The tree-bed is the ultimate answer to the question raised at the start of the poem: What does Odysseus choose when he rejects Calypso’s offer? It is something deeply characteristic of Odysseus himself: like his most famous invention, the Wooden Horse, the bed is a wood structure that contains humans and a secret, and allows close friends to inhabit a hidden place of safety, even surrounded by enemies. Odysseus, the master storyteller, is also the master builder—of horses, ships, beds, plans of attack, and means of escape. As soon as Calypso allows her lover to leave her island, he begins work constructing a raft; his detailed, obsessive account of how he built his marriage bed echoes that earlier moment of construction. In leaving Calypso, Odysseus chooses something that he built with his own mind and hands, rather than something given to him. Whereas Calypso longs to hide, clothe, feed, and possess him, Athena enables Odysseus to construct his own schemes out of the materials she provides.
But the bed is a product of nature, as well as of human labor; it is growing, alive, and divinely blessed. Trees are not, in fact, permanent or immovable objects; Odysseus cuts down trees to make his raft. This bed is thus a rather different kind of symbol from the nailed-down bed to which the frustrated narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is confined (a symbol of the restrictions imposed on women in nineteenth-century New England). Odysseus’ bed is difficult to move, but not immovable. Its permanence and its mutability stem from the same cause—the life of the olive tree. In returning to Ithaca and to this bed, Odysseus has chosen a world in which his own work is part of something larger than himself, and where he is woven into relationships that are both rooted and changing.
When Penelope and Odysseus are finally reunited, Odysseus puts his arms around his wife, and a simile invokes the experience of shipwrecked swimmers, suddenly catching sight of land, and crawling to shore, “their skin all caked with brine.” We must initially think that this image applies primarily to Odysseus himself—who is the one embracing Penelope when the image begins and who has, in real life, experienced shipwreck. But the narrator then suggests that it is Penelope, not Odysseus, who is like these survivors: “So glad she was to see her own dear husband, / and her white arms would not let go his neck.” A surprising slippage happens through the imagery, from the man’s to the woman’s point of view. With Calypso, Odysseus would have been frozen into the role of the weak, dependent survivor of shipwreck. The mortal Penelope may not know all of Odysseus’ many identities and may not have plumbed his capacity for lies. But she understands his suffering, because she too has lived through twenty years of pain—caused by his own absence, in war and with Calypso.
Hated Odysseus
Odysseus is defined by his mutual loving relationships—with his wife, Penelope; his patron goddess, Athena; his father, Laertes; his dead mother, Anticleia; his son, Telemachus—and by his less-mutual loving relationships with Calypso, Nausicaa, Eurycleia, and Circe. He is also defined, even more explicitly, by his enemies, those who hate him and dislike him. In Book 19, we learn about Odysseus’ grandfather Autolycus, whose own name suggests “Real Wolf,” and “who was the best / of all mankind at telling lies and stealing.” Autolycus gave the baby Odysseus his name, based on the fact that he himself has managed to make so many enemies:
“I am
disliked by many, all across the world,
and I dislike them back.” (19.406–8)
The verb odussomai, meaning “to be angry at,” “to dislike,” or “to hate,” sounds similar to Odysseus. Athena connects Odysseus with the same verb in Book 1, asking Zeus why he bears a grudge against her favorite: “Why do you dismiss Odysseus?” she asks. The etymology suggests that Odysseus is himself much disliked, by both gods and other human beings, and also that he takes after his grandfather by acting in hostile fashion to other people: he tricks, steals from, and hates. Poseidon is, of course, his most powerful enemy, but Odysseus arouses dislike, hatred, and anger in many others during the course of the narrative, and displays his own capacity for rage.
Odysseus is the hero of his own story, and the poem to some extent glorifies its protagonist and valorizes his claims to dominance. But it also articulates some important questions about the moral qualities of this liar, pirate, colonizer, deceiver, and thief, who is so often in disguise, absent, or napping, while other people—those he owns, those he leads—suffer and die, and who directly kills so many people.
Odysseus’ use of aggression and violence is presented as problematic in certain ways. The poem raises questions about whether Odysseus, as a fighter who has spent ten years at war, sacking and pillaging a foreign city, can adapt himself enough to succeed in an entirely different context—or whether he will bring the battlefield home with him. In some cases, we see Odysseus managing to modify the conventions of the Homeric battlefield to fit a new challenge. For instance, when he first meets the young Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, he supplicates her—an action familiar from warriors on the Trojan battlefield, when one man kneels in abjection and touches the knees and beard of another, to beg for his life. But in this new version of the formulaic supplication scene, Odysseus is kneeling before somebody who has no beard and who poses no kind of military threat. The supplicator, in this version, is rather more physically threatening than the person to whom he prays. Odysseus studiously avoids the traditional touching of the knees, which would only alarm the girl, and shows his own ability to adapt techniques practiced at Troy for entirely different situations.
But the poem also seems to question how fully this epic hero can adapt to a new, nonmilitary world. When Odysseus is about to go through the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, Circe warns him not to put on his armor and try to fight against Scylla, which will be futile and will only make the situation worse. But Odysseus insists on doing so—increasing the danger to his men. Similarly, in leaving the island of Polyphemus the Cyclops, Odysseus is unable to resist shouting back,
“Cyclops! If any mortal asks you how
your eye was mutilated and made blind,
say that Odysseus, the city-sacker,
Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithaca,
destroyed your sight.” (9.502–6)
Odysseus cannot resist the urge to gain kleos—the honor that comes from being the named subject of heroic legend. He is able to become nameless (“No man”) only for a little while.
One of the epithets most commonly used of Odysseus is polytlas, which means “much-enduring.” It may suggest how much Odysseus has endured and suffered, and it may also suggest how much he is capable of enduring: his stubbornness, his tenacity, his courage, his relentless drive to achieve his own ends. In modern terms, we can see Odysseus as a veteran soldier with his own version of PTSD: he is moody, prone to weeping, often withdrawn, and liable to sudden fits of aggression. We can also, rather differently, see Odysseus as a man who keeps on repeating the same behavior patterns that he has displayed in Troy. He succeeded in taking the foreign city by a mixture of aggression with deceitful infiltration, in the Wooden Horse, which the Trojans themselves took into their town; he succeeds in taking back his own household through much the same means, sneaking inside the house in hidden form (not inside a horse, but inside the body of a beggar), and emerging to slaughter the inhabitants.