Professor Harriet Rosenman
The Phi Theta Kappa Honors Topic, The Past as Prologue, is the perfect entry to the current Great Books Program topic, the Search for Identity. We develop our identities not through our genetic makeup but through the past experiences we have had.
It is through the music to which we listen, the conversations in which we participate, the classes that we have taken in school, and primarily through the literature we read that we seek to determine who we are. The characters we meet in this literature “[challenge] us to confront ourselves in them…They continue to inform us [of] who we are” (Rutter xi).
For example, Homer’s poem, The Odyssey, is the story of Odysseus, a valiant Greek warrior who fought for 10 years in the Trojan war, a war waged to retrieve the beautiful Helen who left her husband Menelaos and ran off with Paris, a Trojan prince.
After the Greeks’ victory, Odysseus begins his voyage home to Ithaca where his wife Penelope waits with their son Telemachos who was born just before Odysseus had left for Troy.
In the 10 years it takes for Odysseus to reach Ithaca, he shows himself to be a rather unusual type of hero. Contrary to the bravery of Achilles, the archetypal hero of the Iliad, Homer’s poem about the events in Troy, Odysseus is a hero because of his craftiness and his intelligence. Not perfect, he makes mistakes because of his egotism.
He is also a hero who refuses to accept the immortality offered by Calypso, a beautiful goddess who has kept him captive on her island for 7 years. Instead, he is a husband hero who does not give up his dream of returning home to Penelope and Telemachos.
Who we are and when we are determine how we look at the specifics of the story. For example, Alfred Lord Tennyson, a 19th century English poet, and James Joyce, a 20th century Irish novelist, present different views of Odysseus.
According to Tennyson, Odysseus is an adventurer, a hero that longs for the knowledge that can be gained only by experience. In his poem, Ulysses (which is the Roman name for the Greek Odysseus), he describes Odysseus 3 years after he has returned to Ithaca. As the speaker in Tennyson’s poem, Odysseus says that he is bored and must set out for new adventures. He describes himself as being saddled with an “aged wife” and longing for more adventure. He says, “I cannot rest from travel; I will drink/ Life to the lees.” This metaphor illustrates how he wants to experience all that he possibly can, to grab all of the gusto he can get.
To use Matthew Arnold’s analogy, he wants to squeeze the last drop of moisture from the towel of life. When he says, “I am a part of all that I have met”, he echoes the idea that we are what we have experienced.
He pledges “To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” And so, although by this time he knows that he is old, he is not ready to give up. Instead, he sets out on a new voyage, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Tennyson’s praise of Odysseus as a person who prizes knowledge is much different from a modern feminist interpretation of Odysseus as a philandering husband who has been playing around for at least 8 years with two beautiful goddesses while his faithful wife Penelope has stayed home weeping for her absent husband and refusing to take one of the young suitors wooing her as a new mate.
Tennyson’s heroic picture of Odysseus is also very different from that of James Joyce in his novel, Ulysses. Joyce transforms Odysseus into Leopold Bloom, a nondescript man in Dublin whose odyssey consists of his wanderings in that city through the course of only one full day, June 16, 1904. Ultimately Bloom returns to his wife Molly at the end of the book, just as Odysseus returns to Penelope at the end of The Odyssey. However, all during the day Bloom has been thinking about his wife and the meeting she is going to have at 4:00 p.m. with Blazes Boylan, her business associate with whom she is going to have an affair. Bloom knows about it, thinks about it much of the day, but does not go home to interrupt. What kind of a husband is he? What kind of a hero is he?
Odysseus gives up an offer of immortality from a beautiful goddess to return to his wife–to preserve the sanctity of the family.
Bloom goes back to Molly at the end of the evening, after midnight, to do the same thing. The last 40 pages of Joyce’s Ulysses consists of a soliloquy by Molly, an interior monologue in which she examines her life, her relationship with Bloom, how they fell in love, what happened to their marriage, and her feelings about Blazes Boylen. She ends the soliloquy with remembrances about having met Bloom when she was a young girl in Gibralter. She says, “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” As Molly ends with the word “Yes,” she is affirming her love for Bloom and her hope that their marriage will bloom once again.
One might interpret Joyce’s approach to domesticity and marriage as being comparable to Homer’s, but if Odysseus was the philanderer who returned to the faithful Penelope, perhaps Joyce is presenting Molly as the philanderess who ultimately returns to Bloom. So what kind of a hero is Odysseus? Is he a hero because he gives up Calypso and immortality for domestic bliss with Penelope? What kind of a hero is Bloom? Is it heroic for him to acquiesce in his wife’s infidelity? Or is it more heroic for him to realize that his marriage can still be saved? And since it is Molly who has the last word in Ulysses, is her emphatic “yes” her heroic acceptance of the past, both hers and Bloom’s, and the prologue to a renewal of the marriage?
As we consider such questions about the reunions of Odysseus and Penelope and Leopold Bloom and Molly, we discover that there are no easy answers to these inquiries. But discussing these issues leads us to question our own lives: What kinds of heroes are we? What kinds of husbands and wives are we or do we expect to be? And, finally, what discoveries can we make about who we really are?
Work Cited
Rutter, Carol. Clamorous Voices–Shakespeare’s Women Today. ed. Faith Evans. London: The Women’s Press, 1994.