The Authoress of the Odyssey / Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands

by Samuel Butler

Hence if in any work the women are found to be well and sympathetically drawn, while the men are mechanical and by comparison perfunctorily treated, it is, I imagine, safe to infer that the writer is a woman; and the converse holds good with man. Man and woman never fully understand one another save, perhaps, during courtship and honeymoon, and as a man understands man more fully than a woman can do, so does a woman, woman. Granted, it is the delight of either sex to understand the other as fully as it can, and those who succeed most in this respect are the best and happiest whether men or women; but do what we may the barriers can never be broken down completely, and each sex will dwell mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, within its own separate world. When, moreover, we come to think of it, it is not desirable that they should be broken down, for it is on their existence that much of the attraction of either sex to the other depends.

Men seem unable to draw women at all without either laughing at them or caricaturing them; and so, perhaps, a woman never draws a man so felicitously as when she is making him ridiculous. If she means to make him so she is certain to succeed; if she does not mean it she will succeed more surely still. Either sex, in fact, can caricature the other delightfully, and certainly no writer has ever shown more completely than the writer of the Odyssey has done that, next to the glorification of woman, she considers man's little ways and weaknesses to be the fittest theme on which her genius can be displayed. But I doubt whether any writer in the whole range of literature (excepting, I suppose, Shakspeare) has succeeded in drawing a full length, life-sized, serious portrait of a member of the sex opposite to the writer's own.

It is admitted on all hands that the preponderance of interest in the Iliad is on the side of man, and in the Odyssey on that of woman. Women in the Iliad are few in number and rarely occupy the stage. True, the goddesses play important parts, but they are never taken seriously.

Shelley, again, speaking of the "perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books" of the Iliad, says, "The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this."[1] The writer of the Odyssey is fierce as a tigress at times, but the feeling of the poem is on the whole exactly what Shelley says it is. Strength is felt everywhere even in the tenderest passages of the Iliad, but it is sweetness rather than strength that fascinates us throughout the Odyssey. It is the charm of a woman not of a man.

So, again, to quote a more recent authority, Mr. Gladstone in his work on Homer already referred to, says (p. 28):—

It is rarely in the Iliad that grandeur or force give way to allow the exhibition of domestic affection. Conversely, in the Odyssey the family life supplies the tissue into which is woven the thread of the poem.

Any one who is familiar with the two poems must know that what Mr. Gladstone has said is true; and he might have added, not less truly, that when there is any exhibition of domestic life and affection in the Iliad the men are dominant, and the women are under their protection, whereas throughout the Odyssey it is the women who are directing, counselling, and protecting the men.

Who are the women in the Odyssey? There is Minerva, omnipresent at the elbows of Ulysses and Telemachus to keep them straight and alternately scold and flatter them. In the Iliad she is a great warrior but she is no woman: in the Odyssey she is a great woman but no warrior; we have, of course, Penelope—masterful nearly to the last and tossed off to the wings almost from the moment that she has ceased to be so; Euryclea, the old servant, is quite a match for Telemachus, "do not find fault, child," she says to him, "when there is no one to find fault with" (xx. 135). Who can doubt that Helen is master in the house of Menelaus—of whom all she can say in praise is that he is "not deficient either in person or understanding" (iv. 264)? Idothea in Book iv. treats Menelaus de haut en bas, all through the Proteus episode. She is good to him and his men, but they must do exactly what she tells them, and she evidently enjoys "running" them,—for I can think of no apter word. Calypso is the master mind, not Ulysses; and, be it noted, that neither she nor Circe seem to have a manservant on their premises. I was at an inn once and asked the stately landlady if I could see the landlord. She bridled up and answered, "We have no landlord, sir, in this house; I cannot see what use a man is in a hotel except to clean boots and windows." There spoke Circe and Calypso, but neither of them seem to have made even this much exception in man's favour.

Let the reader ask any single ladies of his acquaintance, who live in a house of their own, whether they prefer being waited upon by men or by women, and I shall be much surprised if he does not find that they generally avoid having a man about the house at all—gardeners of course excepted. But then the gardener generally has a wife, and a house of his own.