The Odyssey by Homer: Day 9
Book 7, lines 1–348
Eurymedusa, like Eurycleia—these older enslaved women across the epic doing all the caretaking. The prefix “Eury,” I learn, means “wide.” Now used in ecology, it describes animals that can withstand a wide range of variable conditions.
How unlike the guise of Mentes with which Athena met Odysseus’s son. To meet her favorite, she is practically coquettish: “twinkling” and “skipping,” she even winks. Her shimmer is taken up in the blinding brilliance of Alcinous and Arete’s palace: all precious metals, bronze walls, gold doors, pitchers, dogs, and boys. Softening the cold opulence is the fertility, fecundity of encircling fruit.
It’s in Book 7 that we really start to know Odysseus: all “careful calculation,” “careful skill,” and “careful tact.” He takes control of narrative, beginning with the events we’ve just witnessed, voicing them and making them his own.
Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey with Stefania Heim
In Book 7 once again the women provide the action. Now Arete , the Queen of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa’s mother, and not the king, rules the roost: “White-armed Arete had noticed his fine clothes, the cloak and shirt she wove herself, with help from her slave girls. Her words flew out to him as if on wings. ‘Stranger, let me be first to speak to you.’”
Harold Bloom argued in his Book of J that the Yawhwist, an author he identified for some of the most famous parts in the early narrative of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch, was a woman.
He noted the complex and nuanced female characters like Eve, Sarah, and Rebecca; ironic treatment of male patriarchal figures like Abraham; and the distinct literary style.
The same reasoning could support that a woman authored the Odyssey.
We've discussed this “feminist” quality of the Odyssey and its style and voice that feels so distinct from the Iliad and more sophisticated, kind of modern. Athena, Penelope, Helen, Calypso, Nausicaa, and now Arete have driven the narrative and have complete agency.
There are also domestic details woven throughout the Odyssey.
On the other hand, Odysseus himself, the male lead, is treated with much irony. Supposedly such a clever guy who has gotten all his men killed and is completely reliant on and subservient to women, at least so far.
The hapless, awkward, and insecure Telemachus is also ironically portrayed. Kind of a parody of a Bildungsroman.
There’s a line in the Fitzgerald translation that is hard to match. Wilson has 152-153 as “I miss my family. I have been gone so long it hurts.” In Fitzgerald: “My home and friends lie far. My life is pain.”