Realising this, I decided to create a response to The Odyssey that would emancipate her from this patchwork narrative. She does not speak, except for oft-repeated moaning about her grief and longing for Odysseus to return. We have no sense of her own voice – her fears, her failures, her desires and her joy. It is here that Homer’s craft kicks in – Penelope’s individual speech is negligible. Personality is distinguished by speech that is not repeated. That is, an individual is marked by unique text, by what is stated only once. To achieve this, he used a great deal of repetition in his writing (the easier for the epic poet/singer to remember what he was singing).Īnd so on – every character is identified by their own personal epithet, and great swathes of speech and description are repeated word-for-word throughout the 10000 line poem. Many scholars believe Homer’s composition was focused towards an oral tradition – his words were intended to be heard rather than read. When I did, I realised the image I had of Penelope was not unfounded – there is a particularly breathtaking craft to Homer’s production of Penelope’s servitude.
When I had this first image I had never read it. The Odyssey is an ancient epic poem fundamental to the modern Western canon. The white cloth gradually filled with her blood as she wore her fingers down to their bones. She was sitting in the middle of a room absolutely filled with cloth, her fingers bleeding into the fabric as she stitched.
The first image I had for I sat and waited but you were gone too long was of Penelope. Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891.
0 kommentar(er)
