1/15/2024 0 Comments Penelope odyssey analysis![]() (Book 1 351:352) Thus, Telemachus asserts his right of ascension and proves he is his father’s son. He says “Public speech shall be men’s concern, and my concern most of all authority in this house is mine”. Here again we see the role of woman in Greek society, because at this point Telemachus decides to prove himself to be a man, by telling his mother to go back to her rooms and sew. This sounds more like a woman mourning the recent raw, loss of her lover. (Book 1 332:337) This does not sound like a wife who is over the disappearance of her husband and ready to move on to another. In the first book she begs the bard to sing a different song and says, “Choose one of those and sing it among the suitors here while they drink their wine in silence, but cease from this melancholy lay that always wrings my heart within me, because I more than any other am pierced by sorrow beyond forgetting so peerless a man is he I mourn for, he I remember always”. Penelope’s fidelity is never in question, she is obviously missing her husband. She has spent the time he has been away keeping his estates but more recently, she has had to play host to a number of suitors for her hand in marriages, this is eating away at Telemachus’ inheritance. Penelope is waiting for her husband to come home from the Trojan War, and has been waiting faithfully for twenty years. This is a result of the strong male presence within Greek society and focusing on so many women in the poem may have been an attempt to add drama to the story as women’s lives would not have been much documented at this time. This essay will examine the role of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope within the poem and analyze her characters effect on the plot.Īlthough each woman in the Odyssey is well rounded as a character, Homer does offer a rather limited presentation of woman, most of the woman depicted in the poem are either goddesses, servants or in the case of Penelope, mothers. ![]() However masculine the poem may at first appear, the poem is laced with very strong women Athene, Penelope, Helen, Circe to name but a few, each of them extremely well defined and three-dimensional. The Odyssey is without a doubt an epic tale of one man’s journey home to Ithaca, to his wife and son, and is the tale of the adventures that befell Odysseus on that journey.
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