Lupita Nyong'o, promoting the latest Hollywood blockbuster adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, has provoked a literary row by declaring that the epic is “told from a very masculine side of things”. The Oscar-winning actress told an interviewer that “very little time is spent in the perspective of the women” in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. But her comments have been challenged by a long-neglected theory that the Odyssey may actually have been written by a woman.
More than a century ago, the Victorian writer Samuel Butler published a book titled The Authoress of the Odyssey (1896), arguing that the psychological framework and patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance in the poem strongly suggested a female author. Butler, a puckish homosexual who delighted in upending orthodoxies, was struck by the “highly feminine character” of the Odyssey compared with the Iliad. He concluded that whoever wrote the Odyssey had very little idea about boat construction, sheep feeding, or the sound of wind at sea – details a man of the time would have known.
“Lupita Nyong'o says Odyssey is masculine, but Samuel Butler argued in 1896 it was written by a woman.”
Nyong'o, who holds a bachelor’s degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, appeared unaware of Butler’s thesis. Her claims of masculine perspective sit uneasily alongside the text’s actual content. The Odyssey is, after all, a poem in which the hero Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and slaughters more than 100 suitors in a single book, described with “a sense of relish” by Homer. The housemaids who slept with the suitors are hanged in a line, their “pale legs twitching in their death throes”; the goat-herd Melanthius is mutilated at the storeroom door. The New Statesman notes that “the modern reader is likely to find the extent of Odysseus’s revenge excessive” – a violence that feels distinctly masculine.
Yet Butler, writing in 1896, saw something else: a work of “intense knowledge” and “total ignorance” that no male author could have produced. His theory is enjoying a revival as the new film reignites questions about who – or what – lies behind one of Western literature’s foundational texts.