Book review: “Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It” by Emily Hauser

Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out by British classicist Emily Hauser makes some provocative points about the role of women in Homer’s two great epics and suggests some insights into the life of women in the European Bronze Age. (3200 BC-900 BC).

But the book is a frustrating, irritating and disappointing read. One reason is Hauser’s tendency to overstretch recent archeological findings to fit, however awkwardly, the women in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Another is her breathless enthusiasm; everything, it seems, is “a staggering coincidence” and “a fascinating narrative.”

And all of the archeological information she marshals and every angle she presents from her reading of the two epics go to make her point that women of three thousand years ago were oppressed by men at every turn, an oppression that, well, has continued down to the present day.

Penelope’s Bones, released in hardcover a year ago by the University of Chicago Press, was one of many titles that publishers were bringing out or sprucing up in anticipation of Christopher Nolan’s cinematic retelling of The Odyssey. The paperback edition of Hauser’s book came out in June, a month before the film premiered.

 

“Women are ever-present”

Fans of the hugely successful movie who come to Penelope’s Bones will find, at least at first, some interesting food for thought.

For instance, in an introduction, Hauser notes that generations of scholars, mostly men, have looked at these nearly three-thousand-year-old epic poems as being “all about men.” Yet, as she points out, if it weren’t for the presence and action of women, “there would have been no story at all.” Indeed, she argues:

When we look for them — when we read the Homeric texts in a way that tries to tell their story — women and women’s experiences are, in fact, ever-present: from the Muses who open the epics to Helen who starts the Trojan War, from (the enslaved woman) Briseis who begins the Iliad to Athena who helps to engineer the sack of Troy, from Calypso and Circe and Arete who rule the teeming fantastical lands of the Odyssey’s voyage home, all the way to Penelope who marks the journey’s end.

In sixteen chapters, focusing on seventeen women and goddesses in the epics, Hauser seeks to examine what it meant to be a woman in the world Homer describes, often employing new scientific research using ultramodern technology.

To be a wife, like Andromache, knowing that slavery awaits her if her husband Hector is killed and Troy is conquered.

Or to be a handmaid, like Eurycleia, Odysseus’s wet-nurse who, as an old woman, helps him win back his home from the hundred-plus suitors for Penelope’s hand.

Or to be a mother, like Thetis, the goddess who gave birth to Achilles, who is also “a hapless victim and a grief-stricken mother, who wants nothing more than to shield her mortal son from death, and knows that she cannot.”

 

Tendency to overwrite and overreach

Yet, such insights are obscured by Hauser’s tendency to overwrite and overreach to make connections that are, at best, tenuous in the extreme. The reader is yanked here and there across the Mediterranean and up and down the centuries with Hauser insisting at every turn that new archeological data show how downtrodden women of that era were.

The facts of the patriarchy, however, don’t need The Iliad and The Odyssey for proof.  Nor Penelope’s Bones. Women have been treated as second-class citizens in Western civilization for a long, long time.

Yet, what the epics show — and what Hauser avoids looking at very closely — is how much power women were able to exercise despite their lower status.

Consider, for instance, all of the goddesses who have much more direct impact on human lives in the two epics than their male counterparts — Hera and Calypso and, more than any, Athena.

And consider the human women, such as Arete, the legendary Queen of the Phaeacians, who seemingly carried more power than her husband king.

And, of course, there’s Helen whose face started it all.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.2.26

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 9.3.26.