women

• Lillian Doherty imagines the Phaecian episode through the female lens, it "idealised accounts of potentially sexual encounters between divinely beautiful women and men of superior power and status”
• L. Doherty - courtship where men and women's speheres intersect and where it is "most essential that the disparate perspectives of women and men be reconciled”
• L. Doherty - The single surviving daughter is a figure of some power - “a saviour of her family and a sacred ancestor”
• L. Doherty - Penelope and Athene are the two figures in the poem that most closely resemble the hero in his characteristic excellence(metis) but paradoxically belong to groups that are no thought of as furnishing potential peers for a hero - female and divine
• L. Doherty - Athene uses metis as a form of pleasure and manipulation, whereas Penelope does so from a position of weakness - Odysseus lies in the middle
• L. Doherty - Athene governs both masculine and feminine spheres (war and weaving), thus showing a continuity between them=> both in which demand intelligence
• Protevi - Clytemnestra + Agamemnon -> indicative of a demonisation of court women, which is a necessity in the move from an aristocratic to a democratic Athens
• Protevi - a pattern develops, Odysseus meets women, negotiates and eliminates them or wins them over to his side
• Protevi - sirens represent the fear the Greeks had of women
• Protevi - Homer refuses to give into a simple fear of women shown in rs of Penelope and Odysseus and the reverse similies used
• Fletcher - the biggest narrative tension in the Odyssey is Penelope and Odysseus’ separation
• Fletcher - “feminine silence is idealised” and the “unrestrained speech of women is frequently equated with a lack of sexual restraint”
• Felson and Slatkin - Argues women are “objects of exchange”, Helen as a war prize and Penelope as wife
• E. Hauser - Women represent a longing for a world of peace, and men a longing for conflict, which creates tension throughout the poem
• E. Hauser - Argues women represent several themes in the Odyssey, the experiences and values of men predicated on the world of women
• E. Hauser - women a key part of narrative, men (suitors) fighting over a woman (Penelope) which represents war, contrast with a man trying to return to his wife, the peace storyline