Sheka: Week 3

 Classic Lit versus Modern Sensibilities

Spoiler alerts for The Merchant of Venice and The Odyssey. 

I doubt it’s a surprise to anyone that classic literature isn’t very woke. Most of the stuff that we’ve had to read in English classes were rife with sexism and racism. Sometimes, it was very blatant, such as in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where the main character, Shylock (a Jewish moneylender living in Venice), is subjected to just about every anti-Semetic insult under the sun and is forced to convert to Christianity in order to stay alive. Other times, it’s more subtle, such as when Odysseus cheats on Penelope, his wife, with almost every named female character in the Odyssey, then threatens to kill her if she was unfaithful to him after believing he was dead for the past 20 years. So yeah. Not a great showing from Shakespeare or Homer. 

That being said, is it really fair to judge these texts and others by our modern standards? I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but Elizabethan England wasn’t the greatest environment for pro-Jewish sentiment. Shakespeare, to his credit, at least made an attempt to make Shylock a somewhat fleshed-out character rather than a one-note stereotype. Don’t get me wrong; Shylock’s portrayal is definitely stereotypical; he’s a Jewish moneylender who tries to get a literal pound of flesh from the guy who stiffed him, for God’s sake. But Shakespeare weaves in Shylock’s sense of justice, and his anger of being betrayed, along with those negative traits. In short, it’s an incredibly complicated issue that has stumped critics, one that I shouldn’t be passing judgement on. 

As for Homer, ancient Greece was a horrible place to be a woman. In many places, women had roughly the same status as slaves. They were the property of their fathers until marriage, where they then became the property of their husbands. They rarely held positions of power or any sort of control over their lives. Homer, for all of his faults, actually gives Penelope some agency in the story. She tries to delay her marriage to one of the suitors living in her house, and intentionally creates an impossible contest for the suitors to win her hand. Keep in mind that everybody thought that her husband was dead; the socially acceptable thing to have done would have been to remarry. Yet, she chose to remain faithful. It ended up working out for her in the end, but her decisions could have easily made her a social pariah. 

I really don’t want this to sound like I’m defending racist and misogynistic ideals. My point is that injust ideals don’t exist in a vacuum, and that these authors (or rather, poet and bard) don’t deserve hate for repeating the ideals of their times. Alternatively, we could read literature from  more marginalized storytellers instead; they have just as important a story to tell as privileged storytellers.