Terence Malick’s The New World and Homer’s Odyssey

Seán Easton (Gustavus Adolphus College)

Terence Malick, in his earlier film, The Thin Red Line (1998), explicitly alludes to Homer’s Iliad. He depicts a military commander watching dawn break on the day of battle, who quotes to his subordinate officer, ‘Eos rhododactylos’. That film is set during the Guadalcanal campaign and its Homeric template is the Iliad (McCabe 1999). The New World (2006) works demonstrably, albeit indirectly, with the narrative framework of the Odyssey in order to tell the tale of Pocahontas, John Smith, and the English Jamestown expedition.

Beginning with its own epic invocation of a Muse, spoken by Pocahontas (“Come, Spirit, help us sing the story of our land.”), it moves forward in a structure, which engages with, and reshapes the narrative of the Odyssey. The New World’s Odyssean dialogue has four phases. Phase I: Smith (Odysseus) arrives and is saved by Pocahontas (Nausicaa) from the execution that her royal father had decided to carry out. Phase II: Smith (Odysseus), after receiving her into the Jamestown colony, departs, deceiving Pocahontas (now to become a Penelope figure) into believing he is dead. Phase III substantially transforms the Homeric narrative template. Pocahontas marries John Rolfe, becoming a Penelope who chooses a suitor. In phase IV, Pocahontas travels to England, where she has an encounter with Smith. In a final role reversal, Smith now plays the part of a suitor, whom Pocahontas resists.

Pocahontas, in Malick’s version, does what Penelope cannot. She meets her Odysseus away from the world of her own domestic space, where she can only await him, and encounters him in his world. She makes her choice of husband on the basis of what she finds there. In the course of her experiences and travels, Pocahontas acquires part of the Homeric Odysseus’ epic identity (Od. 1.3: ‘he saw the cities and learned the mind of many men’).

Bibliography

McCabe, Colin. “Bayonets in Paradise”, Sight and Sound, February 1999.

<http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/139>