The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women’s Epic Poetry by Jeremy M. Downes (review)

Jeremy Downes set out to discover “whether or not epics by women existed, and if so, what they were like” (290), and this accessible volume will certainly engage those who are new to the area. Covering a wide range of material from the Sumerian Descent of Inanna (ca. 1900-1600 BCE) right up to the modern day and arguing for the application of the term “epic” to some works not traditionally considered as such, Downes reveals “affinities” between these works by women and begins to sketch out a female tradition of epic composition and performance.

The book is divided into twenty-two short chapters, each introduced by a brief personal anecdote from Downes’s family life; the aim of these may be to highlight the domestic dimension with which he argues so many female epic poets are concerned, and frequently they do lead into his argument in a charming, if slightly surprising, way. Eschewing a chronological structure in favor of a thematic one, on the grounds that “chronology presupposes tradition” (22), Downes nevertheless provides a useful historical overview in the third chapter. Thereafter, the thematic framework takes hold, with chapters on women’s use of lyric strategies in their epics (chapter 4) and on mythic structures such as the katabasis (chapters 5, 6, and 7). Acknowledging the recent growth in the scholarship on women’s performance of oral poetry (103), Downes goes on to consider female performers of epic in the Finnish, African, Icelandic, and Russian traditions; he demonstrates that while some women were innovators, the cultural tradition typically proves more powerful than the gender of the bard in an oral culture, and the content of the poems makes it hard to discern whether the performer was male or female. Nevertheless, Downes’s primary concern is to expose women’s role in the creation and performance of epic poetry and to overturn the consistent pattern of concealment that patriarchal history has subjected female poets to. Downes then considers the role of textiles both within an epic narrative and as a form of epic itself, before arguing that both Samuel Butler’s case for a female author of the Odyssey and Harold Bloom’s argument that the writer “J” (author of parts of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers) was a woman have the power to overturn our traditional readings and cast the texts into new light.

A number of minor epics written by female authors in girlhood are discussed in chapter 11, including the twelve-year-old Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Battle of Marathon; her much later Aurora Leigh (1856) serves as an important linchpin of Downes’s volume. The next section, on Sharon Doubiago’s Hard Country (1982), is one of the strongest. Downes returns to material he discussed in Bernard Schweizer’s edited volume Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic, 1621–1982 (2006) and his own Recursive Desire (1997) for these chapters. It is satisfying to see him dedicate more space to a single text here, since in preceding chapters many works are discussed and dispatched with almost unseemly haste. Downes argues that Doubiago not only responded to the earlier epic tradition but even scorned epics by women such as H. D., whose Helen in Egypt (1961) may be seen to be still too much in thrall to the patriarchal tradition of epic (198).

Women’s focus on “monumental time,” manifested in events like births and weddings, and on cyclical time rather than the more linear time of most epics by men is illustrated in the works of Mina Loy, Lyn Hejinian, and Vita Sackville-West, Downes argues. This leads into a brief discussion of “feminist epics” and the use of catalogues of women and their achievements. In chapter 17, he goes on to posit the idea that religion is even more important to epics by women than to those by men, a claim he supports with examples as far...