During a pivotal moment in The Odyssey, Circe sends Odysseus to the Kingdom of the Dead to find the soothsayer who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years away. But to travel to the Kingdom of the Dead, our “complicated” (the most fitting Homeric epithet, introduced only a few years ago in Emily Wilson’s translation) protagonist must traverse the world’s boundary in the form of the Stream of Oceanos and the city Cimmerian, where mortals live in total darkness. Here, the dead speak the truth, but only if you first feed them blood from the living. How’s that for a metaphor?
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At its heart, The Odyssey is a quest narrative. An adventure story. The hero must leave home—though was it really necessary to go slaughter so many people in a faraway city?—and, after trials and tribulations, return changed.
Back home, his wife Penelope wonders: Is Odysseus alive? Will he ever return? We readers know the answers because we are allowed to rove across the text and through the ancient Greek world, but she is stuck in Ithaca with no cell phone and no Internet.
At some point in my recent re-reading of the tale, I began to wonder: Does Penelope even want him to return?
Penelope resists believing at first that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and maybe that resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it took him to return but the fact that he does so at all.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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In addition to the throughline of the quest, The Odyssey juggles multiple characters in multiple places and creates nested stories that move back-and-forth in time. It starts, famously, in medias res (as Horace advises we all should). The narrative spools and unspools. The son, Telemachus, leaves in search of his father while at the same time Odysseus attempts to return. Penelope tells the suitors, who party day and night and eat all her food, that she will marry when she finishes weaving her father-in-law’s shroud, but she unravels it again each night. There are gods and battles and danger and magic and romance—it is, in a word, epic. It’s also just a story about a guy trying to get home.
But The Odyssey gives more attention to the female than The Iliad, certainly, and more than most ancient texts, such that some early scholars theorized it had actually been written by a woman: the narrative opens with Penelope, not Odysseus; the suitors are said to admire her for her intelligence and wit; the central deity of the text is the goddess Athena, rather than Zeus.
I didn’t set out to incorporate a retelling of The Odyssey into my second novel Mudlark. I dipped back into The Odyssey when Emily Wilson’s translation came out in 2017—in the 60-plus translations into English, hers is the first by a woman—and then I couldn’t unsee it everywhere I looked, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Mad Max: Fury Road. We also live in a literary world rich with retellings of Homer (just look to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Claire North’s The Songs of Penelope).
Emily Wilson makes the claim that Penelope’s dominant characteristic in the poem is her “opacity,” how little we really know about her mind or desires. What if Penelope’s waiting is her own form of aggression, a way of holding a space, for as long as possible, that excludes the men and their own attempts at power? Penelope resists believing at first that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and maybe that resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it took him to return but the fact that he does so at all.
In this way, The Odyssey is ripe for us to project our own ideas onto it. With Mudlark, I envisioned my own quest narrative. Like Odysseus, my character Neko is also looking for answers that may only come from beyond The Veil, and like him, she is in search of a lost home. Her mother, Jenny Sweet, a middle-aged indie rock musician, works on a solo album inspired by The Odyssey, a sort of apocryphal retelling from the female perspective, as she thinks of it.
The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here.
Does anyone remember that Scylla and Charybdis are not monsters but goddesses? In her album, Jenny Sweet portrays them as mothers angry at how humans have warmed their waters, turning them into lobsters in a pot being boiled alive by climate change. The sirens are “nags” telling any boat that passes how they want childcare and healthcare. They want equal pay for equal work. Each age sees metaphors of their own struggles in these ancient texts.
I am absolutely not the first person to reframe this story from the perspective of a woman, and I trust that I am far from the last. We are like Penelope, unraveling Homer’s tale for our own purposes.
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Jenny Sweet’s album is called The Wreckage, and developing her character also made me think about the ways in which rock musicians might be the epic poets of our age. While we know The Odyssey was written down between the late eighth and late seventh century BCE, we also know that it was part of an oral tradition for hundreds of years before that. The repetitions and formulaic expressions (rosy fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea) are like the choruses of our pop songs, and the dactylic hexameter is like the melody. A band comes together to write collectively, and then other bands cover and reframe those same songs. This is also how The Odyssey has traveled through time. It was not composed by one person but woven together by many voices.
Like all the best stories, The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here. Like Penelope’s shroud, it is woven and unwoven, always becoming, never complete. Maybe it is another way to put off the end of our own story. Another way to feed the dead from the blood of the living. Maybe that’s all it is or maybe that’s everything.
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Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
