PENELOPE'S REVENGE: ESSAYS ON GENDER AND EPIC

Author(s): Reyes Bertolín

Source: Phoenix, Vol. 62, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer/printemps-été 2008), pp. 1-4
Published by: Classical Association of Canada
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25651694
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 PENELOPE'S REVENGE: ESSAYS ON GENDER AND EPIC

Reyes Bertolin

From April 30th to May 1st 2004, theUniversity of Calgary hosted the first
international colloquium for femaleHomerists, "Penelope's Revenge."1 Although
the name was intended to be humorous, it raised eyebrows among my more
conservative The title is but itwas not meant to offend.
colleagues. provocative,
In fact, ancient literarycharacters do not need to be avenged bymodern scholars;
neither do modern scholars need to approach the circumstances of the past with
a pre-set agenda. The colloquium itselfwas a serious academic event. But itwas
also a celebration ofwomen's scholarship in theHomeric field, something that
was overdue.
long
The colloquium presented the opportunity for a group of Homeric scholars
to realize that, in spite of differences in education,
background, and expertise,
we approach theHomeric poems looking for similar topics. For instance, most
papers were centered on the Odyssey,which has generally held more appeal for
female scholars than the Iliad. The colloquium was also an occasion to reflect
on the question whether "female
scholarship" differs from "male scholarship," or,
perhaps more to the point, whether male and female Homerists have distinct
interestswhen readingHomer. I am conscious that it is controversial (ifnot even
passe) to speak about "female scholarship" in an age of equality. Yet does academic
and administrative equality elide diverse interestswhen readingHomer? Is there
any truth to the impression thatmen and women work on different topicswhen
they studyHomer?
Modern Homeric scholarship dates back to before the broad inclusion of
women into academia, and the
subject-matter of earlyHomeric scholarship often
did not include the topics on which women regularlywork today. The Calgary
colloquium approached the question of how and when so-called "female" topics
became integral toHomeric research. During the colloquium it became clear
that topics that interestwomen have become relevant to Homeric scholarship
as part not only of
general societal shiftsbut also of a historical development in
the scholarship itself,which moved the inquiry from "external" concerns about
Homer's composition of the text and the history or archaeology reflected in the
poems to "internal" ones about the poems' intrinsic literaryvalue.2
1
we were
Serendipitously, at the very time that our a book
having colloquium by Barbara Clayton
appeared with the titleA Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving theFeminine inHomers Odyssey (2004).
Several books on Penelope and the poetics of the were
Odyssey published in the 1990s, for instance:
Katz 1991; Felson-Rubin 1994; and Papadopoulou-Belmehdi 1994. Clayton's book continues this
trend.
2Peradotto (1997: 382-383) refers to these tendencies inHomeric as
scholarship "centrifugal"
and "centripetal."

1
PHOENIX, VOL. 62 (2008) 1.

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 2 PHOENIX

A brief overview of the history ofmodern Homeric scholarshipwill show few

thematic studies of the poems before the 1980s.3 Indeed, until then linguistic and
compositional issues predominated,4 with the exception of some scholars who
were, so to speak, on themargins.5 Coincidentally, it is only since the 1980s that
female scholars have become prominent inHomeric studies.Their contributions
had a transformative effecton the interpretation of the poems and the field has
benefited from theirwork.6
The present collection is a sample of the research of femaleHomerists working
in North America and Australia, trained in various languages and traditions.
The papers contain a diversity of approaches; however, although none is overtly
feminist, all are premised on the conception ofHomer as a gendered text. The
a a means
appreciation of gender issues in theHomeric poems is not goal, but
to furtherexploration, employed to enrich other scholarly traditions and literary
interpretations.The papers represent different schools of thought superimposed
on the background of gender. Besides traditional philology, there are comparative,
structuralist, and
socio-linguistic approaches.
The collection begins with two papers on Penelope.7 These focus on the
on the figure of
study of female language, centered Penelope. "Penelope and the
Pandareids" by Olga Levaniouk examines how Penelope uses themyths of the
as a
daughters of Pandareos firstas an exhortation to Odysseus to act and then
prayer. For these reasons, themythological details included in theparadeigmata
cannot be seen as gratuitous; rather, they function as a veiled message between
Penelope and Odysseus. In "Penelope's Absent Song" Pura Nieto Hernandez
examines Penelope's relation to poetry and explains why the "song of Penelope"

3LAnnee Philologique listsmore than 7,000 titles from the late 1950s to our day, while Latacz
(1979: 18) counts approximately 12,000 titles for the period between 1770 and 1977.
4
Griffin (1980: vii) notes in his preface: "The desire towrite this book arose out of my teaching.

Listening
to many essays on Homer, I came to feel that the undergraduates who wrote them were
a less than
being impelled, by the books and articles they read, in the direction of dryness which did
justice to the Iliad and Odyssey. Mycenaean land-tenure, Bronze-Age archaeology, the intricacies of
formulaic phraseology: these special and technical questions seemed almost to squeeze the poems out."
5
Let me mention as an example theAustralian scholar Florence M. Stawell, who published her
book Homer and the Iliad: An Essay toDetermine the Scope and Character of theOriginal Poem in 1909.
was about thewhole project
Although Stawell firmly in the analyst tradition, she expressed her doubts
and proposed from the first sentence of her introduction to "approach the poem [the Iliad] without
as as we can take a modern work of art." This proposal was not carried out
prejudice and take it freshly
until much later in the twentieth century. In the case of her contemporaries the question ofHomer's

identity eclipsed any literary interpretation.

6 was Samuel Butler's theory
An early attempt to include women in the study of Homeric epic
of the female authorship of the Odyssey. Butler's, however, was yet another attempt to resolve the
Homeric question, since he entitled his book, first published in 1897 (Butler 1967), The Authoress of
theOdyssey: Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, theUse SheMade of the Iliad and How thePoem
Grew underHer Hands.
7
The reader may notice the absence of papers on Helen, the other main female character of the
on Helen at the conference were for
Homeric epics. Unfortunately, the scholars who presented papers
various reasons not able to contribute to this volume.

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 PENELOPE'S REVENGE 3

(that the immortalswill one day sing) has disappeared from the Odyssey. Nieto
argues thatwhile narrating her story in public would be impossible, itwould also
be inappropriate for the victorious character of the end of the Odyssey to sing a
lament, the genre with which Penelope identifies her singing. In this context,
Nieto explores the relation between the lyre and the loom, which becomes in
Odysseus' absence Penelope's instrumentfor controlling her song.
Lillian Doherty focuses on less prominent women in her "Nausikaa and
Tyro: Structural Parallels between the Phaiakian Episode of the Odyssey and
the Hesiodic Catalogue ofWomen!' She posits the existence of a female oral
tradition on the topic of courtship that survived only by being incorporated and
absorbed intomythic narratives largely focalized by men. The Odyssey and the
women and gods into a past era,
Catalogue project the free encounters between
which may also represent a shiftbetween these two "genres," the female and the
male. A less prominent woman is also the subject of Judith Fletcher's 'Women's
Space andWingless Words in the Odyssey!' She examines the character of
Eurykleia as a liaison between themale and female spaces of Odysseus' house.
is often as
Eurykleia portrayed doorkeeper and associated with silence, which
connotes her allegiance to her master, Odysseus. In view of the characterization
of Eurykleia, Fletcher argues that the formula ajtxepot; li60o<; refersto Penelope's
and Eurykleia's understanding of the need for silence and for not compromising
the positive outcome of the Odyssey.
My own paper, "The Mast and the Loom: Signifiers of Separation and
Authority," goes back to the established division between male and female spaces
and argues that this division is signified by planting a laxoq, which can be
translated as mast or loom according to the context. The lotoq becomes a
gendered object for both men and women, since they both have access to it.As
Penelope sets up her loom and Odysseus ties himself to themast, the erection of
the igtoc; is necessary for each character to take control over her or his destiny.

Department of Greek and Roman Studies

University of Calgary

2500 University Drive N.W.

Calgary, Alberta
T2N1N4 rbertoli@ucalgary.ca

bibliography

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Use SheMade oftheIliad andHow thePoem Grew under Her Hands. Chicago (reprintof
second edition, London 1922).
B. 2004. A Poetics: the Feminine inHomers
Clayton, Penelopean Reweaving Odyssey.
Lanham, MD.
N. 1994. toPoetics.
Felson-Rubin, Regarding Penelope: From Character Princeton.
Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on and Death. Oxford.
Life

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 4 PHOENIX

Katz, M. A. 1991.
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Renown:
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Latacz, J. 1979. Homer: Tradition undNeurung. Darmstadt.

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Poem. London.
Original

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