R E M O V E E N R I C H M E N T 1 9 M AY

EPIC & GENDER

W H Y M I G H T I T B E I M P O RTA N T T O L O O K
AT T H E R O L E O F W O M E N I N E P I C ?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgWGvHlLays
W H AT C A N W O M E N D O I N E P I C ?
• What roles would you expect women to play in an epic poem?
 • Each of the following pictures shows a woman from a famous
classical epic. Try to figure out each woman’s role / ‘job
description.’ Can you guess who any of them are?

W H AT C A N
WOMEN DO
IN EPIC?
HELEN OF TROY
• Paris taking her from her husband, Menelaus, is the reason why the Trojan War between the
Trojans and the Greeks begins
• Supposed to have been the most beautiful woman in the world
PENELOPE
• Wife of Odysseus in the Odyssey
• Pursued by suitors who are trying to get her to remarry (because Odysseus has been gone for
nearly 20 years)
• Says she’ll marry them after she finishes weaving her tapestry
• Undoes her tapestry at night
CIRCE
• Sorceress
• Seen in the Odyssey
• Turns the men who land on her island into animals!
• Falls in love with Odysseus, who stays with her for a year on his journey home
ANDROMACHE
• Wife of Hector, hero of Troy (in the Iliad)
• Tries to convince him not to go to back to war after he comes within the walls of Troy
• He tells her to go home
• (and…the unnamed nurse holding Hector and Andromache’s son)
• NB: how ready for war does Hector look in the painting we just saw?
DIDO
• Queen of Carthage, where Aeneas stops on his way to Rome
• Caused by the goddess Venus to fall in love with Aeneas
• Is abandoned by Aeneas
EVE
• Adam’s helpmeet
• Tempts him to eat the apple which God had forbidden
PA S S A G E 1 : T H E PA R T I N G O F
HECTOR & ANDROMACHE
• 1) What is Andromache trying to persuade Hector to do?

• 2) What reasons does she give?

• 3) What parts of this speech fit the stereotypes of a ‘passive woman’? What parts don’t fit?
PA S S A G E 2 : T H E D E AT H O F D I D O
 
1) How does Dido hope that Aeneas will respond to her death?
 
 
2) What parts of this speech/story fit with the stereotype of the ‘passive’ epic woman? What
parts do not fit?
 
 
PA S S A G E 3 : H E L E N TA L K S T O
PRIAM, KING OF TROY
1) What impression do we get of Helen’s character?
 
 
2) How does this fit in with the stereotype of the passive epic woman?
 
PA S S A G E 4 : C I R C E A N D
ODYSSEUS
 
1) What do you are Circe’s motivations in seducing Odysseus?
 
 
2) How does this fit with the stereotype of the ‘passive’ woman in epic?
 
 
 A NEW KIND OF EPIC? ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING, AURORA
LEIGH(1856)
Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
A little overgrown, (I think there is) Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s self
Their sole work is to represent the age, Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age, And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat, What is the poet
saying about epic
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, As Regent Street to poets. here? How might
women in this new
And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Never flinch,
kind of epic be
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch portrayed
differently?
Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. Upon the burning lava of a song,
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age: