I wonder if Ms. Emily Wilson has ever spent time as a full-time wife and homemaker. It does not sound to me like she has.
I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side.
I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an empowered way, to stop seeing myself as simply a victim. The gist of what I came to understand can be summed up in the negotiating trope "The first person to name a number loses."
Emotional labor is a hot buzz word currently that seems to be the fashionable new way to say that doing women's work makes you a chump, a victim. But I think it is more complicated than that.
I don't like this trend that I see where modern women translate the stories of traditional women and are as derisive of the woman's role as men are, if not more so. The female slaves were executed, but so we're many men. This write up implies that the death of women has a unique horror to it that we need not feel over the more prosaic deaths of men.
At the time The Odyssey was written, life was generally harder than it is now. This was true for both men and women, rich and poor. Death was pretty common. It was not inherently more wonderful to be an executed male than an executed female.
I probably won't read Wilson's translation -- I recently read Fagles', and am not keen to re-read for sake of a new translation, although might be interested in a comparison of translation differences. But you are correct that Greek society was very, very different from "modern" society in many ways.
I was debating going into the ways it is different, but it seems that the political climate is too toxic, so I will instead link to a fantastic lecture series on the Odyssey that I personally found enlightening: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/odyssey-of-homer.htm...
Huh. I have never seen anyone use "emotional labor" to mean what you say it means. I agree that it's a lot more complicated than what you say it means.
>But many students, scholars, and general readers want even more from this literary character: they want her to fit the ideal of an empowered woman. It is comforting to subscribe to the notion—as Daniel Mendelsohn does in his recently published memoir, “An Odyssey,” and as Robert Fagles does, in his translation of the poem—that the marriage between Odysseus and Penelope is a partnership of intellectual equals, based on true love and a shared outlook on life. Odysseus speaks, in Homer’s poem, of the ideal of like-mindedness (homophrosyne) in marriage.
The modern impulse to impose its cultural norms upon the past is deeply upsetting. Its a sign of a frail, unsure, and declining culture.
You want the mathematical definition. All cultures judge others according to their own norms, that's essentially the definition of what a culture is: a set of norms and behaviors by which things are judged.
Yeah, i'll go so far as to correct you there and say its not a sign of declining culture. It IS culture, period.
Its arguably even the case that it could be argued to be the sign of a particular kind of ascending culture, since being able to reinterpret the past and spread your own cultural norms could be said to give weight/momentum to a particular culture's propagation...
Things that are constant at any generation throughout history: the young always appear selfish and without morals; the past is not treated with enough respect; the overall culture is surely in decline. Athenians under Pericles were convinced of these, as were Romans under Augustus.
There is no historical evidence that everyone always thinks the young appear selfish and without morals. Very often the youth have lead moral revivals (or panics, according to tastes.)
I don't mean to be unpleasant, but the idea that there has always been an oppositional libertine youth culture of selfishness is a modern canard.
Very much agree. We may not agree with the past culture, but we should never forget the past or the progress we made.
History is cyclic. Humans flip between freedom to oppression, and I think so much of those steps back come from the fact that we are encouraged to forget the mistakes and lifestyles of the past. You see this in communism, various cultural revolutions, and other horrible things, yet certain revisionists wish to look back at those horrifying events with rose-tinted glasses. No, we should be willing to accept and see the truth, for all it's glory and brutality.
We can "save" the women of literature, yet ignore the oppression in the modern day woman, ie. the gender-driven infanticide that still exists today. If written words from 3000 years ago offends our sensibilities, what hope to do we, as a culture, have to hold up a guiding light to the rest of the world?
I had figured I might have been misled by euphemisms in translations of Odyssey, it did seem uncharacteristic of the period in time (even coming from possibly the most progressive society of the time).
It's important to seek the truth before attempting to change it, and I'm glad Emily can separate her clear desire to inhabit a different world from (what I see as) the duty to accurately present the work. If I need a translation of the Odyssey for myself or someone else, I guess I'll be getting a copy of this one.
Yes, Penelope's maids come to a bad end. I think a lot of critics misread this as misogyny on Homer's part. However, it is meant to be balanced with the death of the suitors and also Odysseus' shipmates, leaving only the marriage at the end.
Hmm, that's an interesting take I had not considered before. I can totally see where our modern sense of sexuality/morality could get in the way of some of Homer's subtler themes.
On the topic of female gender & the Odyssey, here's a thesis 'Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate' which includes reference to the original Greek text https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4157
I checked their profile and it's from the university that their town (found on github) is best known for, my guess would be that they have personal experience with the thesis leading them to recommend it.
I have to respectfully disagree. I thought the author offered a thoughtful take on how sexuality and privilege is presented in the Odyssey. I can see where you could possibly criticize her for interpreting these themes through a modern/liberal lens but at least she backs up her analysis with Homer’s original Greek text. I hardly find this article click-baity.
It's a story about a man trying to get home, and a woman staying faithful in the face of uncertainty. Anything else is reading too much into it.
That's the story as summarized in a potential entry for a 'most trite message board comment' competition of some sort. The actual story is another story. Either that or people have been doing it wrong and reading too much into it for a couple of thousand years.
> It's a story about a man trying to get home, and a woman staying faithful in the face of uncertainty. Anything else is reading too much into it.
Of the 24 books of the Odyssey, Odysseus' famous seafaring wanderings account for just 4. Likewise, the narrative focuses on Odysseus in 20 out of the 24 books, and he is at home, on Ithaca, for 12 of them. Clearly, Odysseus trying to get home is not the main point of the story, however memorable some of his nautical adventures are.
If you ask me, the poem is about barbarism versus civilization, revenge versus justice, family, and the nature of heroism.
Upon further investigation, it looks like Woodford repeated it rather than originated it. Also, he was applying it to Hollywood movie plots, and later TV plots.
I think that entire category of quotes is handily won by Pat Conroy:
"My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'"
The best canonical song (at least about country music). This is David Allan Coe.
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train
I'm guessing this is far as you're going to acknowledge 'Tolstoy never said a thing Tolstoy would have never said but I claimed he did and thought was a decisive forum killshot'. :)
I don't know what that means. You based some argument on a made-up quote. That argument can't be right, can it?
Edit: I'll summarize the arguments you've made so far and the obvious objections.
- The Odyssey is a trivial story of a dude returning to his wife [Not true, 20-odd centuries of scholarship saying otherwise]
- There is a tiny number of stories all stories reduce to (possibly two), a Major Writer of a World Literature Said So [not true, and, obviously, he did not say that]
- The above idea is somehow supported by tvtropes [tvtropes is wonderful but also full of thousands of tropes rather than two]
Every single one of these things is just deeply and demonstrably wrong. The totality of your evidence is... a made-up Tolstoy quote and a country song? It's hard to tell how to even argue with this.
There just isn't any evidence Tolstoy ever said or wrote that. Nor would it make sense for someone who wrote Anna Karenina. You should read the link in my last reply. And/or Anna Karenina.
I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side.
I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an empowered way, to stop seeing myself as simply a victim. The gist of what I came to understand can be summed up in the negotiating trope "The first person to name a number loses."
Emotional labor is a hot buzz word currently that seems to be the fashionable new way to say that doing women's work makes you a chump, a victim. But I think it is more complicated than that.
I don't like this trend that I see where modern women translate the stories of traditional women and are as derisive of the woman's role as men are, if not more so. The female slaves were executed, but so we're many men. This write up implies that the death of women has a unique horror to it that we need not feel over the more prosaic deaths of men.
At the time The Odyssey was written, life was generally harder than it is now. This was true for both men and women, rich and poor. Death was pretty common. It was not inherently more wonderful to be an executed male than an executed female.