Mendelsohn is a perceptive literary critic and a self-consciously elegant writer. Mendelsohn sets an account of the Homeric Odyssey alongside a nuanced portrait of his own complicated familial and quasi-familial relationships, with his non-biological sons and their mother (who is neither a sexual nor a romantic partner), with his students, and with the many substitute parents (uncles, aunts, professors, teachers and friends) who have taught, mentored or inspired him during his life. The oikos to which Odysseus returns includes not only his biological father and son, but also the many other members of his household: his decrepit old dog, his resident poet and his multitude of slaves (including the pig keeper and other farm workers, the old wet nurse and the many minions kept to bathe and feed their owners). I would note, although Mendelsohn does not say this, that the protagonist has his most intimate and longest-running relationship not with Penelope but with the goddess Athena.Īncient Greek has no term exactly corresponding to our “family”: the word genos suggests lineage, while oikos means “house” or “household”, including all the people in the house – whether or not they are related. Meanwhile, Penelope searches for escape in her weaving and her dreams, and Odysseus seems to find a series of alternative, albeit temporary homes with Calypso and Circe and the nubile Nausicaa. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, is taught about masculinity and the elite norms of marriage by alternative father figures, Nestor and Menelaus, and by a pair of marvellously intelligent and seductive alternative mother figures, Athena and Helen. As Daniel Mendelsohn shows in his brilliant new memoir/lit-crit essay, the trio of husband, wife and son is complicated by a vast array of other familial or quasi-familial relationships. But The Odyssey is surprisingly complex in its account of the ideals and realities of family life, identity and home. It’s easy enough to assume that the ancient and archaic Greeks, since they lived a long time ago, must have espoused values that we regard as “traditional” because they were the norms of Victorian or Edwardian England. So far, so predictably androcentric and heteronormative. He suffers no negative repercussions, while “faithful Penelope” has to ward off all her suitors as long as she possibly can doing nothing and nobody is the only way for a mortal woman to avoid the bad reputation of the oft-mentioned adulterers Helen and Clytemnestra. Odysseus spends seven years on the island of Ogygia, and in the bed of the beautiful, devoted goddess Calypso, plus another year with the sexy witch Circe. The institution of marriage seems to lie at the heart of the poem, along with an accompanying set of double standards about gender. The husband and father himself spends 10 years away at war, and another 10 making his meandering way back home. A wife waits anxiously at home for her absent husband a man-child son, still living at home, dreams of his father and snaps irritably at his mother. As everyone knows, The Odyssey is a poem about a “traditional” family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |