“Bitch That I Am!”: An Examination of Women’s Self-Image in Homeric Epic

Kirsten Day (Augustana College)

Although recent years have seen great advancements in our understanding of women’s lives in Classical antiquity, our knowledge of female interiority – what women thought and felt and how they viewed themselves in relation to their world – remains severely limited by our lack of direct evidence. Focusing in particular on the examples of Helen and Penelope, this paper examines the mechanics behind female expressions of self-image in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the texts which best represent the foundational ideological tenets of Classical antiquity, as a means of better understanding how societal expectations would have worked to shape real women’s views of their own self-worth.

In ancient Greece, female virtue was seen as a function of how well a woman measured up to a male-prescribed ideal. The particular characteristics of this ideal – traits like beauty, chastity, modesty, industry, and passivity – all served in one way or another to bolster male honor, primarily by ensuring women’s fidelity (Carson 1990). Similarly, in Homer female expressions of self-image are dictated by the gendered context of the situation in which they occur: women regularly self-deprecate when they fail to live up to the feminine ideal or when their relationship with a male is threatened, while they act with more self-assurance in exclusively women’s contexts or when working on behalf of their male kin. Both Helen and Penelope conform to this pattern, expressing feelings of self-loathing in times of erotic disaster and speaking assertively when acting in conjunction with the interests of their male relations.

At the same time, both women work to call this normative model into question, testing its limits through strategic use of disingenuous expressions of attitude towards the self. Despite her allure, Helen is rejected as a model for real women because her expressions of self-image, although ostensibly presented as working in accordance with the interests of her male connections, are ultimately exposed as self-serving. Like her sexual transgression, Helen’s manipulation of self-image is threatening in that it serves her own interests even at the expense of those of her male relations. Penelope, in contrast, receives ideological endorsement as a role model because although she tests the boundaries delineated for her as a woman, she does not transgress them entirely. Although like Helen she self-consciously manipulates expressions of self-image to her own advantage, her interests coincide in the end with those of her husband rather than contradicting them (Felson-Rubin 1994). Penelope’s character thus works to reaffirm the very norms she initially called into question.

In this way, women in Homeric epic serve the essential function of testing the ideological framework socially dictated for them in order to establish and reinforce its boundaries, ultimately providing a lens through which real women in ancient Greece were expected to evaluate themselves.

Word Count: 470