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In Book XXIII of the Odyssey Penelope declares that Helen would never have become the mistress of Paris had she not been misled by a god, and had she known that the Achaian warriors would in the end take her back to Sparta. Since Penelope, deprived of her husband for twenty years, had least cause of any to defend Helen, these lines have been rejected by critics from Aristarchus onwards.
Devereux shows in detail the evidence from the Odyssey of Penelope's natural ambivalence towards the erring Odysseus, his (and Agamemnon's) suspicions of her fidelity, the importance of the suitors to the ageing and deprived woman, etc. Moreover, since critics accuse psycho-analysis of a modern cultural bias, he quotes Greek sources and a modern anti-analytic critic to confirm the view that Penelope's character was not necessarily considered chaste by them either: for instance in one myth she was the mother by all the suitors of the god Pan.
Thus, even if Penelope remained chaste, her outburst in Helen's defence is not only understandable, but necessary in defence of her own impulses. Devereux wonders how many other classical texts have been mutilated by the psychological scotomata of philologists.