Female Homers
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have been inspiring a tradition of writers since their inception. Yet while this tradition comprises men and women, the associated literary criticism focuses almost exclusively on the male response. If the female response is addressed, it is subjected to a disproportionate consideration of gender. Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff each rewrite the Iliad during World War II yet neither writer responds through the prism of feminism. This paper proposes that through their adaptations Weil and Bespaloff illustrate that the female response is not always one of gender and that they act as precursors to a contemporary wave of female writers transforming Homer’s texts in innovative and subversive ways. With their twentieth-century reworkings of Homer, Weil and Bespaloff set in motion the process of restoring to women the recognition afforded them by Homer and due to them by their peers.