‘Health isn’t making everybody into a Greek ideal’

Presented as a variation of Homer’s Odyssey rewritten from the perspective of a cancer patient’s spouse, Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey (2010) has its roots in her husband’s real-life diagnosis with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In thus reconfiguring the hero’s homecoming as a wife’s quest to find and cure her sick husband, the poet is able to chart her journey in coming to terms with her husband’s condition and treatment. Although the voyage towards healing and marital reconciliation is at times difficult and fraught with danger, the poem’s protagonist is buoyed along her way through a series of affirming encounters with other characters. Reading the text alongside Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the chapter considers the ways in which Lewis interrogates contemporary attitudes towards the sick, as well as what it means to care for someone diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.

Excavations in Homer

The essay offers a comparative examination of Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), which re-works material from the Iliad, and the German poet Barbara Köhler’s poem cycle Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife, 2007), which responds to the Odyssey. I argue that in dissolving the narrative line that characterizes Homer’s epics, both poets perform ‘speculative archaeologies’. Oswald’s treatment brings to the fore traces of lament and pastoral lyric forms that may have predated Homer’s narrative organization, recollecting the function of formal poetry in social rituals of mourning. Through her handling of the similes in particular, Oswald draws out of Homer’s text those moments in it which encapsulate connectivity and collectivity. Köhler’s differential treatment of grammatical gender likewise highlights connectivity, encapsulated in the female figures in the Odyssey and their complex interrelations (also a figure for poetic speech), which contrasts with linear narrative as projected by the male hero’s story.

Rereading Penelope’s Web

Feminist readings of the Odyssey often cast Penelope’s weaving and unravelling of Laertes’ shroud as an act of resistance against the suitors and the threat they pose to her independence, and as a signature or allegory for female authorship. In The Penelopiad (2005), Margaret Atwood uses a similar set of critical approaches and interpretive strategies in her feminist refiguration of Penelope and the twelve maids hanged at the end of the Odyssey as literary representations of female authors. In this, Atwood can be seen to play on the oral origins of the androcentric primary epic and the negative cultural associations of weaving with a dubious and inauthentic female oral tradition in order to explore, challenge, and confront the anxieties of female authorship.

Feminist at Second Glance? Alice Oswald’s Memorial as a Response to Homer’s Iliad

A few years before Caroline Alexander became the first woman to translate Homer’s Iliad into English (2015), Alice Oswald published her book-length poem Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (2011). Although Oswald’s poem differs profoundly from retellings of Homeric myth in the vein of feminist revisionism, such as Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, her approach can nevertheless be regarded as feminist: (a) she erases the Homeric hero’s male prerogative of achieving immortality through his glorious deeds in battle and his begetting of a succession of equally heroic sons; (b) she locates the cause of the war not in a woman’s betrayal of her husband, but in a pervasive sense of male restlessness; and (c) she puts even greater emphasis than Homer on the devastating effects that the war has on women.

Introduction

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

Epilogue

This chapter discusses the author’s own 2017 verse translation of the Odyssey as a feminist project. It argues that the injunctions by Lawrence Venuti and Antoine Berman to ‘foreignize’ in translation are more questionable in the case of male-authored and androcentric texts translated by women. Seven different strategies for feminist translation practices are proposed, and three passages from the Odyssey are discussed in detail: Helen’s ‘dog-face’ (Book 4), the hanging of the slave women (Book 22), and the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus (Book 23). In each case, the author’s translation is contrasted with those by male translators. The chapter ends with a discussion of the presentation of Robert Fagles’s Odyssey as a ‘politically correct’, proto-feminist translation, arguing that it is anything but.

Iberian Sibyl

Winner of Spain’s national poetry prize, Francisca Aguirre is the author of the long poem Itáca (1972), a reconceptualization of the island home of Penelope and Odysseus. Aguirre’s engagement with myth is both reactionary and revisionary as it responds to the idea of Ithaca as symbolic homeland and as the impetus for a liberating, life-changing journey. Inspired by the poetry of Greek writer C. P. Cavafy, Itáca is also in dialogue with the mythology of place, exile, recognition, and the restructuring of identity. However, as a woman encountering his work decades later in Francoist Spain, Aguirre found that Cavafy, like Homer, promised a journey that was not accessible to her. Thus, her poem becomes an investigation of how narratives of the self are limited by social expectations and how divergent subjectivities are silenced, and reborn.

Monologue and Dialogue

With the telling and retelling of stories by the narrator and characters, Homer’s Odyssey seems to invite the reworking of episodes and characters in new forms. Modern poets favour the dramatic monologue for entering into dialogue with a revered canonical text, often in an irreverent or subversive manner. Dramatic monologues are crucial to the revisionist mythology of women writers, often representing female characters who are peripheral and largely silent in classical texts in order to articulate some element of the story that was previously untold. Poets such as Linda Pastan, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and Judith Kazantzis use monologue and dialogue to create reworkings of the Odyssey that relocate Odysseus to the margins of the story and question the importance of his heroic adventures.

Between Night and Day

This chapter offers a close reading of the final five poems in the German poet Barbara Köhler’s poem cycle Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife, 2007). It shows how Köhler’s interest in developing a feminine (non-linear, non-hierarchical) form of expression is particularly successful in evoking the atmosphere, if not the actual events, of Books 18–20 of the Odyssey. The essay argues that Köhler’s emphasis on uncertainty and ambiguity has a lot in common with recent feminist scholarship, which has drawn attention to the significance of Penelope’s uncertainty about Odysseus’ whereabouts and her own status. It also makes use of the simile of the nightingale in Book 19 of the Odyssey to show that already in the Homeric text Penelope is linked explicitly to both lyric and uncertainty.

Romantic Encounters with Homer in Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles

Elizabeth Cook’s novella, Achilles (2001), offers a meditation on the eponymous hero and the lives with which his own life intersects, charting the blossoming of the aristos Achaion, from Skiros to Troy, and his immortalization in epic song. The closing section, ‘Relay’, maps points of literary contact between Achilles and the Romantic poet, John Keats, for whom appreciation of the Iliad and its receptions translates to physical sensation. In Cook’s novella, Keats’s historic expression of fellow feeling for Achilles (‘According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches’) becomes a catalyst to explore the pleasures of reading and the cultivation of meaningful encounters across time and place. With Achilles, Cook plays with a Keatsian poetics of physicality, sensuousness, and desire, exposing the ways in which Homer’s Iliad is a text not altogether untouched by eroticism.