Content area
Full Text
With Athena as its presiding deity The Odyssey has been associated with the feminine even before the rise of feminist criticism in the last decades of the twentieth century.1 Samuel Butler claimed in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) that the author disguised herself in the character of Nausicaa; in Homer's Daughter (1955) Robert Graves followed Butler in imagining Nausicaa, here a priestess of Athena, as the protagonist who discomfits her 112 suitors.2 Andrew Dalby's recent Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic argues that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by a woman (2006, 150-53, 203-04).
Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of the Odyssey was produced in 1999 at the Goodman Theatre and in 2000 at the McCarter and Seattle Repertory Theatres;3 the playtext was published in November 2006. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus appeared in 2005 in the series The Myths edited by Karen Armstrong. Both writers follow the reassessment of the Odyssey initiated by feminist critics of the epic in the 1980s and 1990s; in addition, both may have found inspiration in the Odyssey's representation of the creative process as feminine-as exemplified by Athena's sponsorship of Odysseus's stratagems to find his way home to Ithaca and of Penelope's weaving and unweaving of Laertes's shroud as well as her "plotting" to keep the suitors under control.
One of the most memorable scenes in Mary Zimmerman's critically acclaimed adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses poignantly dramatized the marriage, separation, and reunion of Ceyx, who dies at sea, and Alcyone, his inconsolable wife (2002, 20-32). Her adaptation of the Odyssey also focuses on a husband and wife who are separated by the ocean, and are reunited not as birds, but as humans, although they are no longer young. From the beginning of her Odyssey Zimmerman emphasizes her feminist perspective by introducing a woman reader who is uninspired by her reading of the (male-authored) Odyssey: "Sing in me, Muse, and through me-[She stops, sighs, and starts again]" (2006, 3).The Muse, awakening from sleep (and by implication, inactivity), violently takes hold of the reader: she "snatches the book and throws it away. She grabs the WOMAN from behind and begins to whisper in her ear. The WOMAN, gasping and clutching at her own...