Abstract
Not merely a physical structure or a geographical location but always an emotional space, home is among the most emotionally complex and resonant concepts in our psychic vocabularies, given its associations with the most influential, and often most ambivalent, elements of our earliest physical environment and psychological experiences as well as their ripple effect throughout our lives. More than two millennia ago, Homer tapped this motif on an epic scale: Odysseus’s encounters with monsters, temptations, and challenges prepare him for his ultimate return to the point of his original departure where, to invoke a passage from Eliot’s Four Quartets, he knows the place for the first time. Twenty years after his departure from Ithaka, both Odysseus and home have been transformed.
Keywords
Female Character Original Departure Emotional Space Negative Baggage Feminist ConsciousnessPreview
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Notes
- 1.See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1953; rpt., New York: Knopf, 1971);Google Scholar
- and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; rpt., New York: Dell, 1964).Google Scholar
- 2.A number of novels by women published during the late 1960s and the 1970s mirrored those views, representing the perspective of the trapped woman or “mad housewife” who felt compelled to leave home to escape from the tyranny of domesticity and to find herself. Representative novels include Sue Kaufman, The Diary of a Mad Housewife (New York: Random House, 1967);Google Scholar
- Anne Richardson Roiphe, Up the Sandbox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970);Google Scholar
- Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973);Google Scholar
- and Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (New York: Summit, 1977).Google Scholar
- 6.Roberta Rubenstein, Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).Google Scholar
- 7.See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978);Google Scholar
- and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar