{"id":121593,"date":"2018-02-15T11:00:46","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T16:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121593"},"modified":"2018-02-20T14:41:18","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T19:41:18","slug":"turn-woman-thrust-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/15\/turn-woman-thrust-head\/","title":{"rendered":"In Turn Each Woman Thrust Her Head"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Poster for The Penelopiad<\/em> at the Buddies and Bad Times Theater.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the hot attic bedroom in Minneapolis, my twelve-year-old daughter is reading to me from the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>. Curled in the center of the orange paisley chair, she conjures ship-smashing gales, feasts of roast lamb, a mouth full of salt. The words wash over me as I do leg lifts, building strength after breaking a foot, eager to run again. Sweat sticks skin to the polished wood floor. Sparrows chatter and build nests of junk-mail scraps and dryer lint on beams outside, just above the windows. A lock of dark hair hangs in my daughter\u2019s face as she adopts the goddess Athena\u2019s shocked voice. Odysseus has dared to doubt her, and in her wounded pride, she sounds a bit like an aggrieved mother.<\/p>\n

Your touching faith! Another man would trust
\nSome villainous mortal, with no brains\u2014and what
\nam I? Your goddess-guardian to the end
\nin all your trials.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s a story we both love, though this is my daughter\u2019s first encounter with Homer\u2019s original. Athena, in particular, is magnetic. We\u2019ve both dressed up as Zeus\u2019s daughter at different times for Halloween. In the seventies, I went door-to-door in a lacy thrift-store dress that led everyone to ask if I was a fairy princess, and me to answer, through clenched teeth, \u201cNo. I\u2019m the goddess of wisdom, weaving, and defensive war.\u201d Two years ago, my daughter held a plastic shield from a knight costume on which she pasted a green foam Medusa\u2019s head. Gray eyes, bronze-tipped spear, strategizing mind: there\u2019s no denying Athena\u2019s appeal. To slip into her golden sandals, even if they are just shiny fabric hot glued to flip-flops, is to slip on a measure of power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then, as I wind one end of the rubber exercise band around my ankle and another around the base of the radiator, I brace myself.<\/p>\n

We are a good way though the book. At this point, Odysseus has returned home after ten years of fighting the Trojan War, then ten more battling sea monsters, only to find his banquet hall crowded with men. Assuming he\u2019s dead, they are drinking his wine and hounding his wife to remarry, choosing one of them. Guided by Athena, who loves to interfere\u2014enhancing Penelope\u2019s beauty to rekindle Odysseus\u2019s love, making the suitors extra obnoxious to spur Odysseus\u2019s rage\u2014he has just slaughtered them all. The great hall is washed in blood, suitors\u2019 bodies heaped high, and I know what comes next.<\/p>\n

They are wrapping up loose ends. My daughter\u2019s mouth twists as she pronounces Odysseus\u2019s instructions to his son, Telemachus. Make the housemaids who slept with the suitors clean up the mess of the butchered corpses, Odysseus tells his boy. And then: \u201chack them with your swordblades till you cut \/ the life out of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odysseus\u2019s fury toward the young women in his house has been building, through his return home, through his plotting, through his conversations with his wife. Earlier, disguised as a beggar, Odysseus lies outside his own door and hears the maids slipping out to meet their lovers; he can\u2019t sleep, and \u201canger took him like a wave to leap \/ into their midst and kill them, every one.\u201d He needs no divine prodding to be enraged by the young women\u2019s laughing pleasure in their bodies, the night air, a brief break from drudgery.<\/p>\n

The next part is what I remember most clearly from when my father read the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0to me when I was ten, lying in the bed he built and painted with dragons. It stayed\u00a0with me more than Nausicaa bravely facing down an ocean-soaked stranger, or the sailors swept into Scylla\u2019s mouth from the deck, or the entrancing notion of a bed carved from a still-rooted tree. The words lie in wait, and I am tempted to skirt them, the way you might avoid a trail with a hidden leghold trap. Telemachus will address the maids, \u201cyou sluts, who lay with suitors.\u201d A clean death is too good for them, he will say, and then defy his father\u2019s methods but not his purpose:<\/p>\n

They would be hung like doves
\nor larks in the springes triggered in a thicket,
\nwhere the birds think to rest\u2014a cruel nesting.
\nSo now in turn each woman thrust her head
\ninto a noose and swung, yanked high in air,
\nto perish there most piteously.
\nTheir feet danced for a little, but not long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s chilling. The humiliation of scrubbing blood off the tables and carting out the gore, the way they bring their own necks to the rope, the transformation of their hopes\u2014nesting, dancing\u2014into death metaphors. In my ten-year-old mind, those feet,\u00a0which should be used for sprinting through a field or exploring strange islands, became the birds seeking shelter. They flutter in a panic, then the awful stillness.<\/p>\n

But what particularly disturbs me now, what disturbed me even at ten, is the way that this is all just part of Telemachus\u2019s\u00a0training. Young women in the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0have less to fear from Charybdis than from their male peers.\u00a0Telemachus\u00a0would have known the maids all his life, brushing against them in the hall. The\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0is, for him, a coming-of-age story, and the first thing his absent father does on returning home is launch his son\u2019s education. Dominating women and policing their chastity are integral to becoming a man, essential lessons that Odysseus wants to pass on.<\/p>\n

What do I want to pass on, I wonder, watching dismay wash over my daughter\u2019s face when she hits the word \u201csluts.\u201d She seems herself on the cusp of transformation these days, like she might fly up and turn into a swallow in the rafters or slip into the skin of a trusted adviser. One minute, she pretends to be the cat, crouched on the chair, licking her paws. The next, she asks about order of operations in algebra. As a mother, a writing professor, a believer in literature, what lessons do I have for her about becoming a woman?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just me who stumbles on that scene. Margaret Atwood<\/a> told\u00a0the\u00a0Independent<\/em>\u00a0that she came to her book\u00a0The Penelopiad<\/em>\u2014a novel from Penelope\u2019s perspective, with the murdered maids as a chorus\u2014because she was interested in retelling myth. She made several false starts on other tales before \u201cout of my unconscious, where I keep so many things, there appeared in particular the hanged maids, who have always bothered me about the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

And scholar Emily Wilson, whose English translation of the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u2014the first by a woman\u2014was published last year, struggled with it too. Wilson\u00a0avoids using the words sluts<\/em>, whores<\/em>, or creatures<\/em> and\u00a0centers the moment on Telemachus\u2019s discomfort, as he says:<\/p>\n

I refuse to grant these girls
\na clean death, since they poured down shame on me
\nand Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s still unbearable.<\/p>\n

I remember in college encountering Milton\u2019s Eve, with her hair that waved \u201cas the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli\u2019d \/ Subjection,\u201d and\u00a0Duessa from The<\/em>\u00a0Faerie<\/em>\u00a0Queene<\/em>,\u00a0with \u201cher neather partes misshapen, monstruous.\u201d At eighteen, I didn\u2019t read with cool intellectual distance. I read like I ate\u2014for joy, for sustenance, for fuel to make me into the person I wanted to be. The women in those pages were not recognizably human, just forces to be diminished so they could be controlled. My friends and I did endless feminist analyses, but it didn\u2019t help with the sick feeling. The stories were not for me, and that realization was its own very dismaying, very female coming-of-age. The sense of betrayal, of being thrown out of the text, like being tossed from a boat, was acute. The shock of icy water made it hard to catch my breath.<\/p>\n

Some scholars find Telemachus, who orders his mother around\u2014and, in some translations, demands she be quiet, telling her, \u201cSpeech shall be for men\u201d\u2014a funny and psychologically apt characterization of a typical teenage boy. But typical teenage boys and their attitudes can do harm, particularly to teenage girls, which my daughter hovers on the brink of becoming. She shifts in the chair, tucks the hair behind her ear, as I switch to the other leg.<\/p>\n

At the university, in my literary-nonfiction class, female students bring me their stories. They are eighteen, nineteen, twenty and should be writing about gathering friends, stocking a ship with provisions, going out to seek adventure. But too often, one will hand me an essay about being raped. I realize the ability for women to articulate these stories is new and should be celebrated, but they carry Odysseus\u2019s judgments, Homer\u2019s lens. The students wonder: Did they somehow give permission? Did they obediently mop up the blood? Did they put their own heads through the noose? And the male students described are clearly rehearsing instructions for what they think makes a man. I am overwhelmed by the tales of the maids.<\/p>\n

Robert Fitzgerald<\/a>, in the translation my daughter is reading, has made his own amendment. He omits the early scene of\u00a0Telemachus\u00a0silencing his mother. Fitzgerald offers no reason except to comment in his endnotes that he left out lines \u201cthought spurious or out of place in antiquity.\u201d Maybe it had to do with the fact that he, like parents before him, faced presenting the story to his family. Fitzgerald\u2019s own daughter, a novelist in the office across the hall from me at the university, remembers his reading sections of his translation to his restless children after dinner.<\/p>\n

In his essay \u201cTwo Long Engagements with Homer,\u201d Fitzgerald describes visiting Greece to see the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u2019s landscape and meeting a twelve-year-old girl in pigtails from New Jersey, working in her grandmother\u2019s shoe store. When he asks her name, she says, \u201cOh, I\u2019m Athena.\u201d He recalls Athena\u2019s many disguises. Maybe he saw a goddess. Maybe he just saw a young girl. Could they be the same?<\/p>\n

He writes, too, about the challenges of translating an oral tale that shifted from one night to the next. \u201cOur\u00a0Iliad<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0are merely those performances that got recorded, no one knows how.\u201d Improvisation must have been part of each recitation, Fitzgerald says\u2014there is no one text to be faithful to, \u201csacred or otherwise.\u201d This provides a sense of freedom, he writes. \u201cThe possibility arises of translating not from one dictionary into another dictionary, so to speak, but from one tradition into another, from one life into another.\u201d<\/p>\n

My daughter stares into the abyss of this seductive book. Should I tie her to the mast? In real life, she wields sabers as a fencer and does\u00a0fifty push-ups every night to build muscle. She reads, if possible, with even more abandon than I did. Underneath her bed is a ransacked library of books in progress:\u00a0Sherlock Holmes<\/em>,\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>,\u00a0The Hunger Game<\/em>s. I want her to have this tradition, handed down from lost poets to Homer, to his scribe, to a network of translators, to Fitzgerald, to my father, to me. Reading made me. It\u2019s what I have to offer.<\/p>\n

And now here we are, in our attic banquet hall. The muse is singing. Faith or tinkering? Accuracy or improvisation? Maybe this wrestling with\u00a0Telemachus\u2019s\u00a0cruelty is as much a part of the experience of reading the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0as anything else. Regardless, I\u2019m not ready for her to be faced with a world that will hate her for laughing, that will respond to her body with vicious repression. I don\u2019t want those maids to haunt her. Not yet.<\/p>\n

Just as\u00a0Telemachus\u00a0is leading them away, I put my hand on my daughter\u2019s bare foot.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate that part,\u201d I say. And explain: Why should those young women be killed? Maybe they didn\u2019t want to sleep with the suitors. They didn\u2019t have much power. And if they did, if they liked them, what was wrong with that? Odysseus isn\u2019t punished for lingering on the island with the nymph Calypso, and he\u2019s married.<\/p>\n

And then I say, \u201cYou can skip it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She looks me in the face, nods, and turns the page. Once again, I\u2019ve briefly donned the sandals of Athena, the divine meddler\u2014though unlike her, I will soon watch my charge sail ahead past familiar landmarks and on to places I can\u2019t follow.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kim Todd is the author of three books of literary nonfiction:\u00a0<\/em>Sparrow,\u00a0<\/em>Chrysalis, and\u00a0<\/em>Tinkering with Eden. Her work appears in <\/em>Orion, Smithsonian, and <\/em>The Best American Science and Nature Writing, among other places.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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