Blog Post #3.

We finished the Odyssey in class this week! I was very excited...until we were assigned a paper- not that I hadn't known about it of course. But I was writing my essay today thinking I was going to write about one theme, and then I experienced a revelation and am very proud of myself for coming up with a contradictory thesis that was exactly the opposite of what I originally intended. I'm writing about the roles of women in the story. At first, looking at the book comprehensively, I had thought that women played a big part and displayed power, independance and other charateristics commonly associated with men. However, as I looked closer, these supposed actions were within themselves contradictory. For example, we see Athena's power to transform herself into Mentor, a man who guides Odysseus and Telemachus, appearing before kings of other lands and many other people. But the fact that Athena has to turn herself into a man in the first place is disparaging. It illustrates that a woman showing herself in public to be bold, talking to mean as equals and taking leadership would not have a very a good reception. She needed to be a man so that people would listen to her.