Hall of Shame time: yes, as of three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, I haven't *quite* finished the book! Bad girl!
Okay, but I'm *almost* done!
Anyway. Just wanted to ask this: what is up with Telemachus and Penelope? Does he *ever* have a good word to say about her?
Is this typical teenage attitude, exacerbated by difficult circumstances?
Just reading in Book 20:
"Dear nurse, how did you treat the stranger in our house? With bed and board? Or leave him to lie untended? That would be mother's way -- sensible as she is -- all impulse, doting over some worthless stranger, turning a good man out to face the worst."
He grudgingly gives her some credit for the sense and cleverness everyone knows she possesses, but only parenthetically, within a complaint about her "way."
Going ahead and projecting anachronistic twenty-first century values onto ancient Greece: does he secretly blame her for his father's absence? The way children will blame their parents for things the parents can't help, because the children are angry at feeling so powerless? Children will even blame parents for dying, or being ill.
And this blaming can be all the more potent for not being consciously acknowledged.
