Women In The Odyssey

Degradation of Women Viewed from Modern American Context

On Tuesday, February 6th, the Crockett House Firm charged the epic poem, The Odyssey, for representing the degradation of women, specifically, women being objectified and misrepresented. The Crockett House Firm wants these charges to be judges from a modern, American cultural context. The Crockett House firm is the prosecution and finds The Odyssey guilty of the charges. The Griffin House Firm is the defense for this trial and finds The Odyssey not guilty. I find the defendant not guilty on the charge of degradation of women from a modern American cultural context. The defense has shown through witness, textual evidence, and cross examination that the epic poem The Odyssey is not guilty.

The defense questioned the witness on their views of the characters in the poem such as Odysseus and Telemachus. The Odyssey answered stating that the characters in the poem are not the poem itself. What a character has done does not account for the beliefs and views of the poem. This statement disproves the first part of the charges saying The Odyssey is is guilty of the degradation of women. It is not the poem that degrade women, but the characters in the poem that degrade, objectify, and misrepresent women. The prosecution did not try to prove that the characters are apart of the poem so the prosecution did not prove that the characters are apart of the poem meaning what the characters do, represent the poem itself. The prosecution brought up textual evidence of degradation of women on the first stanza in book 20. The poem says “these women who, long since, / had served the suitors as their sluts.” The prosecution says that the women were represented as sluts because they had had sex with the suitors. They also pointed out that when Odysseus had sex with multiple women during the poem but never faced repercussion for his actions. This whole argument from the prosecution because as I early stated, the defense proved the actions of the characters do not reflect the beliefs and views of the poem. The defense also disproved this argument presented by the prosecution by stating that the women

The defense supported their view of judging the poem in a historical context by bring up subsistence farming. They stated that in the time period of The Odyssey, the people would grow just enough food for their own family. This lifestyle worked best when men would go out and do the work of farming while women would stay and take care of the children and other household chores. The defense states this lifestyle is very foreign to use because we now enough resources and technology to allow both men and women to choose specialized jobs outside of farming and caretaking. In our modern, American cultural context our views of degradation of women are very different than the view of degradation of women in the time The Odyssey was written, and because of these different views, we cannot judge the poem in this modern context. The defense also used the book The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell to explain that myths have four main functions. The defense explained that if we judge the poem with this limiting modern view, the meaning is lost and we gain nothing from the poem. The prosecution argued that the poem needs to be taken in modern American cultural context because that is the viewpoint that is the most relevant to us. However, the defense brought up the fourth