9. Women and monsters

Abstract

For all that Odysseus is hard to pin down, several characters try to do so, particularly women. In a poem so interested in pleasure and family, survival and return, ‘Women and monsters’ suggests it is perhaps unsurprising that female characters should be prominent: the loneliness of Odysseus and his constant wanderings suggest that what he needs, above all, is a home. He has one, of course, in Ithaca, but the poem repeatedly hints that he may set up home somewhere else. His story reflects, in part, the concerns of the age in which the Odyssey was composed: the archaic period was a time of rapid expansion, travel, and new settlements.