalty, and by naming Garcia for her, it seems to me that the CM writers are deliberately closing out the possibilities that Medea represents.
Gideon
Hotch
Reid
JJ
Elle
Morgan
Prentiss
PENELOPE GARCIA
Garcia's last name, as we learn in "Machismo," is her stepfather's. This is the sum total of our knowledge about Garcia's background, so it's fairly important. It's also amusing since Garcia (a.) speaks no Spanish (also proven in "Machismo") and (b.) is, of course, Kirsten Vangsness, about the least Hispanic-looking woman on the planet. So Garcia's surname is a reminder that you can read too much into names; they can mislead as well as reveal.
Garcia is occasionally called Penelope, mostly by JJ. (It always throws me for a second--who's this Penelope chick?) And it's a given name with a certain amount of freight.
Withycombe saith:
Greek Penelope [pi - eta - nu - epsilon - lambda - omicron (accent) - pi - eta], Penelopeia [pi - eta - nu - epsilon - lambda - omicron (accent - pi - epsilon - iota - alpha] (said to be connected with pene [pi-eta (accent) - nu - eta] 'a bobbin'), the name of the faithful wife of Odysseus. It was first used as a Christian name in the 16th C, e.g. Penelope (1562-1607) daughter of William Devereux, Earl of Essex, wife of Lord Rich, and the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney. Penelope has never been common but has been used regularly since its introduction. It is rather more frequent in Ireland where it was used to render the native name Fionnghuala (see FENELLA). It is sometimes abbreviated to Pen or Penny. The gipsy name Peneli may be a form of Penelope.
Rule, who is cracktastic, saith:
Greek: Penelope. "Worker of the web, weaver." Patiently our ancestors in days gone by, wove soft skeins into cloth to glorify and cover man. In Greek myths, Penelope wove each day and unraveled the cloth at night. Namesakes: Penny Singleton, actress.
And Spence saith:
[Greek] 'The weaver'. The patient wife of Ulysses who stitched while he roamed.
We turn to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, which saith:
in mythology, daughter of Icarius, brother of Tyndareos (qq.v.), and wife of Odysseus (q.v.). In the Odyssey she faithfully awaits his return, although pressed to remarry one of her numerous suitors, the local nobles. She puts them off for a while by pretending that she cannot marry until she has finished weaving a shroud for Laertes, Odysseus' father. This she unravels every night, so that the work is never finished, but after three years she is betrayed by one of her maids and compelled to complete it (Od. 2.93 ff.; 19.137 ff.; 24.128 ff.) At last, ten years after the fall of Troy and twenty after the departure of her husband, she is at her wits' end and determines to give herself in marriage to whoever can bend Odysseus' bow. This is at Athena's prompting (Od.Telegonia that she married Telgonus after Odysseus' death.
There is, however, another story of Penelope so different from that of the epic tradition that it seems possible that we have here to do with a different figure (nymph or minor local goddess?) of the same name. This is that she was the mother of Pan. Tzetzes, who mentions the tale that she and Hermes were his parents, is already of this opinion (schol. Lycophron, 772, cf. Apollod. Epit. 7.38). It of course produced sundry reconciliations and rationalizations, the most notorious, that of Duris of Samos in Tzetzes, ibid., being simply an indecent pun. But possibly the whole legend is no more than any etymological fancy, a connection of Pan [pi - alpha (accent) - nu] with Doric or Doricized Panelopa [pi - alpha - nu - epsilon - lambda - omicron (accent) - pi - alpha].
Penelope receiving gifts from the suitors appears on a mid-fifth century Attic vase. On another, with Telemachus, she sits at her loom, elbow on knee, head on hand. She is shown in the same pose in contemporary sculpture, and the type is adapted for other characters.
I find the link to Pan, however tenuous, weirdly appropriate, but what's really interesting here is something else. The appropriateness of Penelope as a namesake for Garcia is fairly obvious: she stays at Quantico while the rest of them go chasing all over the country; Penelope's literal weaving becomes Garcia's adeptness with the World Wide Web; Garcia is a trickster figure, much as both Penelope and Odysseus are. And then there's the thing that hit me as I was typing in Withycombe's entry.
We have, in CM, a character named for a Greek mythological hero, and a character named for a Greek mythological hero's wife. But the two don't match. This can, of course, be ascribed to practicality: people don't name their daughters Medea, and very few of them name their sons Odysseus or Ulysses. But there's also a very good reason to divert the classical parallels. Medea wouldn't be a bad archetype for Garcia, either. She was a sorceress, one of the most powerful women in Greek mythology: a trickster and a scholar. But Medea's story is about betrayal: she betrays her father for Jason, Jason then betrays her, and Medea wreaks revenge. Penelope's story is about loyalty, and by naming Garcia for her, it seems to me that the CM writers are deliberately closing out the possibilities that Medea represents.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-14 06:06 pm (UTC)*licks*
no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-15 01:47 am (UTC)It isn't just one of your holiday games
Date: 2007-03-15 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 04:08 am (UTC)Fionnula and her brothers were turned into swans by their wicked stepmother and forced to roam the world for 900 years. Interestingly, Fionnula is seen as being the protective-mother figure, giving her brothers shelter under her wings in rough seas. Her name means 'white-shouldered'. She is also usually the spokesperson for the swans. Note also that the swans are basically pagan demi-gods and they finally find rest in Christianity.
So we have a girl who is forced out of her former home in events linked to the death of a parent, who roams around for some time with an equally outcast all-male group, who is a protector but not a fighter, who finds a place to rest in a culture utterly different to the one she has known (in some cases the culture she settles in rabidly hates her former culture but she finds a place which blends the two) and she is the one who conveys/recieves information.
Interesting to see the links, but most of my comparisions are generalisations of lots of fairytales.