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

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 injustices. The Authoress of the Odyssey is Butler's foray into classical scholarship, though judged by his critics to be nothing more than a satirist's fancy in positing female authorship of the Odyssey. In contrast with most works of classical scholarship of his time, Butler writes both in his own, personal, voice and in a non-personal, or professional, voice, and thus challenges the ascendancy of one over the other.

Butler's claim of female authorship for the Odyssey is not the characteristic that makes this a radical book. In fact, his arguments in support of a woman author are entirely based on the common essentialist prejudices that Butler shared with his contemporaries. What I found radical, however, was the play of prose styles in Butler's use of personal and professional voices. As he suggests female authorship of a venerated classical work, Butler's "scholarship" essentially mocks the scholarly mainstream by utilizing the unconventional proof of personal experiences with women to make his case. By confronting his readers with such personal anecdotes, Butler challenges the esteemed objectivity that he perceived drove the scholars around him.

Butler's search for the source of the Odyssey, its human source of beauty, led him to approach the Odyssey by first searching for its author. Rather than a text, Butler sought an artist. He writes (1897.6):

Fascinated, however, as I at once was by its amazing interest and beauty, I had an ever-present sense of a something wrong, of a something that was eluding me, and of a riddle which I could not read. The more I reflected upon the words, so luminous and so transparent, the more I felt a darkness behind them that I must pierce before I could see the heart of the writer--and this is what I wanted; for art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist.

This statement explains Butler's purported motivations for his study, as well as his aesthetic stance towards the work. His motivations are not so strange: searching for ur-texts and, by implication, the identities of authors of epics constituted the major work...