Lupita Nyong’o, promoting the latest Hollywood adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, declared that “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, may have overlooked a provocative 19th-century theory: that the Odyssey was actually written by a woman.
In 1896, the Victorian writer Samuel Butler published The Authoress of the Odyssey, arguing that the poem’s psychological framework and patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance strongly suggested a female author. Butler, a homosexual and sceptic of conventional proprieties, was “a wonderfully intelligent and puckish mind, quite indifferent to generally accepted conclusions”. He had previously warned about artificial intelligence in an 1863 essay “Darwin Among The Machines”, and his novel The Way of All Flesh, published after his death in 1902, was a furious satire of religious hypocrisy.
“Lupita Nyong'o says Odyssey lacks female perspective; Victorian writer Samuel Butler argued it was written by a woman.”
But the Odyssey also contains scenes of extreme violence that test modern readers. Homer describes Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, stringing his great bow and turning vengeance on the suitors competing for his wife Penelope. The suitor Antinous takes the first arrow through the throat as he lifts his cup. Over one of the text’s 24 books, more than 100 suitors are “mown down among the wreckage of tables”. The housemaids who shared the suitors’ beds are hanged in a line, their pale legs twitching in their death throes. The goat-herd Melanthius is mutilated at the storeroom door. Homer tells the tale “without apology, indeed with a sense of relish”. While modern readers may find this excessive, the poem’s own world betrays no unease.
The juxtaposition raises an unresolved question: can a work so steeped in bloody revenge also bear the feminine sensibility Butler detected? Nyong’o’s comments and Butler’s theory now sit in awkward tension, inviting readers to reconsider who — or what — animates the epic.
