After centuries of serving as background noise to her husband Ulysses’ odes of sea storms, sirens, and celebrity, the mythological Penelope finally steps into the light in Miriam Waddington’s poem “Ulysses Embroidered.” Functioning as a revisionary text to both the Alfred, Lord Tennyson work “Ulysses” and the tradition of The Odyssey itself, “Ulysses Embroidered” quickly strikes its readers as a fiercely feminist re-envisioning of Penelope and her tale. Waddington’s work allows for an age-old legend to be told in a new way with a bold, feminine speaker, but to what end do her changes remark on Tennyson’s original work? By engaging in two separate modes of revision by both reading against the grain and “constantly [engaging] in dialogue” to …show more content…
Waddington grabs hold of this notion and retrieves the trope of the “old blind woman in the tower” by giving her new life with the restructuring of the poem (Waddington 4-5). While Tennyson’s epic poem utilizes the strict confines of iambic pentameter and heroic verse known by Homer’s original Odyssey, Penelope’s updated narrative bleeds out through a variant, but equally structured schematic. Waddington’s six stanzas contain a slow moving enjambment of choppier and more laborious lines, creating a certain rocking of language emergent from the first lines: “You’ve come / at last from / all your journeying” (Waddington 1-3). This motion of the poem effuses the tediousness of Penelope’s long wait, as well the feeling of the line by line repetition of the legendary loom through which her story (and her husband’s) is woven. While Tennyson’s work conforms to that of typical myth and masculine heroics, the base structure of the revision places the role of storyteller in Penelope’s …show more content…
These intentional references to Penelope’s blindness, a traditionally diminishing character trait, thus call us to read more deeply in order to understand the importance of the recurring motif. By digging into this construction within Penelope, we suddenly begin to see her not only as a tool for modern feminism in the retelling of stories, but also as a powerful lens through which to re-envision the original work and to view the dialogue between the pretext and the revision. The necessary examination of blindness in “Ulysses Embroidered” compels the audience to seek the theme out in different manners in the pretext, this time looking more pointedly at blindness on the side of Ulysses as we turn from discussion of an old blind woman to a man “made weak by time and fate” (Tennyson 69). Together, Waddington and Tennyson’s words underline Ulysses’ own blindness: myopia and ignorance toward his reality, whether it be to his fate or his family. As is most evident in the Tennyson work, Ulysses is so incredibly war driven that instead of enjoying the life that his battles have struggled for, he regards even death as a battle to be fought, looking to voyage into the terrain of Hades “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (Tennyson 70). The hero is similarly myopic towards his son, who
Atwood’s “The Penelopiad”, explores the evolving characterisation of key characters such as Penelope and Odysseus through her postmodernist reimagination of Homer’s classical “The Odyssey”. Through the exploration of the characters, the reader is provided an insight into the context of Atwood’s writing. Her characterisation of Penelope and Odysseus are shaped from our understanding of the characters within “The Odyssey” and allows us to draw comparison between the predominant culture and society of the Homer and Atwood’s writing.
For the Greeks, Homer's Odyssey was much more than just an entertaining tale of gods, monsters, and men, it served as cultural paradigm from which every important role and relationship could be defined. This book, much more so than its counter part The Iliad, gives an eclectic view of the Achean's peacetime civilization. Through Odyssey, we gain an understanding of what is proper or improper in relationships between father and son, god and mortal, servant and master, guest and host, and--importantly--man and woman. Women play a vital role in the movement of this narrative. Unlike in The Iliad, where they are chiefly prizes to be won, bereft of identity, the women of Odyssey are unique in their personality, intentions, and relationship towards men. Yet, despite the fact that no two women in this epic are alike, each--through her vices or virtues-- helps to delineate the role of the ideal woman. Below, we will show the importance of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Clytaemestra, and Penelope in terms of the movement of the narrative and in defining social roles for the Ancient Greeks.
From mermaids to female Navy officers, the relationship between women and the sea, in both history and literature, has been a complicated one. Mariners traditionally had conflicting superstitions involving a woman’s place on a ship, and this sense of conflict spills over into two Early Modern works of drama—namely Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West and Shakespeare’s Pericles. Bess and Marina, the main female characters of both plays, walk a fine line between captors and masters of the sea, and similarly between the roles of strong heroines who act outside of their gender-roles and hetero-normative females who are mastered by the plays’ respective male characters. Indeed, the sea seems to have either a link to independence or confinement for both female protagonists, which ultimately relates to their “proper” (non-threatening) place as traditional wives and homemakers.
Alfred Tennyson breaks away from the pastoral discourse that is typical of the Romantic Age and transcends into the Victorian Age with a poem full of obsession, madness, death, love, and patriotism in his creation of Maud. In Maud, the state of the speaker’s life and his mental health are called into question from the very beginning. The speaker’s initial mental state is one of madness, a melancholic, morbidity that has been influenced by the suicide of his father into a persona that is not perfect or happy, but a disturbed man with nothing to recommend him to a higher state. We see this morbid side immediately when he says, “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, / Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood- / red heath, / The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, / And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers / “Death.” (I,1-4). The speaker is already preoccupied with death and loss. He is all about thinking in extremes. The extremes of death, love, loss, and patriotism permeate his personality with such intensity that everything in his life is an obsession. The intensity of the character creates a situation where he never operates in the middle. He is always very high or very low either in anguish or happiness. It can be argued that his madness resonates as different phases of obsessions and that sanity at the end is not an arguable point as the reader never actually sees him operating within a sane situation. The speaker’s patriotic discourse in Part III is just one more obsession, another faucet of his internal madness that has found an alternate focus. The speaker’s is caught in a weave of madness that is present throughout ...
Suzanne Marrs' work, "Place and the Displaced in Eudora Welty's The Bride of Innisfallen, focuses on Welty's settings in the collection specifically Welty's departure from using her native Mississippi. Marrs recounts the events of Welty's life in the early 1950s, the time Welty wrote these stories, and how her journeys in Europe influenced The Bride. But one important element of Marrs' critique gets buried within the text, the feminist element of Welty's technique which gives the women of Homer's Odyssey a voice, especially Circe.
This essay explores the role of women in Homer's Odyssey, James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Derrick Walcott's Omeros (1990), epics written in very different historical periods. Common to all three epics are women as the transforming figure in a man's life, both in the capacity of a harlot and as wife.
Greek women, as depicted as in their history and literature, endure many hardships and struggle to establish a meaningful status in their society. In the Odyssey, Penelope’s only role in the epic is to support Odysseus and remain loyal to him. She is at home and struggles to keep her family intact while Odysseus is away trying to return to his native land. The cultural role of women is depicted as being supportive of man and nothing more. Yet what women in ancient Greece did long ago was by far more impressive than what men did.
In Julia Alvarez’s poem “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries”, Alvarez skillfully employs poetic devices such as imagery and personification to let the reader view the power of literature through the eyes of a young, poverty stricken, estranged woman, inspiring her love for poetry. Alvarez’s use of imagery paints a vivid picture of the setting and the narrator’s actions for the reader throughout her significant experience; all through the eyes of an alienated female. The use of personification and author’s tone brings “The Blue Estuaries” to life for the reader-just as it had appeared to the narrator.
Within the Penelopiad, Atwood’s responds to the cultural values of Homer’s Odyssey through the characterisation of Penelope. Penelope’s narrative perspective exposes aspects of gender and class relationships that the Homeric original ignores. Atwood couples this with multiple genres and an emphasis on the process of myth formation. This serves to challenge the construction of the Odyssey as a tool to encode social norms. However, this focus on subjectivity also emphasises the unreliable female narration of the Penelopiad. Conflict between these female characters reinforces values imposed within the Odyssey. Penelope’s interaction with other women demonstrates her compliance with Homeric ideas about class and gender. To a major extent, the
Penelope is possibly the most interesting character in the Odyssey. Cunning, forgiving, and kind, she rules the kingdom and raises her son without her true love. The poem, “Penelope” by James Harrison represents Penelope holding her pent up anger inside, and her internal debate over the suitors.
Lillian Doherty, Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor 1995), esp. chapter 1.
The theme of women in the Odyssey is essential in establishing one of the if not the main message in the poem. The paradoxical messages give insights into the lives of the characters and generalizations into the reader's lives. Although this theme would have a noticeable affect on the poem in its absence, it is odd that in a story about war and adventure that they hold such dominating roles. In the setting of the Odyssey, women did not have a status that measured up to that of a man. However, whether seen as demonic or angelic they still hold in the example of Odysseus a significant role in the determination of the final fate of a man.
The character of Penelope in Homer's Odyssey reflects the faithful wife who waits twenty years for the arrival of her husband. Only a strong woman could sustain the stress, anxiety and confusion resulting from the chaos of a palace with a missing king whose fate is unknown. Her responsibilities and commitments toward the man she loves are particularly difficult to keep, under the strain of the situation. Although she does not actively pursue an effort to find him, her participation in the success of Odysseus' homecoming can be seen in her efforts to defend and protect the heritage, reputation and the House of Odysseus in his absence. As Odysseus withstands his trial, Penelope withstands her trials against temptations to give in to the many anxious suitors, to give up on her faith and respect for her religion, her husband and even her self. Penelope's strength in keeping the highest standards in her function as a wife, woman and mother contributes to the success of Odysseus' homecoming by keeping the home and family for him to come back to.
Unlike her brother, Dorothy seems to be less solitary in her experiences, her accounts of what happened and who was with her are less personal than William’s. Dorothy tends to include everyone who surrounded her at that point and time – ‘We [Dorothy and her brother William] were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park’ – whereas William makes it a companionless experience, he forgets everyone that may have been sharing the moment with him – ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ . This, in conjunction with the use of imagery, similes and personification, not only makes William’s poems more accessible to a wide range of readers but it also adds character and personality, whereas Dorothy’s journal tends to be more reserved and closed to interpretation. Although both use semantic field of nature, William’s use is more affective as it conveys emotion, passion and attachment to his work.
... middle of paper ... ... Somewhat like the mirror in the Lady's tower, Tennyson's poem reflects the attitudes that shaped the destiny of women in Victorian England, while it further succeeds in presenting a model of an assertive Victorian woman existing, albeit briefly, within the bounds of patriarchal society. References Abrams, M.H., ed., pp.