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Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate

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Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-29-2016 12:00 AM Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate Alexandra Salyga Reynolds The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Laurence De Looze The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Comparative Literature A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Alexandra Salyga Reynolds 2016 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Indo-European Linguistics and Philology Commons Recommended Citation Salyga Reynolds, Alexandra, "Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate" (2016). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4157. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4157 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................i Abstract and Keywords .....................................................................................................ii Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate 1 1 Sources...........................................................................................................................1 1.1 The Odyssey ............................................................................................................. 2 1.2 The Arthurian Vulgate............................................................................................. 32 2 Gender and Metaphor..................................................................................................61 2.1 The False Queen and the Lion .................................................................................. 61 2.2 The Odyssey ........................................................................................................... 91 2.3 The Arthurian Vulgate .......................................................................................... 100 3 Textuality ..................................................................................................................117 3.1 The Odyssey ......................................................................................................... 118 3.2 The Arthurian Vulgate .......................................................................................... 123 Conclusions...................................................................................................................132 Bibliography .................................................................................................................134 Author CV ....................................................................................................................138 i Abstract The Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate each integrate various traditional sources with various takes on gender into themselves as well as comment directly on the topic. The Odyssey prioritizes forming both cooperative and competitive equality between male and female characters and their distinctly masculine and feminine uses of language. The Arthurian Vulgate prioritizes forming a status hierarchy with masculinity higher than femininity and correspondences between the gender binary and other binaries, although it also transmits stories with embedded contradictory messages. Both texts also tell a false queen story, which comments on the possibility of a disconnect between a sign and its signified and what each values in a female character enough to make her internally consistent by splitting one complex character into two simple ones. Keywords: gender, Indo-European philology, False Guinevere, False Helen, comparative method, mythology, Merlin ii 1 Inhuman and Heroic Women: Femininity in the Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate Alexandra Salyga Reynolds Introduction The Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate have both cast a long shadow over Western culture, their influence reaching modern tropes. The two texts belong to many of the same broad categories: they both have an expansive scope, were composed by multiple anonymous authors, and form intertextual links with a broad range of older and younger texts. They also differ in an essential way: the Odyssey is the product of a tradition of oral composition where the Arthurian Vulgate is the aggregate of multiple literate composers retelling and adding to older written texts. This project seeks to make connections between these two texts in one aspect: the ideologies of gender contained in each. It will follow each text to its sources, and analyze their use of metaphorically meaningful characters, and notions of textuality to reach conclusions on how each text genders its characters and the process of composition. 1 Sources The Odyssey and the Arthurian Vulgate each contain several systems for gendering their characters, one proper to each work and several others embedded within each through its transmission of traditional materials. These sections preserve their source's system of gendering, albeit in a form adjusted to fit the younger text. These internal divisions of the text introduce and allow for differing and contradictory ideologies that relate to gender to coexist. Each text relates itself to its sources in different 2 ways that reflect both the oral or literate nature of their composition and the priorities of their authors. 1.1 The Odyssey The sources of the Odyssey are occulted due to their orality, hence their non- survival to the present. These sources are available indirectly through the written texts influenced by them. One of these sources is the Proto-Indo-European story accessible through both the Odyssey and its cognate in Sanskrit, the Nalopākhyāna. The Nalopākhyāna is a section of the Indian epic, the Mahābhārata. It follows the Odyssey's main storyline in a linear narrative. Its hero, prince Nala, is chosen as the heroine's husband, their marriage almost dissolving in the husband's absence, and is reinstated by the same ceremony that enabled his wife, princess Damayantī, to choose him as her husband the first time. This ceremony, a svayaṃvara, consists of the suitors participating in an athletic contest set by the prospective bride, who chooses a husband that did well in the contest, but not necessarily the winner if they were of unequal status. This arrangement allows her father to avoid alienating the associates of his who would become his daughters' suitors by indebting one of them to himself by giving him a bride; edgewise it gives the daughter some control over whom she marries (Gresseth 1979). The Nalopākhyāna preserves this story along with its embedded arrangement of mutual self- interest between the genders in a more primitive form than the Odyssey. 3 The Odyssey, as a full-length epic, elaborates on this basic story and embedded ideology of a mutually beneficial balance between the male and the female. On the level of narrative, the Odyssey is much more complicated than its cognate. Odysseus, unlike prince Nala, features in stories other than that of his marriage. The basic story the Odyssey shares with the Nalopākhyāna is complicated in order for it to make sense in continuity with Odysseus' appearances in other stories of the Trojan Cycle, especially his appearance in the concurrently composed Iliad. In the continuity built by the epic tradition, Odysseus is absent from his marriage due to his obligation to participate in the Trojan War, meaning that his initial marriage is now separated from his remarriage by the story of the Iliad. The effect of Odysseus' role in the Trojan War on his role in the Odyssey is felt through the displacement of his first winning of Penelope. The Odyssey shows the initial winning of Penelope in a svayaṃvara ceremony through another girl acting out the same story1. The girl to take the role of Penelope is Nausicaa. Nausicaa appears in the Phaeacian episode of the Odyssey, which is marked as an otherworldly place through the closeness of its people to the gods and through gender inversions in the ceremonial matters in which Odysseus participates. Odysseus supplicated the queen, rather than king Alcinous as would be expected, on Athena’s instruction. Athena’s influence on Odysseus is decisive to his success at Scheria: she appears to Nausicaa in a dream to nudge her to help Odysseus and appears to Odysseus to 1 This argument follows the logic of Gresseth’s 1979 article "The Odyssey and the Nalopākhyāna" in Transactions of the American Philological Association 109 into a section of the Odyssey on which he did not comment. 4 tell him how to successfully obtain passage home from the court, both times in disguise as a Phaeacian girl. The narrative introduces Scheria by way of Athena coming to the daughter of the king of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa, in the form of her friend of the same age to call her to prepare for marriage: Ναυσικάα, τί νύ σ᾽ ὧδε μεθήμονα γείνατο μήτηρ; εἵματα μέν τοι κεῖται ἀκηδέα σιγαλόεντα, σοὶ δὲ γάμος σχεδόν ἐστιν, ἵνα χρὴ καλὰ μὲν αὐτὴν ἕννυσθαι, τὰ δὲ τοῖσι παρασχεῖν, οἵ κέ σ᾽ ἄγωνται. ἐκ γάρ τοι τούτων φάτις ἀνθρώπους ἀναβαίνει ἐσθλή, χαίρουσιν δὲ πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ. (6.25-30) Nausicaa, how comes it that thy mother bore thee so heedless? Thy
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