Abstract: In 1897 the English novelist and satirist Samuel Butler published The Authoress of the Odyssey which put forward the bold hypothesis that Homer was not the author of the Odyssey. Instead, Butler maintained that its author was a young Sicilian girl who had lived around 1050 BCE and portrayed herself as Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous of Phaeacia — the island where Odysseus finds himself in Book VI. At the time, Butler’s argument for female authorship of the Odyssey made little impression on either the public or the critics of the day. Decades later, however, Robert Graves took up that hypothesis and challenged readers with a novel, Homer’s Daughter (1955), a fictionalised retelling of the Odyssey narrated by a Butlerian Nausicaa. Although Graves’s narrative reflects the cultural influence of the late-Victorian reception of the Homeric epic, Homer’s Daughter can be described as one of Graves’s many attempts to reinterpret and rewrite the classics. In this novel, not only are the narrator’s voice and point of view highly problematised, but time and space are also redefined to reconstruct the ancient world and our modern understanding of it. I will argue that Graves, who is a fine classicist and an extraordinary mythographer, explores the possibilities of changing our perspective on the Western canon by rewriting its most central text. In doing so, I also examine two poems from 1933, ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Nobody’, which subvert the traditional reception of Odysseus and show the extent to which Graves engaged in a wider cultural dialogue with the past.

Keywords: Odysseus, Homer, Nausicaa, myth, parody

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Very little in the vast bibliography on Robert Graves is dedicated to Homer’s Daughter. Although Graves himself describes it as historical fiction, the novel is in fact difficult to categorise. It is certainly not a historical novel like the Claudius novels; it is certainly not mythography like The F and it is certainly not a simple rewriting of the Homeric myth. Sheila Murnaghan suggests the word ‘potboiler’ — a term Graves himself uses — as a more accurate label. She points to the combination of history and fiction, which is in any case the basis of the novel as a genre, and adds the satire that appears to predominate here.[1] I would call it parody rather than satire: in postmodern terms, parody denotes the exploration of a text’s meaning, together with a critical and ironic affirmation of its relationship to the past. I therefore see Homer’s Daughter as the fruit not only of a dialogue with the origins of Western civilisation, on the one hand, and with Victorian literature, on the other, but also of a broader undertaking: Graves explores the origins of poetic inspiration and treats the female element as the founding principle of (proto) civilisation.

Graves began writing Homer’s Daughter in 1953–54, a period when he had little money and was writing stories for Punch and reviews for the New Statesman, which provided him with a reasonable income. It was a period of frenetic writing: between 1950 and 1957 he published seventeen books, including translations, critical essays, three volumes of poetry, the Clark Lectures in Cambridge, two books on Christ and Greek myths and, finally, Homer’s Daughter (1955). The novel also caught the attention of the film industry: during a visit to Rome in 1954, Graves discussed a film version with the director Roberto Rossellini and his wife, the actress Ingrid Bergman,[2] who was to play Nausicaa, but the project was never realised. An operatic version based on Graves’ novel,[3] called Nausicaa, was staged in 1959 by the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks, though with little success.

Homer’s Daughter was inspired by The Authoress of the Odyssey by Samuel Butler (1835–1902). Published in 1897, it met with an immediately cold reception.[4] Butler argued that the Odyssey was not written by Homer, but by a young Sicilian woman who lived around 1050 B.C. This young woman is in fact the narrator of the Homeric epic and is present in the story as Nausicaa, the daughter of Alcinous of Phaecia, the island where Odysseus lands after his shipwreck — the physical setting of both the hero’s salvation and the epic’s narration. At the end of the nineteenth century, Butler (who had already challenged Darwinism and overturned Victorian values) also challenged the authorship of the Odyssey, one of the dogmas of Victorian androcentric culture. To dismantle an assumption as fundamental as Homer’s very existence was to take apart Western civilisation itself, overturning its concepts of time, space, voice and narrative point of view. Although classically educated, Butler did not begin translating Homer into English until the end of the century — translations he regarded as a necessary companion to The Authoress — and he also wrote, together with his friend H. Festing-Jones, a libretto for a secular oratorio called Ulysses. [5]

However, what Butler does in The Authoress of the Odyssey is not a simple revision or reinterpretation of the classic epic, nor is it an assertion of the work’s female authorship. As indicated by the subtitle, ‘Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands’, Butler engages with the Homeric debate of the time on the consistency of the style of the poems and the actual geography of Odysseus’s journey. As for the idea of a female author, a Sicilian girl, this rests not on textual evidence but on a general consideration: as Mary Beard suggests, ‘Only a female writer could have made such crashing errors as the Odyssey-poet does on key areas of male expertise’.[6] Nonetheless, Butler does not lay claim to a cultural alternative in terms of gender, nor does he set out to rewrite the myth from a female point of view, aware as he is that his classicist peers would simply have ignored it. Yet The Authoress manages to create a cultural climate that, on the one hand, renews interest in a ‘contemporary’ reading of the classical epic and, on the other, emphasises the female element it contains. As is well known, Butler was an eclectic intellectual who, by means of irony, parody and satire, challenged cultural authority and the mainstream thinking of his time. For many of his contemporaries (mainly writers) he was an innovator; for others (mainly critics) he was instead an eccentric and provocative figure whose work resisted any kind of critical engagement. However controversial the reception of his work has been, one has to recognise Butler’s strong and unequivocal influence on later generations of writers. Most notably, one cannot but trace the origins of works by James Joyce, G. B. Shaw, Robert Graves and, later, John Fowles — and others fascinated by the theory of a female narrator behind Odysseus’s adventures — back to Butler’s reading of the Odyssey. Here, I should mention the valuable book Homer’s Daughters, Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond edited by Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos for Oxford University Press. While the title clearly alludes to Graves, the book discusses the female response to Homer among twentieth-century writers such as H. D., Elizabeth Cook, Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood and many others. It is a valuable study because it shows how taking ‘male’ texts and rewriting them as female products confirms that ‘new forms of heroism and new forms of epic arise from such critique, which uncovers the overlooked voices of the mothers, wives, and sisters’.[7]

Returning to Butler, his The Authoress certainly influenced Joyce’s vision, bringing the Homeric poem up to date and placing female consciousness (Molly Bloom) at the centre of his analysis of contemporary society. After all, both Joyce and Graves, who had received a Victorian education, must have known Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903)[8] by Butler, two works that anticipated the modernist tendency to deconstruct the literary standard with paradox, parody and demythologisation. As Margot Norris has keenly observed, ‘[Butler and Joyce] degrade myth from instrument of desire — desire for order, for form, for significance — into an instrument of self-critique, a means of uncovering the repressed truths of the social real, of history, buried under mythic desire for heroism, fidelity, idealism’.[9]

Yet, if Joyce takes up Butler’s challenge and transforms it into a creative rereading of the Odyssey, Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daughter comes directly from Butler’s The Authoress insofar as it develops Butler’s narrative and Butler’s characters. The attitude, however, is certainly different: Butler uses irony to manipulate the classical tradition and, even more, to direct how it would be received. Graves uses the instruments of parody, understood as revealing the mechanisms of the narrating process to offer us the story of the ‘true’ origins of the Homeric epic. It is, therefore, not simply a rewriting but rather a sort of ‘prequel’ that precedes the epic itself. As Sheila Murnaghan aptly puts it, ‘a modern revision of the Odyssey, a secondary work derived from the Odyssey, but it presents itself as prior to the Odyssey: it claims to be the true story of which the Odyssey is a revision, and an account of the Odyssey’s origins’ (Murnaghan, p. 58). In more ways than one, Graves seems to identify himself with Hesiod rather than with Homer: he is not content to discuss the ancient world as we have received it, but feels compelled to explain the origins of that world and its underlying principles. In the ‘Historical Note’ at the beginning of Graves’s text, it is interesting to read the following words:

Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, [...] suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler’s theory the least attention [...]. Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler’s arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It recreates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggests how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father’s throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.[10]

This passage reveals Graves’s writing process: it often draws inspiration from casual reading, and even more often becomes a kind of trap from which the writer frees himself only by finishing the story (‘I could not rest until I had written this novel’). It also reveals Graves’s characteristic method of reading myths so as to reorganise them with a primordial intention, as he does, for instance, 1) in The Greek Myths, in which he attempts to provide the original representation and meaning of Greek myths, 2) in I Claudius, in which Claudius writes the ‘real’ story, as opposed to the official invented story, and 3) in The White Goddess, in which the myth of the origin is even clearer.[11]

Graves speaks explicitly of fiction (‘I had written this novel’) and of history (‘It recreates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances [...]’): a combination necessary to bring to life a modern literary work that is both believable and readable. Both qualities are possible because the text demythologises the characters and brings them down to the level of everyday life. Graves takes episodes from the Odyssey and humanises them: Nausicaa, for example, does not have all her suitors killed as Homer does, but spares those who are not directly guilty. Graves also takes a marginal character (Nausicaa is secondary in Homer’s story, marginal both as a woman and as a figure on the outskirts of Homeric geography) and makes her the centre of the ancient world.

Graves’s Nausicaa is the heroine of his story, but she is also the antihero of Graves’s macrotext. Unlike the narrator Claudius and the poet at the service of the White Goddess, Nausicaa tells the true story of the ancient myth and shows that she is perfectly aware of the implications of her point of view. Nausicaa does not replace Homer: in the ‘Prologue’, even before introducing herself to the reader, she announces that she has made a decision:

of securing for myself a posthumous life under the mantle of Homer. May the Blessed Gods, who see all, and whom I never neglect to honour, grant me success in this endeavour, and conceal the fraud. Phemius the bard has sworn an unbreakable oath to put my poem in circulation: thus paying the debt he incurred on that bloody afternoon when, at the risk of my own life, I saved him from the two-edged sword.[12]

As one can see, Nausicaa immediately introduces herself as an active heroine and a self-aware narrator, adopting a very specific marketing strategy by turning the two bards, Homer and Phemius, to her advantage: the former, Homer, is already an immortal poet (‘he will outlast Father Zeus himself’) (ibid); the latter, Phemius, was saved from death by Nausicaa herself, like Ulysses on the beach of the island of Phaecia, and therefore owes her his life. The centrality of her point of view reflects Graves’s conviction that Western civilisation was originally matriarchal. In Hercules, My Shipmate, the poet writes:

The woman, not the man, is always the principal: she is the agent, he the tool always. She gives orders, he obeys. Is it not the woman who chooses the man, and overcomes him by the sweetness of her perfumed presence, and orders him to lie down in the furrow on his back and there riding upon him, as upon a wild horse tamed at her will, takes her pleasures of him and, when he has done, leaves him lying like a dead man?[13]

As Bruce King notes in his 2008 biography of Graves, ‘in seeking a return to a supposed original matriarchy Graves was also offering a political model’.[14] Moreover, in Homer’s Daughter, Nausicaa’s choice of Aethon as her husband overturns the Homeric scheme: in the absence of her father the king, the girl protects both the kingdom and Aethon, the unknown man she finds on the beach of Phaecia (again an alter ego of Odysseus), accepting him only after he promises to obey her. When her father returns, he can only acknowledge his daughter’s decision. Here, the narrative impulse is recognisably the same one that underlies The Greek Myths, where the idea of matriarchy and of a dominating female figure shapes the history of Western civilisation: ‘The Great goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought […] Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch’.[15] Graves treats Nausicaa not only as a modern narrator — reliable and authoritative, consciously shaping stories that make sense of the world — but also as a modern character whose words and actions strive to persuade the reader that this is the one and only account of Odysseus’s adventures.

Of course, since the episodes in the Odyssey are parodied, they often appear out of order and altered. Take, for example, the question of marriage. The narrator says that ‘marriage custom change [...] dowries were inconvenient relics of this outmoded system, and had no place in our patriarchal economy’.[16] In Nausicaa’s world, whoever wished to marry her ‘would find it advantageous both to disburse considerable treasure for that purpose, and to treat [her] with utmost respect when [she] becomes his wife’ (ibid). Nausicaa herself says that ‘it does [not] cost anything to portray [her]self as tall, beautiful and gentle-voiced’ (ibid, p. 18), returning to the description of the Homeric girl as a goddess,[17] but she specifies that ‘I have respected the truth [...] though I do exaggerate at times, like everyone else, and must adapt, disguise, shift, diminish and enlarge incidents to square them with the epic tradition’.[18] Therefore, loyalty to the truth is not as important as respect for the narrative form: what interests Graves is ‘to square [the incidents = the truth] with the epic tradition’.

Choosing a modern narrative form, historical fiction, to convey the truth of the epic is, moreover, a strategy Graves always adopts when rewriting episodes from Greek and Roman classics. Accordingly, the language is succinct, linear and unambiguous, as can also clearly be seen in the translations of the Iliad (The Anger of Achilles) the Odyssey, and The Golden Fleece (1944).[19] Nausicaa’s ‘bardic’ attitude toward narrating stories in a simple, light language makes her story more accessible and thus more plausible to the modern reader. This leads us directly to one of the purposes of Graves’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey. In exposing the difference between the original text and its modern parody, Graves takes us back to his own understanding of the ancient myth as testimony to the centrality of the female principle, the Muse-Goddess.[20]

In poetry, however, the myth of Odysseus is conveyed by a polyphonic, metaphoric and multiple language, but to a completely different effect. Consider, for example, the poem ‘Ulysses’, which dates from 1933:

‘Ulysses’ (1933)

To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done

With woman whether gowned as wife or whore,

Penelope and Circe seemed as one:

She like a whore made his lewd fancies run,

And wifely she a hero to him bore.

Their counter-changings terrified his way:

They were the clashing rocks, Symplegades,

Scylla and Charybdis too were they;

Now angry storms frosting the sea with spray

And now the lotus island’s drunken ease.

They multiplied into the Sirens’ throng,

Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast

Hand and foot helpless to the vessel’s mast,

Yet would not stop his ears: daring their song

He groaned and sweated till that shore was past.

One, two and many: flesh had made him blind,

Flesh had one pleasure only in the act,

Flesh set one purpose only in the mind—

Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find

Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.

His wiles were witty and his fame far known,

Every king’s daughter sought him for her own,

Yet he was nothing to be won or lost.

All lands to him were Ithaca: love-tossed

He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone. (Complete Poems, p. 337)

Here, the epic hero does not recognise the healthy female principle (unlike Aethon-Odysseus in Homer’s Daughter); he confuses Penelope with Circe (‘seemed as one’, line 3) in an erotic and carnal experience of the woman who metaphorically represents the same experience as the Odyssey. Therefore, the proverbial craftiness of the Homeric hero, his intellectual vision, becomes blindness (‘One, two and many: flesh had made him blind’, line 16), and his skill in narrating becomes silence. Rather than ‘polumuthos’ (‘teller of many tales’),[21] here Odysseus seems to be the bearer of an existential failure because he does not distinguish good from bad, the real goddess from the false goddess, so the hero is reduced to ‘nothing to be won or lost’ (line 23). What remains is the erotic dimension of the Homeric character who, after all his wandering, belongs nowhere (‘All lands to him were Ithaca’, line 24). One cannot help but notice that the name of the hero adopted by Graves is not the Greek one (Odysseus) but the Latin one (Ulysses). There has therefore been an inevitable transformation in this poem: the real protagonist becomes the sea (the female element par excellence), while Ulysses, the man, is unable to dominate it and becomes passive: ‘a hero who is essentially passive, the victim rather than the vanquisher in his amatory exploits’.[22] For Graves, Ulysses ends up being the same character he claimed to be in the episode with Polyphemus, namely ‘Nobody’. In other words, the epic hero has been reduced to the condition of a non-hero. Ironically, Odysseus’s very characteristics — his determination, his craftiness, his intelligence, his rhetoric — are now the causes of his confusion, weakness and loss of identity.

It is worth noting that another poem, with the telling title ‘Nobody’, appeared in the same collection, Poems 1930–1933,[23] in which ‘Ulysses’ was first published. It is a brief composition of fourteen lines arranged in seven two-line stanzas:

‘Nobody’

Nobody, ancient mischief, nobody,

Harasses always with an absent body.

Nobody coming up the road, nobody,

Like a tall man in a dark cloak, nobody.

Nobody about the house, nobody.
Like children creeping up the stairs, nobody.

Nobody anywhere in the garden, nobody,
Like a young girl quiet with needlework, nobody.

Nobody coming, nobody, not yet here,

Incessantly welcomed by the wakeful ear.

Until this nobody shall consent to die

Under his curse must everybody lie —

The curse of his envy, of his grief and fright,
Of sudden rape and murder screamed in the night.[24]

This poem is not normally incuded among his most famous. Both its form and subject have been described as strange and sinister, producing a rather disturbing effect through the obsessive repetition of the word ‘nobody’. As can be observed, the poem relies mainly on anaphora and a four-stressed line which contribute to the incantatory tone of the composition, so that the word ‘Nobody’, which opens and closes most of the lines, falls naturally on a stress every time it appears, reinforcing the refrain. The absence of somebody ‘up the road’ (line 3), ‘about the house’ (line 5), ‘in the garden’ (line 7) paradoxically becomes a steady presence that is even more sinister and frightful. In fact, this ‘nobody’ acts as the agent of the verbs ‘harasses’ (line 2), ‘coming’ (line 4), ‘consent to die’ (line 11), ‘curse’ (line 13); at the same time, although it is an eerie and disturbing ‘presence’ since the poem’s inception, ‘nobody’ is compared to domestic, innocuous images (a tall cloaked man, creeping children, a quiet girl with needlework) that turn sinister by association. Each simile takes something ordinary and safe but drains it of comfort simply by repeating ‘nobody’ after each of them, as an inevitable threat. The volta of the poem occurs in line 11 with the shift from third-person description to a conditional curse formula that, in the last four lines, lends a concrete, though dramatic and irrational, presence to the absence, culminating in the heinous violence of the crimes of the last line.

It is worth noting how ‘Nobody’ connects with Graves’s broader themes and the Homeric myth. Beyond the obvious connection to Odysseus, who, in the Cyclops episode, tells Polyphemus that his name is ‘Nobody’ (in Ancient Greek ‘Outis’), the poem recalls one of Odysseus’s main characteristics, namely, intelligence (in Ancient Greek ‘métis’), which in line 1 is evoked as ‘ancient mischief’. By means of synecdoche, ‘Odysseus-Outis/métis’ stands out as a prefiguration of death, since he is a ‘nobody’ that harasses our Western civilisation and whose curse can bring the world only misery and death. Unlike the Odyssey, but as in the poem ‘Ulysses’, the hero’s intelligence turns out to be useless for us as well as for himself since he is ‘nothing to be won or lost’ (see above).

In Graves’s perspective, the Greek hero is transformed into a non-hero as he does not recognise the primacy of the female principle over male hierarchies. As emerges from Nausicaa’s narration in Homer’s Daughter and from the two poems here analysed, the real meaning of Odysseus’s voyage around the Mediterranean Sea is finally revealed: notwithstanding his numerous sensual experiences with different women and the long-awaited reunion with the faithful wife Penelope, Odysseus neither rationally nor emotionally understands the female principle that rules the world, the same principle that Graves recognises and personifies in the White Goddess. Such lack of understanding is symbolised by Odysseus’s loss of his primary characteristic of being a ‘polumuthos’, the incredible tale-teller who enchants Alcinous with the narration of marvellous undertakings. In Book XI, the King of Phaecia, Alcinous, says:

‘ὦ Ὀδυσεῦ, τὸ μὲν οὔ τί σ' ἐΐσκομεν εἰσορόωντες

ἠπεροπῆά τ' ἔμεν καὶ ἐπίκλοπον, οἷά τε πολλοὺς

βόσκει γαῖα μέλαινα πολυσπερέας ἀνθρώπους

ψεύδεά τ' ἀρτύνοντας, ὅθεν κέ τις οὐδὲ ἴδοιτο·

σοὶ δ' ἔπι μὲν μορφὴ ἐπέων, ἔνι δὲ φρένες ἐσθλαί,

μῦθον δ' ὡς ὅτ' ἀοιδὸς ἐπισταμένως κατέλεξας,

πάντων Ἀργείων σέο τ' αὐτοῦ κήδεα λυγρά.

ἀλλ' ἄγε μοι τόδε εἰπὲ καὶ ἀτρεκέως κατάλεξον,

εἴ τινας ἀντιθέων ἑτάρων ἴδες, οἵ τοι ἅμ' αὐτῷ

Ἴλιον εἰς ἅμ' ἕποντο καὶ αὐτοῦ πότμον ἐπέσπον.

νὺξ δ' ἥδε μάλα μακρή, ἀθέσφατος, οὐδέ πω ὥρη

εὕδειν ἐν μεγάρῳ· σὺ δέ μοι λέγε θέσκελα ἔργα’.

‘Odysseus, we do not take you

For the sort of liar and cheat the dark earth breeds

Among men everywhere, telling tall tales

No man could ever test for himself.

Your words have outward grace and wisdom within,

And you have told your tale with the skill of a bard —

All that the Greeks and you yourself have suffered.

But tell me this, as accurately as you can:

Did you see any of your godlike comrades

Who went with you to Troy and met their fate there?

The night is young—and magical. It is not yet time

To sleep in the hall. Tell me these wonders.[25]

Alcinous believes in the authenticity of Odysseus’s words and encourages him to continue telling those ‘wonders’. For Graves, instead, Nausicaa is the Poet, the one who embodies the power of rhetoric that shapes human reality. She represents the female principle that is able to reconstruct and make sense of the ancient as well as the modern world.

Anna Enrichetta Soccio is full professor of English Literature at Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Chieti and Pescara, Italy. She is the author of monograph books on George Meredith, Philip Larkin, and Charles Dickens. She has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics and authors, such as Austen, Scott, Gaskell, Dickens, Broughton, Thomson, Wilde, Larkin, and many others. She is Director of the CUSVE (University Centre for the Victorian and Edwardian Studies) and Coordinator of a PhD program in English Studies.