Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey disappoints in its portrayal of Homer’s women

Menelaus then describes how she walked around the Trojan horse calling to the warriors inside in the voice of their wives, enticing them to come out. Together, these stories highlight her cunning alongside her sexuality and agency, which remained central to later versions of her story.

The Greek lyric poet Alcaeus slut-shames her. The poet Stesichorus and historian Herodotus offer versions in which Helen was in Egypt during the war (her sexual virtue intact), with an eidōlon (“a double”) taking her place at Troy.

The playwright Euripides explores both versions of Helen in two different plays, Trojan Women and Helen. Sappho, one of the few female voices from the ancient Greek world, praises her for choosing Paris over her husband and daughter because she acted on her desire.

Each version demands engagement with her sexuality and reflects on a sexual autonomy and power not permitted to the average ancient Greek woman.

Women as desiring subjects

Homer’s Odyssey is more than 2,500 years old. Its survival depends partly on the many ways later generations have retold and reinterpreted it.

In Nolan’s film, the women characters are reimagined for an anti-war tale — a timely theme to be sure. Circe punishes Odysseus’s men for their war crimes, Helen becomes a victim of a soldier’s rage and Penelope an audience for a soldier’s self-reflection.

But in doing so, Nolan continues a long tradition of appropriating women’s stories through a man’s perspective. It misses an opportunity to explore women as desiring subjects with sexual agency who struggle against double standards that judge their choices and cast them as a source of anxiety.

Nolan’s Odyssey reminds us that violence, even sexual violence, is still more acceptable to viewers than female sexual autonomy.

Allison Glazebrook, Professor of Classics and Archaeology, Brock University

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