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"Like a lioness caught in the toils with huntsmen hemming her in on every side she thought and thought till she sank into a slumber, and lay on her bed bereft of thought and motion.
--Book IV
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Read the poem
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Brief background
- Trojan war, Ulysses gone twenty years, spent several years on various islands- infidelity abounding
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Penelope as an archetype: faithful wife
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Odyssey telling of story from primarily Telemachus and Ulysses’ points of view
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Purpose: reveal Penelope’s side, implying what occurred while Ulysses wasn’t there to defend Ithaca from her suitors
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Tone: Penelope tries to be callous and to injure Ulysses with her own infidelities, but strong undercurrents of deep betrayal
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Audience: Ulysses, also readers of Odyssey who never thought to question Penelope’s perfect exterior
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Run through of more important lit. terms
- Knee-deep in blood, hip-deep in goddesses
- First hint at her worry instead of righteous anger
- Parallelism: love and war, love and hate musical
- Diction in stanza 4
- Unfaithful, but not necessarily willingly
- Motivation: pain at Ulysses’ own adultery
- Parallel structure stanza 5
- Diction, stanza 6—connection between ‘suitors’ in 17 and 10
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Meter
- Stallings’s view on meter while writing lines on board
- Summary of paragraph on meter page
- Line 3, line 6, line 14, line 15, last stanza, tone shift, caesura
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