Was Odysseus a hero or a self-pitying liar? Mendelsohn’s father embarrassed him by publicly challenging his view of the epic – a rich moment in a brilliant family memoir As everyone knows, _The Odyssey_ is a poem about a “traditional” family. A wife waits anxiously at home for her absent husband; a man-child son, still living at home, dreams of his father and snaps irritably at his mother. The husband and father himself spends 10 years away at war, and another 10 making his meandering way back home. The institution of marriage seems to lie at the heart of the poem, along with an accompanying set of double standards about gender. Odysseus spends seven years on the island of Ogygia, and in the bed of the beautiful, devoted goddess Calypso, plus another year with the sexy witch Circe. He suffers no negative repercussions, while “faithful Penelope” has to ward off all her suitors as long as she possibly can; doing nothing and nobody is the only way for a mortal woman to avoid the bad reputation of the oft-mentioned adulterers Helen and Clytemnestra. So far, so predictably androcentric and heteronormative. It’s easy enough to assume that the ancient and archaic Greeks, since they lived a long time ago, must have espoused values that we regard as “traditional” because they were the norms of Victorian or Edwardian England. But _The Odyssey_ is surprisingly complex in its account of the ideals and realities of family life, identity and home. As Daniel Mendelsohn shows in his brilliant new memoir/lit-crit essay, the trio of husband, wife and son is complicated by a vast array of other familial or quasi-familial relationships. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, is taught about masculinity and the elite norms of marriage by alternative father figures, Nestor and Menelaus, and by a pair of marvellously intelligent and seductive alternative mother figures, Athena and Helen. Meanwhile, Penelope searches for escape in her weaving and her dreams, and Odysseus seems to find a series of alternative, albeit temporary homes with Calypso and Circe and the nubile Nausicaa. I would note, although Mendelsohn does not say this, that the protagonist has his most intimate and longest-running relationship not with Penelope but with the goddess Athena. Continue reading...
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