Siren Songs ─ Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey

Odysseus is famous for resisting the appeal of the Sirens, but does the Odyssey itself exert a seductive influence on its female audiences? Doherty argues that it does, especially by contrasting its female characters in the roles of listener and storyteller. Odysseus courts and rewards supportive female characters like Arete and Penelope by treating them as privileged members of the audience for his own tale of his adventures. At the same time, dangerous female narrators - who, like Helen or the Sirens, threaten to disrupt or revise the hero's story - are discredited by the narrative framework in which their stories appear.
In a synthesis of audience-oriented and narratological approaches, Doherty examines the relationships among three kinds of audiences: internal, implied, and actual. Internal audiences are made up of characters in the work itself. The Odyssey, rich in storytelling episodes, uses such characters to build patterns of audience response, which in turn allow us to sketch an implied or model audience for the epic as a whole. But while this implied audience includes females as well as males, the epic addresses the two genders differently. Males are addressed as a group of peers, while females are addressed as individuals whose most important ties are to individual males. Like the hero, the epic woos the individual female reader by inviting her to identify with the faithful Penelope. Actual audiences, composed of historical individuals, are not compelled to accept the response the epic models for them; but when the model corresponds to gender roles in a reader's own culture, there may be unconscious incentives to accept it.
Siren Songs contributes to the growing body of feminist work in the fields of classics and literary criticism while making the fruits of research available to a nonspecialist audience. All Greek is translated and critical terminology is clearly defined. The book will be especially useful to those who study and teach the Odyssey at the college level and above, whether in English, comparative literature, classics, or general humanities courses.

Lillian Eileen Doherty is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park.