Penelope Speaks: Rebecca Solnit on the Western Literary Tradition of Silencing Women

The following first appeared via Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency.

Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to face a long list of charges. Andrew Tate is charged with “seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and 19 additional charges for offences relating to indecent images of a child/extreme pornography.” His brother Tristan faces “one count of sexual assault, two counts of rape and three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.”

Sometimes it feels that there is nowhere I can turn without running into violence against women. The headlines are full of it. Monday, July 20th, the Tate brothers went before a judge and the Guardian top stories included “Experts warn of rise in sadistic online exploitation of vulnerable children” and “In dark corners of the internet, men are goading each other to masturbate in public—and on female shoppers—and post the footage.” Tuesday’s headlines included, “Singer-songwriter D4vd appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom on Tuesday as prosecutors aim to prove sufficient evidence exists for him to stand trial for the murder and sexual abuse of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, a minor whose body was found in his car.” She was thirteen; she was dismembered.

Wednesday brought four more Guardian stories about sexual abuse of women on the digital front page (sometimes I wonder if anyone else notices how common these stories are). Last week, Trump was finally forced to pay up $5,625,005.48 in partial settlement of the civil cases in which he was found liable both of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll and of defaming her. Last week, there was Guardian a story about gang rapes and murders of girl children in India I wish I hadn’t read.

I thought of the landmark 2014 essay by classicist Mary Beard “The Public Voice of Women” when a stranger tagged me in a hate post on Saturday that includes these words: “Can someone please tell Rebecca Solnit to stop talking?” The post concluded “Sit down, shut up, and stop running your bullshit.” Some parts of his post I didn’t share here makes me think he was mentally ill, but mental illness in our era often manifests as the psychological equivalent of a weak immune system: a susceptibility to the loud and destructive noise all around us that instructs us how to think, live, act. Quite a lot of that noise is directed toward hating women and has been for a very long time, which was Beard’s point.

“Public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.”

Beard’s essay opens, “I want to start very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public.” Her example is the Odyssey and Penelope’s son Telemachus upbraiding her: “Mother,” he says, “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.” And Penelope goes back upstairs.

Beard confirms that in ancient Greece speech was man’s matter, writing, “public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man—and we’re talking elite man—was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a—if not the—defining attribute of maleness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.” We’ve seen fury and fretting over women in politics speaking, including fuss about tone of voice—too high? too school-marmish? too much vocal fry? too this? too that?—that ignores what they’re actually saying, as if their job was to be aesthetically pleasing, not ethically engaged. Beard notes that the Greeks thought a proper voice was deep, and women’s higher voices disqualified them from public life.

Have we evolved much since Telemachus told his mom to shut up? Those who have are in conflict, sometimes literally, with those who haven’t. Like Beard, Emily Wilson is a classics scholar fluent in the Greek of the Odyssey and the Iliad. She translated them both, was much described as the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, and right-wing men have been furious about her translations, especially on the site formerly known as known as Twitter, where they sounded wounded, frantic, panicky that if a woman was allowed to handle Homer nothing would ever be the same again. Many of them had the notion that Homer should sound archaic, perhaps because a lot of translations created their own ornate anachronistic English that had nothing to do with the language of the epics. An America First social media account calls her version “unfaithful” as if she was a linguistic adulteress.

But it wasn’t just style; there was a death-of-civilization-level panic as if Homer speaking through a woman, a woman speaking with the authority to take on a foundational classic, was annihilation for something or other. They insisted that she had done something to it she wasn’t allowed to do and that somehow it was damaged as a result (one hysterical social media post made it sound like she was somehow destroying all other versions so we now and forever after could only read her version). A woman speaking could, in their ears, only be threatening. Beard writes, “For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it, it’s the fact you’re saying it.”

Wilson has been explaining her decisions ever since. For example, she told the Washington Post that there’s a term in the Odyssey made up of the words for dog and face so she translated it “dog-face,” noting “Most other Anglophone translators have made different choices: For instance, Richmond Lattimore (often celebrated as the most “literal” of Homeric translators) uses “slut that I am” (and “whore” later in Book 6, when Helen calls herself more literally ‘dog’; Robert Fagles has “whore that I am!”; Robert Fitzgerald, whose Homer often quotes from Shakespeare, has “wanton.” Unlike me, none of these translators use the same term when Achilles is insulting Agamemnon; Lattimore, for instance, has Achilles say, “You with the dog’s eyes,” not “Agamemnon, you slut!” Verbal repetition is always a challenge for a translator. Though she must have enjoyed the understatement, she’s pointing out that previous translators have added misogynistic layers to the texts, and not doing so can be seen as feminist when it’s mostly accurate translation.

Misogyny and the classics, as Mary Beard and many others have pointed out, is a capacious topic.

Misogyny and the classics, as Beard and many others have pointed out, is a capacious topic. Historian Bettany Hughes writes of Helen of Troy, “Of all Helen’s roles in the literary and artistic corpus (and it is a long career—she has been forgotten by not a single generation since she entered the written record 2,700 years ago), it is her part as fantasy whore that has been most tenacious. Her many sexual partners—the hero Theseus, her husband Menelaus, her lover Paris, her second Trojan husband Deiphobus, and (some whispered) Achilles after both he and Helen were dead—are trotted out by ancient and modern authors alike as the gossip columns would the client-list of a high-class prostitute. And so Euripides calls her a “bitch-whore”; she is Shakepeare’s “strumpet”… A woman’s beauty was thought, in the Western tradition, to “trick” men into a sexual relationship. The more beautiful a woman, the more likely her exterior attributes displayed a duplicitous nature.

Last night I watched Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey, and it felt as with his 2024 film Oppenheimer that he had dutifully stuffed lots of incidents from the life of his protagonist into a film that is epic at least in length, but without fully grasping or conveying what these things mean. As Richard Brody observes in his New Yorker review, “Homer’s character, notorious as a schemer, here comes off as plain and direct—a gruff, practical tactician, rather than something more energetically inventive and morally dubious.” As with Oppenheimer I can value the film for generating a deep and broad conversation—about nuclear weapons and the atomic age then, about Homer’s poem now—and apparently getting hordes of people to read it, mostly in the recent translations by Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelssohn.

The women in the Odyssey are compelling characters, and the goddess Athena and demigoddesses Circe and Calypso are genuinely powerful; like the sirens, the latter two are also portrayed as dangerous. But the human women are rendered powerless by their society. Penelope is unable to just govern Ithaca herself and is besieged by the suitors and patronized by her son; Helen is kidnapped by Paris (or is given to him as a prize by Aphrodite or elopes with him), setting off the Trojan War. In the prequel Iliad Trojan women become sex slaves to the Greeks camped outside Troy, and the Trojan priestess Cassandra (blessed with the gift of prophesy, cursed with never being believed because she refused to have sex with the god Apollo) is raped by Ajax the lesser after the fall of Troy and then murdered when Agamemnon brings her back to his kingdom as a sex slave (the euphemism “concubine” is often used for these captive women).

Judith Thurman, in an article she wrote about Emily Wilson, sums up Homer’s other epic, the Iliad, with the account of Agamemnon angering Apollo by turning the god’s captured Trojan priestess into a sex slave. In response the god sends a plague to the Greek camp. Thurman writes, “But then he consoles himself by mortally offending his greatest warrior: he confiscates Achilles’ trophy from an earlier looting spree, “fresh-faced Briseis.” And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.

The women in the Odyssey are compelling characters, and the goddess Athena and demigoddesses Circe and Calypso are genuinely powerful.

Sex slaves are not a thing of the past. In an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism published in the New Yorker in April, Heidi Blake reported on the Tate brothers. She interviewed the Tates themselves, victims, associates, and tracked down legal documents and social media posts to offer a fuller and more horrifying picture of who they are and what they have done to women’s bodies and psyches and men’s worldviews than anyone had before. She writes that after the Tates built an online sex show business in which dozens of women were essentially held captive, the brothers turned to teaching other men and boys both how to do this and how to despise and dehumanize women: “Tate presided over an online network called the War Room… Members learned how to recruit women into ‘sexual slavery’ in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or ‘Pimping Hoes Degree.'” Blake describes an early victim tattooed with “Tate owned,” the many other women who were similarly marked as, essentially, property, and Tate’s instructions in one of his videos: “That’s how it goes. Slap, slap, grab, choke. Shut up, bitch. Sex.”

I think the first Odyssey-related book I read (along with various versions of the Greek myths and Ovid) was Henry Treece’s novel The Amber Princess, which tells in lurid (I was probably about 12) detail the story of the Trojan War and the House of Atreus from the perspective of Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sister of Orestes and Iphigenia, niece of the Helen whom the Trojans kidnap (as you probably know, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to placate the gods and get the wind that will send his ships to Troy to fight with Achilles, Odysseus, and the rest; Clytemnestra kills him for it; Orestes kills his mom for that; in Aeschylus’s 458BC play The Eumenides Orestes is excused for this matricide by the god Apollo because “the mother of what is called her child is not the parent, but the nurse of the newly-sown embryo,” aka dad matters more). Only as an adult did I notice how normalized rape and sexual coercion were in ancient Greek literature (and all the art made about it for millennia after), long after I knew that

The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow

as Andrew Marvell delicately put it about another one of Apollo’s rape attempts and another woman’s escape (at the price of her humanity). Gods and men raped women and occasionally boys (Zeus: Ganymede). Switching over to Roman history, you can admire the rape of the Sabine women in Nicholas Poussin’s version in the Louvre and in Peter Paul Reubens’s huge version in the UK’s National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum offers dozens of works in response to a search query for “rape.” In the National Gallery of Ireland last year I came across Lucretia stabbing herself after being raped to preserve her family’s honor and Europa being kidnapped by Zeus in the form of a bull.

Violence against women begins and ends with silencing; the two are not separate phenomena; a voice is what a human being has when that human being also has rights and membership in society.

Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture. I used one Greek-vase image of Ajax’s assault on Cassandra as a title photo here; there are a lot more, and what does it mean that images of rape were decorative backgrounds for the last 2500 years?Treece’s book came out in 1963. Jean Rhys’s 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea retells Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr. Rochester’s first, mixed-race Caribbean wife, who we only meet in Charlotte Bronte’s version as the villainized “madwoman in the attic.” Retelling since Rhys has become a meta-genre, a familiar story told from an unfamiliar point of view, often a story formerly centered on men told from a female point of view, or a subversion of literal dominant narratives by showing those of subordinates. After her came other reinterpretations and retellings from women’s perspectives of male-centered books, especially of classical stories as well as books like the Pulitzer-prize-winning James, by Percival Everett, which retells Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim.

Going even wider in what retellings can be brings up Tom Stoppard’s play about Hamlet‘s minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Angela Carter’s 1970s feminist revisions of the classic fairytales and Gregory MacGuire’s Wicked). Of course Huckleberry Finn is its own backwoods version of the Odyssey and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is too, but Homer, to his credit, is more interested in his female characters than Kerouac is. An early feminist moment for me was getting partway through On the Road and realizing that I identified with the female characters who are static, rooted in place, forever being left behind, not the male wanderers, and I will note that Homer seems more interested than Kerouac in women characters.

In recent years, retellings have become something of an avalanche, including Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, Madeline Miller’s bestselling Circe and Pat Barker’s Women of Troy trilogy that begins with The Silence of the Girls, told by the Trojan women captive in the Greek camp. Lots has been said about the most recent versions of Odysseus—in 2024’s somber The Return, in Nolan’s new version—suffering from PTSD, but the enslaved women of Troy get all the brutality of war and the other brutality of slavery and rape and silencing and unfreedom. As I noted a couple of weeks ago in my essay on Graham Platner, quoting writer and combat veteran David J. Morris on PTSD: “The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat.”

Rather than make yet another Odysseus-centered narrative someone should tell the story from Penelope’s point of view or—I was going to say turn Barker’s books into films, but the level of sexual violence and child slaughter in The Silence of the Girls is not really suited to cinema. At the end of that book, Briseis, the queen become Achilles’s and then Agamemnon’s sex slave, declares, “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp.” But Barker clearly wanted us to know it.

Violence against women begins and ends with silencing; the two are not separate phenomena; a voice is what a human being has when that human being also has rights and membership in society, the voice with which to participate in society and to determine who she is and what she does or does not consent to. Yet some men are still insisting that women’s bodies are there for men to use and that consent insofar as it matters at all can take many strange and durable forms; we are only a few decades out in establishing that husbands can rape their wives; before that “I do” meant a kind of permanent and irrevocable consent that was the same as relinquishing bodily self-determination.

Earlier this month journalist Ryan Grim insisted that a text by Jenny Racicot saying to Graham Platner, back when they were dating that she “needed her glute massaged” was a crucial part of the story, seemingly because he considered it an invitation—but as other people have pointed out, if he’d broken into her home and massaged her glute that night, perhaps that argument would make sense. But Racicot says he raped her as she said no repeatedly and tried to resist physically. Beard writes about the public voice of women but the private voice of women is not separate, when there’s a question of whether our words have weight in the world, whether a woman can use her voice to affirm her rights, and then to be believed afterward. It’s still a question.

The Tate brothers were arrested in Florida because the Trump Administration had intervened in their case to press Romania to release them; Romania had barred them from leaving the country while they awaited trial there, but let them go after this intervention. To defend the Tates is to defend sexual slavery and radical inequality, both of which are central to what they teach to boys and men. Blake writes,

When Tate was arrested on human-trafficking charges, his allies defended him. Donald Trump, Jr., called the case “absolute insanity,” and Musk suggested that the authorities were targeting the Tates while ignoring “actual sex trafficking.” Carlson, who had just released a documentary called The End of Men, devoted hours of airtime to proclaiming Tate’s innocence; so did the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens. The activist Charlie Kirk praised him onstage.

White supremacy is an important aspect of the Trumpian right; so is male supremacy. Inequality was a given in ancient Greece. It’s still a matter of debate in the contemporary USA and beyond.