At any rate, according to Odysseus' information, the beggar is not a real beggar but a fallen prince of Krete14, used to educated manners and to the tricks of the upper class, which make him a potential threat to the queen.
Truth must be jealously guarded lest family secrets be revealed and thus maliciously used to cause trouble or shame on the members of the family. Even young children are taught to tell lies or to detect and avoid skilful questions from relatives and friends, aimed at extracting information. And lying also refers to a 'policy of systematic and deliberate misdirection And if she does not let anyone know about her suspicion, it is simply because she needs to safeguard her plotting, by not letting even her supposed husband realise what she knows.
Even if she recognises him as he thinks she does, Both of them should be on their guard. Penelope's erotic preoccupation - Her sexual disposition. As a resuit she probably felt an unconscious hostility toward Odysseus which is reflected in her tardiness to recognise him in book Instead, she would enjoy marrying one of the suitors, Amphinomos perhaps, who most resembles the Odysseus of twenty years ago Surely, we can detect secret motives in Penelope's actions and inner thoughts which guide her conduct.
We also understand that she succumbs to acute sentiments, when she cries herself to sleep or when she wishes that her toils would end in death's comfort. Many times does she comment on her beauty which is fading away, due to her daily lamentation and neglect as a woman This is a straightforward reading of the Homeric text; there is, indeed, a psychological background in most of Penelope's actions and thoughts where one can also detect an erotic nuance.
This is expected due to the fact that Penelope's strained position is the resuit of being deserted, regardless of the motives which dictated it, in. She is the embodiment of the chaste wife. However, she is not ignorant of her charms and she focuses her manipulation of the suitors on the erotic spell that she has on them.
Antinoos accuses her of expressly making promises to each man separateiy by sending messages. She also kindles the hopes of the young men that each of them might be chosen as her future husband 2. She is chaste but not innocent. It is in bed that the transformation of the emotionally tired queen to a strikingly beautiful maiden take place, in book She does not hesitate to make it clear to her audience26 that she lies on her bed mourning for her lost husband.
On that very bed, the goddess Athena transforms the neglected body into a splendid marvel for everyone to enjoy. Her relationship with them is a skilful game, aiming at the possession of the marital bed; the suitors say «we wish to sleep with her»28 and not «we wish to marry her». The dispute over the marital bed is. The bed was rooted in the earth and stood in the middle of the bedroom The dream runs as follows: Penelope's twenty geese were feeding on wheat, a sight which delighted the queen.
On the contrary, even after the eagle's reassurance that this is the long wished revenge on the suitors, the queen does not show any sign of relief: she is not happy nor relieved. Why would the suitors be identified with the geese? Is this done on the basis of their weakness while the eagle stands for strength?
However, the suitors are not said to be physically weak; on the contrary, they are men in the prime of their youth who are insolent and confident in their abilities, offspring of noble families who were probably well trained in the arts of war and fighting When she is compelled to appear in front of the suitors in her utmost beauty we are told, in an indirect manner, that. The maiden Nausikaa is also described as Artemis 6.
Artemis and of Aphrodite. She seems to understand Helen's adultery. Any woman may choose to do this, she seems to say. Her crime was that she did not know that the Achaeans would go to claim her back, which was the beginning of their many misfortunes. When Odysseus attempts several times to overcome the difficulties he encounters. It contains three successive multi-verse speech frames ; ; , which is unique in the Homeric epics: all the other elaborate one-on-one conversations that have been discussed in Chapters contain one or at most two elaborate speech frames in a row.
Here, each of three succeeding speech frames is longer than the last, drawing out the episode more and more as its climax approaches. Moreover, the first two expanded speech frames focus on the emotional responses of Odysseus and Penelope respectively to what is said to them.
In the third expanded passage, the famous simile at The speech frames, in fact, parallel the progress of the episode. They focus our attention on each character alternately, and finally on both together at the point when they have recognized and accepted each other. This dramatizes the last moments of the enduring tension between frankness and concealment that both husband and wife have spent so much time and energy to control so that they can reach the moment when each feels able to be candid and let go of skepticism and concealments.
Each of these expansions can be appreciated by itself, but as a group, they work together to contribute to the simultaneous slowing and crescendo effects which so effectively dramatize the end of the conflict between concealment and openness. Not only is the crescendo effect in this conversation more elaborate than in other conversations we have seen, but earlier conversations lead up to it in an elongated, extended crescendo effect that spans the last third of the poem.
This crescendo itself emphasizes the strength that each has to have to manage this tension by emphasizing how long and how much the tension has affected them both. Odysseus, beautified by Athena as well as bathed by Eurycleia, sits down with Penelope She, unlike Telemachus in Book 16, makes no response at all to the newly transformed man who has appeared before her. Here, for the first time in Book 23, Odysseus directly addresses Penelope, and like Telemachus did earlier, he criticizes her for remaining aloof from him when no other wife would do so At the end of his speech, he asks for a bed to be laid for him.
Odysseus, as well as the audience, wants Penelope to be ready to accept him at the same time as he is ready to be accepted, but at no time does she show as clearly as she does here that she is a match for him in her capacity to master an impulse to be open in order to conceal or misrepresent herself.
She replies by directing Eurycleia to make up a bed for Odysseus outside his bedroom The introduction to this remark is the normal reply formula for Penelope ; only after the speech does the narrator explicitly state that her speech was a test. In the third turn of eight in their conversation, the angry Odysseus now proves his identity to Penelope by describing at length the process by which he built their bed. In this way, we can clearly see that she has accepted him in both word and deed.
A particularly striking—and long—passage occurs at the midpoint of the conversation, incorporating many elaborate details to form a dramatically effective whole. This is the most highly developed passage in the Homeric epics that is the functional equivalent to a single verse reply formula.
Indeed, this moment of mutual recognition and acceptance between a husband and wife who have waited and striven so long to be reunited is, for many, the climax of the poem. For ease of reference in the quotation below, I have separated the passage into the different sections that I will be discussing.
In each of these, Odysseus and then Penelope arouse grief in each other towards the end of an episode in which emotion has been steadily building in intensity. Odysseus, the person grieving in this second passage, has just heard Penelope accept him as her long-lost husband. The subject matter of the simile, the joy of sailors at finally returning to land after being shipwrecked by Poseidon, reinforces this idea.
This simile has an unusually involved relationship to its context, in terms of both its syntax and its subject matter. While many similes have aroused debate on what the point of reference is in the narrative, there are no other similes that so explicitly have two points of reference, particularly two as intertwined as these are.
The simile and its relationship to its context, in fact, mirror the final reunion of Odysseus and Penelope by joining the two together as referents of the same simile in a strikingly appropriate and unusual construction. This unusual and effective portrayal of the emotions of both simultaneously emphasizes the actual moment of reunion, making it special and different both from identifications of Odysseus and Penelope elsewhere in the poem and from other reunions in the poem.
The subject matter of the simile makes this identification even more moving. The many parallels between the situation of the sailors of the simile and that of Odysseus are obvious. This extensive similarity between Odysseus and the subject of the simile, taken with the couplet preceding the simile, maximizes the surprise when the simile concludes with a reference to Penelope instead. This conclusion forces a reconsideration of the simile itself: how is Penelope like these sailors?
As discussed above, one immediate effect of the arrangement of the simile is to identify husband and wife, an effect that is independent of the actual subject of the simile. The explicit point of comparison is the joy felt by both the sailor and Penelope on attaining a long-awaited goal Thus, this unusual relationship between simile and narrative reflects a complex web of conflicting feelings binding together husband and wife.
Both are simultaneously the point of comparison to the same simile, which in one sense unites them at the point when their reunion is accomplished. At the same time, the simile and surrounding narrative point to underlying differences in their experiences: Odysseus, weeping, seems to be a man overwhelmed by grief, while Penelope is filled with joy.
Similarly, although they are both compared to sailors wrecked by Poseidon, it is only Odysseus who has actually been shipwrecked. Penelope has had her own trials of perseverance and adversity in Ithaca, but her experiences and Odysseus during the twenty years of separation are distinct and will remain so. A conditional construction follows the simile, but in contrast to the condition that appears in the reunion of Telemachus and his father This verse could directly follow verse Instead, an elongated condition reverses the usual pattern of such conditions: time would have continued to go by and dawn would have appeared, not if X had not spoken as would be more usual , but if Athena had not held off the dawn!
Here the emotions of the scene are so intense that they actually do break down normal temporal restrictions. The passage at describing how Athena held back the night , kept Dawn at bay at the edge of Ocean , and prevented her horses from being hitched up draws out the episode just as Athena draws out the night in order to allow the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus to run its course.
Considered as a whole, Odyssey Like other moments of reunion in the Odyssey , this one is drawn out by several different elements to create a moving and effective vignette that in the hands of a less able artist could simply have gone by with a single-verse reply formula.
Moreover, the simile and the condition in particular are especially long examples of phenomena that occur elsewhere as part of extended speech frames.
All of these components, in fact, contain repeated patterns and language. This passage achieves its effects by means of length and the effective use of expressions known from other parts of the Homeric epics.
This unusually elaborate and dramatic vignette appears at the end of a particularly rich and vivid series of speech frames, a fitting end to the crescendo that in a sense has been building since Penelope first asked to see the mysterious storytelling beggar back in Book The conversation is only half over at this point. It continues for four more turns after this exciting moment for both the characters and the audience. All of the speeches—after the one by Odysseus that follows the unusually elaborate passage we have just been considering—are preceded by regular reply formulas.
The overall dynamic of this conversation, in terms of both the speeches and the speech frames, is one of ever-increasing emotion and tension to which each succeeding speech frame makes an additional contribution. This emotion culminates at the halfway point of the conversation in a prolonged outburst of weeping for both Penelope and Odysseus. By describing this scene of grief and joy in such length and detail, the narrator makes it the heart of the conversation.
Afterwards, the emotional tone of both the speeches and the speech frames drops markedly until the reunited pair goes to bed together, where they enjoy lovemaking and storytelling. Direct speech, however, does not return to the narrative until after they wake up the next morning, drawing a sort of narrative veil over the bed of Odysseus and Penelope.
Neoanalytical criticism is associated almost entirely with the Iliad rather than the Odyssey. In the case of the Odyssey , however, neoanalysis has been much less well served by the questions that the Analysts bequeathed to it. More specifically, neoanalysts have frequently discussed whether certain passages connected with the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus are or are not interpolations.
In one of these story versions, Penelope recognizes her husband, and in the other version she does not recognize him. However, these questions fundamentally differ from the questions that neoanalysis so ably explores in the Iliad. Neoanalytical criticism of the Iliad has shown us how the poem skillfully makes use of other traditional stories about the fall of Troy and the heroes who fought there in order to broaden the scope of the story that the poem tells.
Partly by using various stories and motifs that belong more naturally to different parts of the Trojan War, the Iliad becomes a story of the entire war even though it tells only about a few weeks near the end of the fighting. Neoanalysis reconciles the unity of the Iliad with its broad chronological and thematic reach.
The Odyssey has a number of characteristics suggesting that we can use a similar method of inquiry to better understand it. For instance, both the Iliad and the Odyssey begin their story near the end of what might appear to be the tale. The broadening of time and scope that occurs in the Odyssey , which neoanalysis is well suited to help us understand, primarily occurs in two ways: through tales of the homecomings of other Greek heroes, especially Agamemnon; and through references to events that befall Odysseus and his family either before the Odyssey begins or after it ends.
Neoanalysis can best contribute to our understanding of the Odyssey by exploring the different traditional stories that seem to lie behind the tales that Telemachus hears on his journeys and how they are used to shape the Odyssey.
It has, however, performed a useful service in rehabilitating the Odyssey from the incompetent hash of poetasters that the Analysts believed it to be. It is to be hoped that future neoanalyst scholars will follow the direction of Danek and Reece , and use their methods to answer questions of their own choosing about the Odyssey rather than simply redeeming it from the incompetence that the Analysts attributed to it.
The reunion between Penelope and Odysseus develops to a unique pitch of length, elaboration, and effectiveness the techniques of emphasis that we see operating in the one-on-one conversations discussed in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. This reunion involves traditional characters and a traditional story pattern; it is developed largely through the common type of one-on-one conversation; and it uses a full range of emphatic techniques consistent with the oral aesthetics described in the introduction.
Conversations involving Penelope and Odysseus are unusually long. They contain single-verse formulaic variations the vocative that Odysseus uses, as contrasted with the one that the suitors favor as well as passages of elaboration that range from two verses to long passages containing several components simile, condition, etc.
As in the other reunions in the Odyssey , the consistent theme of the many conversations between Penelope and Odysseus is the tension that both of them feel between being truthful and open with each other, and maintaining a skeptical distance in order to protect themselves. Elaborate speech frames consistently describe strong emotions that Penelope and Odysseus feel but do not act on or speak about, thereby dramatizing this conflict. Indeed, the placement and content of elaborations in the conversations between Penelope and Odysseus clearly show that the core of their interactions, and what primarily interests the narrator in this section of the poem, is the ongoing struggle between openness and concealment.
Russo in Russo et al. Argument has centered on the length of the reunion on which see Emlyn-Jones , which some have seen as excessive and lacking in motivation; whether Penelope does, in fact, recognize Odysseus before Book 23; and what her motivation is for setting the bow contest. Byre argues persuasively that the idea that Penelope should show herself to the suitors belongs to Athena, not Penelope.
He suggests that her laugh before she tells Eurynome of her intention to go among them Odyssey Eurymachus, Odyssey Odyssey Cunliffe def. Odyssey 1. Odysseus demonstrates the wisdom of an understanding father as well as caution in his treatment of Telemachus. Rather than scolding the son for chiding his mother, Odysseus assures him that the parents will work things out. Still a military strategist, Odysseus knows that the intruders belong to some of the most influential families in the area who will be bent on revenge.
He, therefore, asks his son to create the illusion of a wedding feast in the great hall so that anyone passing by will think that one of the suitors has succeeded and not suspect that they have been slaughtered. Giving Telemachus this assignment not only gives Odysseus time alone with Penelope, but it also demonstrates his faith in the maturing prince. A few responsibilities remain. Odysseus must visit his father, Laertes, who has suffered emotionally from his son's long absence; the families of the suitors will have to be dealt with to avoid civil war; and, sometime, Odysseus must fulfill the prophecy of Tiresias, spoken at the Land of the Dead: The king must walk inland, from a foreign shore, carrying a well-planed oar until he finds people who know nothing of the sea.
When someone mistakes the oar for a fan that winnows grain, Odysseus is to plant the oar and sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a wild boar to Poseidon. He can then return home, make offerings to the gods, and live out a peaceful life. By the time of The Odyssey, she is the somewhat matronly queen of Sparta and content to be the wife of King Menelaus.
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