An Epic for the Ladies: Contextualizing Samuel Butler's Theory of Odyssey Authorship

Abstract

The issue of the personal voice in a literary or critical text raises a number of questions: does a written text contain more useful information if we know about the background of the writer? Is a reader better able to assess information or interpret a text if that reader knows where the text originates, what physical body or social identity or individual personality has created and shaped it? I came to the panel on personal voice at the 1996 meeting of the American Philological Association because these questions have vexed me on both a personal and professional level. I have come to understand the personal voice as a rhetorical posture that gains meaning according to its context and the motivations of its speaker or writer. In this paper, I will discuss my interpretation of Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey in the context of my own graduate school experiences. I will demonstrate the varieties of the “personal” as they are opposed to the “professional” in Butler’s work, specifically how the “personal” is allied with the feminine voice. I will then discuss the personal voice as a mode of discourse in the culture of professional training in graduate school and my own experience with this. In conclusion, I suggest that responsible pedagogy must engage with the issue of personal voice at all levels in order to deepen and enrich the imaginative and expressive lives of students and to aid their critical faculties as readers. The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) was written by Samuel Butler (1835‐1902), a Victorian amateur scholar and satirist who, after enduring the harsh life of a clergyman’s son, amassed a fortune in New Zealand and went on to write Erewhon (1872), a satire of English social and economic