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and the sense of boundaries. So Barbara Johnson writes in her remarkable study 'The Frame of Reference', 'the frame thus becomes not the borderline between the inside and the outside, but precisely what subverts the applicability of the inside/outside polarity to the act of interpretation'.29 Hence, my initial hesitation to accede directly to a model of theoretical exposition and classical example (a necessary and impossible divide). |
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Making an Example of Woman |
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'The generic woman seems to have a remarkable faculty for swallowing the individual' George Meredith |
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For the Greek world, Homer even when nodding, is the exemplary text: the paradigm not merely of the genre of epic but of the very possibilities of literature to inform, to teach, to illustrate. How the heroes Odysseus and Achilles are exemplary, however, is itself a question posed in and by the Iliad and the Odyssey.30 The characters of the Iliad themselves debate, especially with Achilles, the nature of his behaviour, and finally even the gods censure the best of the Achaeans for his excess. The Odyssey's focus on  , 'a/the man', as I have discussed elsewhere,31 repeatedly raises a doubt about how exemplary, how generalisable a figure Odysseus is as 'man'. What I wish briefly to gloss here, however, is a moment when a figure is said to be instructive for women in general. |
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The arrival of the suitors in the Underworld is the triumph and glory of Odysseus and Penelope attested to by Agamemnon. He juxtaposes Penelope to his own wife, Clytemnestra (24.197202): |
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29 Johnson (1980) 128. I have discussed this with regard to Theocritus' pervasive framing devices in Goldhill (1990) 22361. |
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30 A much discussed topic. See e.g. Redfield (1975); Schein (1984), and, specifically on paradeigmata, Willcock (1964), and the recent stimulating work of Slatkin (1991); for my go at it, see Goldhill (1990) 1108 with further bibliography to which can be added Taplin (1992). All quotations from Homer in this chapter are taken from the Oxford Classical Text of T.W. Allen. |
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31 Goldhill (1990) 15. |
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