Odysseus in Ino's Veil: Feminine Headdress and the Hero in Odyssey 5
2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 131; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/apa.2001.0011
ISSN1533-0699
Autores Tópico(s)Philippine History and Culture
ResumoOdysseus in Ino's Veil:Feminine Headdress and the Hero in Odyssey 5 Dianna Rhyan Kardulias "Odysseus tests all the limits of his culture."1 Introduction: Feminine Headdress and the Hero As Odysseus journeys home, from "submerged identity" back to wholeness and reintegration, from the languishing "dangers of exotic vice" back to the firm-founded bed of Penelope, even from death back into life, various devices and disguises demonstrate his epithet .2 Homeric scholarship has long been engaged to investigate his polytropic deviousness. One maneuver, however, remains unappreciated: his brief, clumsy, aquatic début wearing a veil (5.333-462). When Ino-Leukothea spies the shipwrecked (or rather raft-wrecked) Odysseus struggling in the ocean between Ogygia and Skheria, she pities him and loans him her veil (). [End Page 23] (Od. 5.333-53)3 The daughter of Kadmos, sweet-stepping Ino called Leukothea,saw him. She had once been one who spoke as a mortal,but now in the gulfs of the sea she holds degree as a goddess.She took pity on Odysseus as he drifted and suffered hardship,and likening herself to a winged gannet she came upout of the water and perched on the raft and spoke a word to him:"Poor man, why is Poseidon the shaker of the earth so bitterlycankered against you, to give you such a harvest of evils?And yet he will not do away with you, for all his anger.But do as I say, since you seem to me not lacking in good sense.Take off these clothes, and leave the raft to drift at the winds' will,and then strike out and swim with your hands and make for a landfallon the Phaiakian country, where your escape is destined.And here, take this veil, it is immortal, and fasten it underyour chest; and there is no need for you to die, nor to suffer.But when with both your hands you have taken hold of the mainland,untie the veil and throw it out in the wine-blue waterfar from the land; and turn your face away as you do so."So spoke the goddess and handed him the veil, then herselfin the likeness of a gannet slipped back into the heavingsea, and the dark and tossing water closed above her. [End Page 24] Although at first Odysseus is understandably suspicious of divine feminine assistance, when faced with imminent drowning he follows the goddess's directions. He strips, ties on her immortal , and swims for it: (Od. 5.372-75) he stripped off the clothing which the divine Kalypso had given him,and rapidly tied the veil of Ino around his chest, thenthrew himself head first in the water, and with his arms spreadstroked as hard as he could. Later he returns the garment to her: (Od. 5.458-62) But when he got his breath back and the spirit regathered intohis heart, he at last unbound the veil of the goddess from him,and let it go, to drift in the seaward course of the river,and the great wave carried it out on the current, and presently Inotook it back into her hands. Commentators on this scene have focused on the parallel between Leukothea's assistance here and Athena's help quieting the waves later (5.382-87),4 Ino's mythic apotheosis, Leukothea's historical cult, or the folkloric motif of the divine helper who brings the hero a talisman.5 But let us attend to this veil's [End Page 25] unique function (as a kind of "lifebelt")6 and Odysseus' singular treatment of it. Our justification might begin with a matter of emphasis: the word is stressed in Odyssey 5 as it is nowhere else in the Iliad or Odyssey; it is repeated four times within approximately 100 lines here (at 346, 351, 373, and 459), but is widely scattered in its eleven other occurrences.7 The emphasis on the veil is likely to reflect the initiatory cult of Leukothea, whose founding myths involved gender reversal and offered reassurance to sailors that the goddess would not allow them to drown at sea...
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