Lupita Nyong'o has stirred a centuries-old literary controversy by declaring that Homer's Odyssey is told “from a very masculine side of things,” prompting renewed scrutiny of the epic's treatment of women — and of the 19th-century theory that the poem was actually written by a woman.
Nyong'o, promoting the latest film adaptation of the Odyssey, told an interviewer: “When you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, very little time is spent in the perspective of the women. It’s told from a very masculine side of things.” The actress, who holds a bachelor's degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, made the remark as Hollywood prepares to release another big-budget version of the ancient tale.
“Lupita Nyong'o says Odyssey lacks female perspective; Samuel Butler argued it was written by a woman.”
Her claim directly contradicts the argument advanced by the Victorian writer Samuel Butler in his 1896 book *The Authoress of the Odyssey*. Butler, a puckish and iconoclastic figure who was homosexual and sceptical of conventional proprieties, marshalled evidence that the Odyssey's psychological framework and its areas of knowledge and ignorance – such as baffling errors about boat construction, sheep feeding and the sound of wind at sea – suggested a female author. His thesis, he wrote, was that “if a man called Homer wrote the *Iliad*, it was quite a different writer from the one who set down the Odyssey.”
Butler, who also warned about artificial intelligence in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines”, published his controversial findings in a book that argued the Odyssey was “strongly suggestive of being written by a woman.” He died in 1902, leaving instructions to publish his satirical novel *The Way of All Flesh* posthumously.
The Odyssey itself is unflinching in its depiction of violence. When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, he strings his great bow and turns his vengeance on the suitors. The first, Antinous, takes an arrow through the throat as he lifts his cup. Over the course of a single book, Homer describes more than 100 suitors mown down. The housemaids who slept with the suitors are hanged in a line, their pale legs twitching in death. The goat-herd Melanthius is mutilated at the storeroom door. “Homer tells the tale without apology, indeed with a sense of relish,” writes a critic in the New Statesman. “While the modern reader is likely to find the extent of Odysseus’s revenge excessive, the poem’s own world betrays no such unease.”
Nyong'o's comments have reignited a debate that is as much about modern sensibilities as ancient texts. Butler, who cared little for popular opinion, would likely have relished the argument.
