{"id":111042,"date":"2026-08-04T17:21:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T21:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=111042"},"modified":"2026-08-04T17:21:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T21:21:35","slug":"opinion-allison-glazebrook-discusses-the-portrayal-of-women-in-christopher-nolans-the-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2026\/08\/opinion-allison-glazebrook-discusses-the-portrayal-of-women-in-christopher-nolans-the-odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Allison Glazebrook discusses the portrayal of women in Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece written by Allison Glazebrook, Professor of Classics and Archaeology at Brock University<\/em>, originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Casting Lupita Nyong\u2019o as Helen and Elliot Page\u00a0as Sinon the soldier\u00a0were bold and exciting choices in Christopher Nolan\u2019s\u00a0The Odyssey.<\/p>\n

Both signalled a departure from conventional, hyper-masculine Hollywood treatments of Greek myth.\u00a0The comments of Elon Musk and many others on X\u00a0confirmed Nolan\u2019s success in that regard.<\/p>\n

But as a scholar of ancient Greek literature and culture, I found the film disappoints in its portrayal of women.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s women are (mostly) strong independent characters central to his anti-war theme. However, they play singular roles \u2014 wife, mother, caregiver, queen, witch \u2014 that lack the sexual and intellectual complexity of Homer\u2019s poem. Their desires, agency and choices are either not as vibrant or lost.<\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s women are so psychologically complex in\u00a0The Odyssey\u00a0that in\u00a01897, British writer Samuel Butler\u00a0argued its author was actually a woman. (The Odyssey\u00a0emerged from an\u00a0oral tradition, and its authorship remains unknown.\u00a0\u201cHomer\u201d is more of a literary convention than historical fact).<\/p>\n

Penelope<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s Penelope knows the powerlessness of a queen whose husband has been absent for years, and whose kingdom is threatened by men seeking to take his place.<\/p>\n

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\nShe uses her skill as a weaver to delay the suitors pressuring her to remarry, claiming she must finish weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law while secretly undoing her work each night.<\/p>\n

Her role as a faithful wife and dedicated mother are pivotal to Homer\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey. Penelope at her loom has become shorthand for female sexual virtue, appearing in art from classical red-figure vase paintings to neoclassical portraits, like that of\u00a0Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807).<\/p>\n

In Nolan\u2019s film, Penelope is never far from her loom. Significantly, one of the most important moments in Homer\u2019s story is missing: her\u00a0test of Odysseus after his return.<\/p>\n

The Homeric Penelope wishes to verify Odysseus\u2019 identity after his long absence. Knowing he carved their marital bed from a rooted olive tree, she tells a servant to make the bed up outside the bedchamber to see how Odysseus responds. He suspects she has been unfaithful until he learns the bed has remained fixed in place.<\/p>\n

Her trick of the bed cements her as the equal of the\u00a0polutropos\u00a0man (\u201cthe man of many wiles\u201d). But it also requires her to voice the possibility of her own infidelity.<\/p>\n

The question of Penelope\u2019s virtue\u00a0hangs over Homer\u2019s account when she appears to the suitors, with even Telemachus questioning whether Odysseus is really his father.<\/p>\n

Penelope\u2019s charged mythical tradition is taken up in\u00a0Margaret Atwood\u2019s Penelopiad, which reimagines the story from the perspective of Penelope and\u00a0her 12 maids. Her story has also become a vehicle for exploring the\u00a0complex emotions of spouses of soldiers deployed to combat zones.<\/p>\n

Circe<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most engaging of Nolan\u2019s female characters is Circe, and not simply because of the scene in which she transforms Odysseus\u2019s men into swine.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s through her that Nolan comments on\u00a0sexual violence as a strategy of warfare, not an unfortunate consequence. In doing so, he builds\u00a0on American novelist Madeline Miller\u2019s \u00a0reading of Circe\u2019s craft as a defence against male violence, although that is never threatened in the original poem.<\/p>\n

Her novel\u00a0Circe\u00a0is one of a number of recent adaptations of Homer, including\u00a0Pat Barker\u2019s Women of Troy series\u00a0and\u00a0Natalie Haynes\u2019 A Thousand Ships, that give voice to women characters and apply a feminist lens to Homeric epic.<\/p>\n

Circe\u2019s identity as a witch in Nolan\u2019s film is a more of a later tradition. In Homer, she is a goddess with knowledge of plants, like other gods. Hermes offers Odysseus the protective plant, moly, so he can resist her drugs.<\/p>\n

In Homer, Circe\u2019s singing entices Odysseus\u2019 men to her house, where she transforms them into pigs. When Odysseus follows, he forces her to restore his men to human form. He then allows Circe to seduce him, enjoying her hospitality and sharing her bed for a year.<\/p>\n

Helen<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most disappointing of Nolan\u2019s portrayals is Helen, whose abduction by the Trojan prince Paris is said to have sparked the Trojan War. In antiquity, the Spartans honoured her with a shrine as part of a\u00a0hero cult.<\/p>\n

In Nolan\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey, Helen is a domesticated, repentant and physically disfigured beauty. The film reworks her grand entrance from the epic: Menelaus turns Helen\u2019s face to Telemachus, Odysseus\u2019 son, revealing a scar and questioning whether she is still desirable.<\/p>\n

Nolan presents her as more of\u00a0a minor character\u00a0than the poem does. Her most significant moment in the film is when Telemachus is taking his leave and she requests he tell Penelope how sorry she is for all the pain she has caused.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Homer\u2019s Helen is more\u00a0complex and engaging. When she first appears in\u00a0The Odyssey, she narrates her own tale, explaining how near the end of the war, and no longer influenced by Aphrodite, she was ready to return home. She recalls helping (or perhaps seducing) Odysseus when he visited Troy disguised as a beggar.<\/p>\n

Menelaus then describes how she walked around the Trojan horse calling to the warriors inside in the voice of their wives, enticing them to come out. Together, these stories highlight her cunning alongside her sexuality and agency, which remained central to\u00a0later versions of her story.<\/p>\n

The Greek lyric poet Alcaeus slut-shames her. The poet Stesichorus and historian Herodotus offer versions in which Helen was in Egypt during the war (her sexual virtue intact), with an\u00a0eid\u014dlon\u00a0(\u201ca double\u201d) taking her place at Troy.<\/p>\n

The playwright Euripides explores both versions of Helen in two different plays,\u00a0Trojan Women\u00a0and\u00a0Helen.\u00a0Sappho, one of the few female voices from the ancient Greek world, praises her for choosing Paris over her husband and daughter because she acted on her desire.<\/p>\n

Each version demands engagement with her sexuality and reflects on a sexual autonomy and power not permitted to the average ancient Greek woman.<\/p>\n

Women as desiring subjects<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey\u00a0is more than 2,500 years old. Its survival depends partly on the many ways later generations have retold and reinterpreted it.<\/p>\n

In Nolan\u2019s film, the women characters are reimagined for an anti-war tale \u2014 a timely theme to be sure. Circe punishes Odysseus\u2019s men for their war crimes, Helen becomes a victim of a soldier\u2019s rage and Penelope an audience for a soldier\u2019s self-reflection.<\/p>\n

But in doing so, Nolan continues a long tradition of appropriating women\u2019s stories through a man\u2019s perspective. It misses an opportunity to explore women as desiring subjects with sexual agency who struggle against double standards that judge their choices and cast them as a source of anxiety.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey\u00a0reminds us that violence, even sexual violence, is still more acceptable to viewers than female sexual autonomy.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Allison Glazebrook, Professor of Classics and Archaeology at Brock University, recently published a piece in The Conversation about the portrayal of women in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111044,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37,6],"tags":[4190,11446,384,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111042"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111046,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111042\/revisions\/111046"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}