Women in Greek epic are treated as objects, as commodities to be exchanged in marriage or as the spoils of warfare. However, women also use objects to negotiate their own agency, subverting the male viewpoint by using the very form they themselves are thought by men to embody. Female objects in Homer can be symbolically significant and powerfully characterizing. They can be tools of recognition and identification. They can pause narrative and be used agonistically. They can send messages and be vessels for memory. This book brings together Gender Theory and the burgeoning field of New Materialisms, combining an approach predicated on the idea of the woman as object with one which questions the very distinction between subject and object. This productive tension leads us to decentre the male subject—and to put centre stage not only the woman as object but also the agency of women and objects. Homeric women are shown to be not only objectified but also well-versed users of objects. This is something that Homer portrays clearly, that Odysseus understands—but that has often escaped many other men, from Odysseus’ alter ego Aethon in Odyssey 19 to modern experts on Homeric epic.
Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/GAR, IP address: 169.230.243.252 on 17 Mar 2015 from the Allen and Monroe OCT editions (Oxford, 1963). All translations are my own. 'Hesiod' denotes both the persona of the poet of the Theogony and the Works and Days, and the consistent driving force which I believe lies behind the poems. Whether or not these were one and the same does not concern me hereissues such as authorship, performance context, or orality versus writing are necessarily beyond the scope of the present article.3 Pre-Pandora: ῥηιδίως γάρ κɛν καὶ ἐπ᾽ ἤματι ἐργάσσαιο| ὥστέ σɛ κɛἰς ἐνιαυτὸν ἔχɛιν καὶ ἀɛργὸν ἐόντα· ('for easily you would have worked even in one day enough that you would have had sufficient for a year though being idle'; Op. 43-4); Golden Age: καρπὸν δ᾽ ἔφɛρɛ ζɛίδωρος ἄρουρα| αὐτομάτη πολλόν τɛ καὶ ἄφθονον· ('the grain-giving earth produced fruit of its own accord, abundant and unbegrudged'; Op. 117-18). 4 βίος (livelihood) at Op. 31,42, 232, 316, 501, 577, 601, 634, 689 (similarly, βίοτος at Op. 167, 301, 307, 400, 476, 499). The Heroes knew agriculture too: but with the land bearing them three harvests a year (τοῖσιν μɛλιηδέα καρπόν | τρὶς ἔτɛος θάλλοντα φέρɛι ζɛίδωρος ἄρουρα, 'for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing three times a year'; Op. 172-3) they hardly match the Iron Race in terms of toil.
Chapter 4 returns to the theme of Homeric poems are shown to reflect on the limitations of objects; how the memories encased in objects are presented as transient; how this transience has a gendered aspect; and how objects as commemorators are consistently presented by the poet as inferior to the medium of poetry. This chapter then offers a way in which objects might be able to mitigate their limitations: through entanglement with immortality, with the divinememory, beginning this time with its limitations. It explores subversions, suppressions, and perversions of memory, and pushes mortal and material memory to their limits. The. And yet not even the immortals feel secure in the longevity of their objects.
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