cont'd, in a way from previous

• More can be said about gender.
• One attempt to mine the epics for aspects of a 'sex/gender system' is that of Laura Slatkin and Nancy Felson in 'Gender and the Homeric Epic,' also found in A Cambridge Companion to Homer, p. 91f.
• The following starts from that chapter as a base and owes a great deal to it.
• It is about the humans, not the gods.
  

• Starting point: No human society lacks some way to organize sexual dimorphism and procreation: 'sex, sexualty, gender, reproduction, production and ideas about all of these are structurally linked in any society'
• The epics are what can be called the 'cultural imaginary'
• note that this 'imaginary' changes depending on who is looking into it/using it: an Athenian woman in Aristophanes Lysistrata has an obviously different take on it than, say, Andromache presents us from within the epic, and we too have different takes on it.
• It's always an interaction, never simply objectively reading about and cosntructing the system in the text. So take all that follows as one informed and intelligent view
• How to use Iliad and Odyssey as historians is not clear: it is fraught with problems and we have to make all sorts of assumptions, often unstated.

• women are central to the plot and action
• Helen is often in the background as part of the 'war story'
• and at the heart of the 'wrath story' Chryseis and Bryseis loom large
• women as things to fight over and by which to get honor
• Agamemnon says of Chryseis:
• I like her better than Klytaimestra / my own wife, for in truth she is in no way inferior, / neither in build nor stature nor wit, nor in accomplishment,. / Still I am willing to give her back, if such be the best way. / I myself desire that my people be safe, not perish. / Find me then some prize that shall be my own, lest I only / among the Argives go without, since that were infitting; / you all are witnesses to this thing, that my prize goes elsewhere.' 1. 109f.
• preference for Chryseis indicates the central problem of instability of marriage and hence of the household
• always there theoretically are infidelity and the uneasy situation of a concubine + a wife
• there are other concubines in Homer: cf. Phoenix' story at 9.447f.
  
• there is a system of relations between the men constituted by reciprocal honors and benefits: women fit in there centrally as prizes/honor, but they also destabilize it
• the situation of desire, strife, and gender is repeatedly enacted in similar ways
• marriage = peaceful exchange of women between men
• war = marriage's violent counterpart
• but there is something the men called 'love' that also figures in here:
• Achilles rejects the embassy and speaks about Bryseis:
  
• Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, thought it was my spear that won her.'
• What this 'love' does is offer an alternative conflicting system:
• if women are prizes, then they are exchangeable, but if they are particular objects of affection/love, they are not exchangeable
• there are possoble hints of this as a possibility in the Paris-Helen relationship: was it 'love' that caused the adultery? Does Menelaus ever speak of love/affection for Helen?
  
• Achilles critiques here the exchange logic underlying the war: the idea of women as a contended prize paradigmatic of honor.
• this makes one realize that the war does not protect a woman or women: it protects marriage, aristocratic honor, and what might be called 'civilized' behavior (civilized is a problematic term, intentionally so here)
• 'the war protects the gendered institution that secures patriliny: marriage.' in Slatkin and Felson's words
  
• But to defend a marriage, war has to destroy hundreds of marriages!
• war is a masculine tragedy inflicted on both sexes
  
• Helen
• so erotically attractive that men cannot resist her
• a prize of such immense attraction that everyone wants it
• but she herself tries to resist eros
• the 'problem' is that she is a talking prize, a prize that has some agency: she is more than the meaning others make her into
• although she gives voice to her own meaning, she does not take action, does she?
  
• when women speak, they mostly mourn or express grief
• mostly, they lament lost hope and disappointment in terms of husbands and children
• cf. Andromache:
• Hector, thus you are father to me, and my honored mother,/ you are my brother, and it is you who are my young husband.' 6.429
• a paradoxical statement, but reflective of the fact that much of women's worlds collapses into their relation to everything via a husband
• she pre-mourns Hector, and has no recourse, no redress for her pains (unlike Achilles, who takes action, albeit horrifically destructive action)
  
• epic women do not take decisive action based on their emotions, do they?
• Hector replies to Andromache (6.486)
• Poor Andromache! Why does your heart sorrow so much for me? No man is going to hurl me to Hades, unless it is fated, but as for fate, I think that no man yet has escaped it once it has taken its first form, neither brave man nor coward. Go therefore back to our house, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff, and see to it that your handmaidens ply their work also; but the men must see to the fighting, all men who are the people of Ilion, but I beyond others.
• Thus even while the Iliad is about the problem of Helen and Menelaus' marriage and the violation of the household, it portrays a sustained marriage and household in Troy via Andromache and Hector: but the war is the story of how that household is completely destroyed
• Within Iliad, women cannot earn honor/fame: men and women are profoundly separated
  
• worth reading is Hector's foretelling of the fate of Andromache (6.447f.)
  
• only in Helen is there a spark of autonomy (what about Penelope? I ask Slatkin and Felson, and you!)
• when men mourn or express grief, it is accompanied by action, by agency
• converting emotion into actions is the sphere of men: they are obliged to act when they feel pity (or anger)
• women's anger almost never appears (Calypso being an exception, but Slatkin and Felson are, for good reasons, not including female gods in their analysis)
• Hecuba in book 24 of Iliad is an exception
• the bond between men/warriors is portrayed a lot
• Achilles and Patroclos, of course
• but is it really unique?
• countless times, a warrior enters the fray to help or defend the corpse of a fallen comrade: and often it's not just any comrade, it's one that is particularly related to the defender
  
• this man-man relationship is a counterpart to the household, the marriage
• it is vulnerable to destabilizing via possessions/prizes, but it is arguably more stable
• that is particularly true if eros is lacking in it: and Iliad does apparently does lack that, from what I can see in the words of the epic
  
• but Achilles' wrath destabilizes it: it is repaired when Achilles re-enters the fray (or is it?)
• Achilles renounces Briseis, apparently, when he makes up with Agamemnon:
• for you (Agamemnon)and me (Achilles), that we, for all our hearts' sorrow, quarrelled toagether for the sake of a girl in soul-perishing hatred? I wish Artemis had killed her beside the ships with an arrow on the day when I destroyed Lynressos and took her. 19.54
• Interesting side note: we face a question: if we want Achilles to be more than a best friend to Patroclos, must we somehow discount his apparent attachment to Briseis? unless we make Achilles into a bisexual and a poly-amorist (we could), we must choose, right?
  
• ODYSSEY
• a poem of re-creation and recovery: of household and marriage, but the wife has vitality and agency here.
• both Odysseus and Penelope use their wits to maintain their marriage/household
• 'the Odyssey performs a kind of reclamation of the oikos (household) that requires the wife's sexual fidelity but also the husband's successful return and successful elimination of all competitors for his wife'
• interesting: note that there was no hint of an effective way to control conception (thus Penelope must stay faithful for this to work: there is, of course, more to it in terms of emotion and politics, but there is a physical reality there to procreation)
• not sure why it 'requires' elimination of all competitors: if a man wins a wife, must they then go kill all the other suitors generally?
• Slatkin and Felson don't say it, but insofar as they are not just competitors, but also offenders against the household, they must die: that could justify it.
• Marriage is idealized in Odyssey:
  
• a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast, than when two people, a man and his wife, keep a harmonious household; a thing that brings much distress to the people who hate them and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the best reputation. (Odysseus asks the gods to grant this kind of marriage to Nausicaa at 6.181)
  
• Odyssey has no particularly strong role for the man-man relationship that existed in combat: but perhaps it does: cf. Eumaius and Telemachus and Odysseus: but those relations seem more father-son and patriarch-client than the combat fellowship of Iliad (not that those relations are not permeable between themselves)
  
• 'reverse similes' (where a woman is compared to a male animal, or a man to a female one) may invite us to conceive of a world in which gender roles are permeable: not the traditional 'divided world' of men and women
• but it's an invitation, not a full on unfolding of the possibility
• Who has been in charge while Odysseus was gone: Penelope, but Telemachus is coming of age and will do so soon
• So the partiarchal economy can keep going via the wife as proxy for the husband?
• reciprocality seems to be a feature of marriage here
• Odysseus' actions
• he rejects 'the quintessential male fantasy' of sex and a life with a goddess (OK, not my fantasy, just saying)
• he chooses to be mortal, to stick to his heroic value system of mortal renown and rejects immortality and immortal renown
• comparison of Penelope with Circe and Calypso seems inevitable:
• they manage their households on their own
• Odysseus also, ever so politically and gently, rejects Nausicaa, who is the  mortal counterpart of Circe and Calypso
• and he rejects the permanent Lotus trip
• and none of his sexual departures from Penelope are brought home to his household: they do not threaten to destabilize it from within: they are temptations from without
• there are no rival offspring (at least in Odyssey) and it's not on Ithaca
  
• cf. Agamemnon, who brought his concubine Cassandra home with him
  
• Penelope
• she has returned to the stage of being wooed: of having suitors
• Telemachus is grown and she is no longer needed for child-rearing
• the suitors have caught her in her delaying trick
• at stake is the household she inhabits: can she best maintain it by staying loyal to Od. or by remarrying
• the poem has comparable scenarios that reveal possibilities
  
• Helen left her marriage and went with another
• not clear if it was agency that made her do it, or she was maneuvered or made to do it
• Penelope herself , at 23.215, excuses Helen saying she would not have done so had she known what would happen:
  
• implicit acknowledgement of her own situation and what is at stake and possibilities for it to go different ways
  
• Clytaimestra chose to go with Aigisthus
• She alone decides and finds ways to turn that decision into action
• she is constantly described as witty, intelligent, cunning, etc. just like Odysseus
• On Ithaca
• Odysseus maintains his disguise, to observe/test Penelope
• Penelope maintains her guises
• but she also announces plans to give herself away: she is in charge of herself
• she puts the contest before the suitors (21.67) and manages it (312 and 336) so that Odysseus, in disguise, gets a chance
• her action  is key to restoring her marriage and household
• Odysseus is famed as much for his wits as for his wife
  
• Cf. what the shade of Agamemnon says in the underworld: he grants renown and fame to Penelope  for her wits and for her household.
• The upshot is that Odyssey presents a different picture of marriage than Iliad
  
• there is not equality really
•  but there is reciprocity and mutuality
• and the wife has agency
• in a way she is trafficked too: the suitors and her own husband, who tests her, but she has agency and navigates the treacherous waters successfully
• but cf. the ominous shadows cast by alternatives: Clytaimestra and Agamemnon, Helen and Menelaus, 
• also, look at the strange tellings of the future: Tiresias foretells that Odysseus' wanderings are not done, that there are further liasions and offspring with other women in his future: see the Telegony  and Cypria
• and the darkness of the suitors, whose blood is on the floor of the household: maintaining marriage and household may be reciprocal and the woman may have agency, but it requires ongoing violence and defense