“FOUND MY HOME AT LAST”: A WOMAN’S ODYSSEY, A WARRIOR’S HOMECOMING

AHONA CHANDA, UG III, ROLL NO. 30

Abstract: The trope of homecoming, a defining feature of Greek literature, such as The Odyssey, has been monopolised by the masculine time and again. A celebrated warrior-hero returns home to more celebration and adulation, and the focus on his journey marginalises the heroine’s altogether. The heroine is passive, submissive and rarely protests when her individuality is compromised.The Penelopes of the world are remembered merely as the hero’s consort. This paper delineates the steps of a heroine’s journey to her home with the help of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, by studying the character arc of Arya Stark in the popular television series Game of Thrones. By revealing the many, far-reaching similarities that she shares with Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic, this paper seeks to understand the cultural significance of a woman’s homecoming, and how that both manipulates and challenges conventional myths.

In an essay titled “Inquiring into Nostos and Its Cognates”, Anna Bonifazi analyses Homer’s The Odyssey in terms of the exploration and portrayal of its principal trope, homecoming. While nostos, a term inextricably bound up with Greek mythology, is often understood simply as homecoming, Bonifazi writes, “In Homer, nostos means first and foremost ‘return home from Troy by sea.”<1>

The second oldest extant work of Western literature, believed by many scholars to have been composed around 8th century BC, The Odyssey is the tale of Odysseus’ ten year long journey back to his kingdom, Ithaca, after the Trojan War<2>. His prolonged absence from Ithaca leads his wife, Penelope and his son, Telemachus to believe that he has perished in the war.

His kingdom gradually descends into chaos due to a a crowd of 108 intractable, young men, called the Mnesteres, who were competing for the supposedly widowed Penelope’s hand in marriage. Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, entering his home disguised as a beggar. He then slays the suitors with the help of his son Telemachus, to whom he had revealed his identity. In the end, Odysseus well and truly returns home, for now he returns to his people as himself.

In her essay, Bonifazi broadens the scope of the word nostos to include a psycho-geographical journey that culminates in homecoming, throughout which the person making the journey must necessarily preserve his identity. She writes, “Odysseus experiences nostos at many different levels. He is the subject of macro as well as of micro nostos tales throughout the Odyssey we have. Furthermore, he is a most successful nostos hero: he saves himself[…]”<3> This saving implies saving his individuality from the many calamities that threatened to rob him of it.

Created by David Benioff and Daniel B. Weiss from George R. R. Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones (2011-2019) is a fantasy drama television series that manipulates and substantially draws upon Hellenic mythology and explores nostos as a trope through several characters whose goal is to return home. Much like The Odyssey, the show may well be described as a conglomeration of several macro as well as micro nostos tales that both trigger and sustain a number of character arcs. While some character arcs fit the exact definition of nostos, in that they fundamentally include journey by the sea, in the rest of them, homecoming is simply that – a psycho-geographical journey back home.

What can be understood from the many parallels in the respective narratives of the television series and Homer’s epic tale of homecoming, is that myths that govern these narratives share a commonality that is far more profound than that which meets the eye. In the words of Joseph Campbell, “Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo[…] or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find […].”<4> In this case, it is the constant story of the hero’s journey.

He writes, “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”<5>

This “monomyth” as a template of the heroic narrative can be easily traced in both The Odyssey and Game of Thrones. However, Game of Thrones seems to focus more on the heroine’s journey than on the hero’s. This focus on the heroine has several socio-cultural implications, primarily because it prioritises the narrative of a gender that is systematically eliminated, subdued or marginalised.

Valerie Estelle Frankel, a vocal critic of Campbell’s unmistakably patriarchal emphasis on the masculine monomyth, writes, “Campbell had called the feminine the “goal” of the quest—the princess needing rescue. While the hero represented the logical, powerful side of the personality, the feminine offered him creativity, nurturing, and intuition: ‘The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero’s total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its master and knower.’<6> […] However, the heroine’s true role is to be neither hero nor his prize.”<7>

Campbell’s reading of the monomyth in The Odyssey is similarly tainted with a discernible patriarchal bent. In Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, he writes, “In The Odyssey, you’ll see three journeys. One is that of Telemachus, the son, going in quest of his father. The second is that of the father, Odysseus, becoming reconciled and related to the female principle in the sense of male-female relationship, rather than the male mastery of the female that was at the centre of The Iliad. And the third is of Penelope herself, whose journey is … endurance. Two journeys through space and one through time.”<8>

Although Campbell does mention that the monomyth is essentially gender neutral, in his imagination, as it appears from his writing, the role played out by the feminine is primarily passive. It is a man’s odyssey. It is a woman’s patience. But Game of Thrones focuses on a woman’s odyssey, hijacking the monomyth from the dominion of the masculine. And the most obvious parallel that the show portrays is that between Arya Stark and Odysseus.

A traumatised, unconventional, unremarkable and deceptively potent member of the Stark family of Winterfell, Arya Stark is introduced early on the show.<9> Almost pathologically vengeful from the very start, the skinny, ordinary-looking, ten year old girl exists in stark contrast from her sister Sansa, who is everything a woman is supposed to be – shy, materialistic, ostentatious and delectably fragile. Sansa is everything Arya is not.

From the very beginning, the makers hint at the defining characteristic of her arc. Arya repeatedly works against the set norms of gender. She donned a soldier’s helmet while first greeting the King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon and his impressive retinue.<10>

At her core, Arya Stark is a warrior. Her character shifts steadily from devastated, wronged and orphaned to brave and resilient to strategic, cunning and formidable. Arya has been explicitly compared to Odysseus by the makers David Benioff and Daniel Weiss themselves, who revealed in an interview that “her return to Winterfell is inspired from Odysseus’ return to Ithaca.”<11>

Winterfell is Arya’s Ithaca. It is her long lost home, and the hope of returning is what sustains her through dire circumstances. In the absence of a family, it represents the womb of her being. In the vast, frighteningly foreign stretches of land that punctuate her journey, it represents a familiarity that she yearns for.

The most important similarity in Arya Stark’s character arc and The Odyssey, lies in the in two parts of the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell calls “supernatural aid” and “the belly of the whale”, respectively. Although Campbell places these at the beginning of the hero’s journey, he also mentions that this paradigm is not an inflexible order etched in stone, so not all stages need to appear in order. What is important, is that the monomyth is an adaptable, living idea, a blueprint of how mankind’s greatest myths bubble up and out of the shared human condition, rising from a collective subconscious that stretches over space and time.

Campbell writes, “[…]the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often an old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.”<12> For both Arya and Odysseus, this encounter facilitates their homecoming. In Odysseus’ case, it is his protectress, Goddess Athena who requests Zeus to allow him to return to Ithaca:

“Father, son of Cronus, our high and mighty king,
[…]my heart breaks for Odysseus,
that seasoned veteran cursed by fate so long —
far from his loved ones still, he suffers torments
off on a wave-washed island rising at the center of the seas.”<13>

In Arya’s case, supernatural aid appears in the form Jaqen H’ghar. One of the most skilled assassins in the seven kingdoms, H’ghar later proceeds to hone Arya’s skills as a silent, murderous warrior. But before that, Jaqen, much like the goddess Athena, tries to facilitate her return. He murders three people who could have provided incriminating evidence against her, thus saving her from impending doom time and again.

Like Athena, he takes several disguises to protect Arya and help her return home. In fact, he gives Arya coins that help her journey from Harrenhal to the free city of Braavos by sea. As the viewers find out later, this journey was imperative to her homecoming. Jaqen is her protector just as Athena is Odysseus’ protectress, and both these figures enable them to achieve their nostos.

Another significant similarity lies in the part called “the belly of the whale”. In the monomyth, the Hero crosses a certain threshold after finding the supernatural aid, before he enters a zone of magnified power. Campbell writes, “The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died.”<14>

The idea of the rebirth is explicit in The Odyssey. When Odysseus recounts his story to the Phaeacians in Book 9 and narrates the tale of his violent encounter with Polyphemus, the one-eyed, giant son of Poseidon, he says this of his experiences before meeting Polyphemus:

“Nine whole days
I was borne along by rough, deadly winds
on the fish-infested sea.”<15>

Scholars and critics take these nine days of his agony as a symbol of the nine months a foetus spends in the womb before being born (in this case, reborn). Arya Stark enters the belly of the whale when she enters the House of Black and White in Braavos<16>, where assassins are trained, employed and subjected to immense hardships that serve to strengthen them. In this place, she is beaten, starved, forced to beg and rebuild herself, much like a phoenix, from her own ashes.

Campbell’s description of this particular stage fits Arya perfectly: “This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. […]Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again. The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple— where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal.”<17>

Arya quite literally enters the Temple of the Faceless God (the other name for the House of Black and White) as a worshipper, and here the other worshippers or assassins remind her repeatedly that she is to strip bare of all her worldly possessions in order to be born again as a nameless, lethal assassin.

This is where the other striking similarity between the two characters lies. In the temple of the Faceless God, Arya is repeatedly taught to become “No One”. The Faceless men, who are the worshippers of the Faceless God, believe that it is only by stripping bare of personal motivations, resentments and allegiances that a person can become a formidable assassin. Throughout her training, her teacher repeats to her, “A girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell. A girl must become No One.” It is by becoming No One, that Arya is able to defeat the monsters.

In The Odyssey, when Odysseus tries to intoxicate Polyphemus so that defeating him becomes easier, Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name. To this, Odysseus’ response is:

“So, you ask me the name I’m known by, Cyclops?
I will tell you. But you must give me a guest-gift
as you’ve promised. Nobody — that’s my name. Nobody —
so my mother and father call me, all my friends.”<18>

Much like Arya Stark, Odysseus needs to become No One or Nobody for two reasons: firstly to overpower the monster, and secondly, to be born again.

To fully comprehend the extent of Arya’s similarity with Odysseus, it is important to understand the similarity between Arya’s sister, Sansa and Odysseus’ wife, Penelope. In The Odyssey, Penelope slowly takes the form of Odysseus’ homeland. Her figure contains not only the image of Odysseus’ beloved, but the image of his kingdom as well. She shares a sisterhood with Ithaca, for she too, was his to protect. Penelope symbolically signifies Ithaca. Ithaca’s wearisome wait for the return of its lost Lord is physically enacted by her. She devised tricks to delay her boisterous suitors, certain of the return of true king.

Similarly, Sansa symbolically signifies Winterfell. Not only is she hailed as the Lady of Winterfell by the 7th season of the show, she survives many horrors in order to protect the essence of Winterfell. She is tossed around, like Penelope, from one suitor to another – and although her perspective towards the very idea of romance is changed altogether, she preserves the sanctity of her being. She remains a Stark and she becomes Winterfell.

The similarities run deeper. When the disguised Odysseus returns, Penelope announces to the suitors:

“Listen to me, my overbearing friends!
[…]So, to arms, my gallants!
Here is the prize at issue, right before you, look —
I set before you the great bow of King Odysseus now!
The hand that can string this bow with greatest ease,
that shoots an arrow clean through all twelve axes —
he is the man I follow, yes, forsaking this house.”<19>

Bernard Knox writes, “For the plot of The Odyssey, of course, [Penelope’s] decision is the turning point, the move that makes possible the long-predicted triumph of the returning hero.”<20> Similarly, in Game of Thrones, Season 7, given a choice between trusting a possible suitor and Arya, who had started acting as the Lord-Protector of Winterfell, Sansa makes the decision that ultimately ends up favouring Arya, which is what makes “the triumph of the returning hero” possible.<21>

In fact, both Arya and Odysseus enter into similar trysts with the suitors of their respective feminine counterparts. While Odysseus seeks to overpower the Mnesteres, Arya Stark maintains a list of the names of the people she wants to murder for they had wronged her in some way or the other, and two of Sansa’s three suitors, along with the people who had suggested them as suitors, feature in the list.

As Frankel writes, “Jungian psychology teaches that man has a feminine side and woman a masculine side, anima and animus respectively. […] The heroine quests for her source of strength. When the woman meets her lover, he acts as animus and evokes masculine traits within her: logic, rationality, intellect. Her conscious side, aware of the world around her, grows, and she can rule and comprehend the exterior world.”<22>

In both these cases, it is the meeting with the Lord-protector that results in the women coming up with strategies to defeat the collective enemy. It is only after meeting Arya, that Sansa comes to publicly question the integrity of her suitor after she develops a strategy to bring him to court.

It seems as though both Penelope and Sansa provide the feminine counterpart, the Jungian anima to the returning hero that helps them re-establish their identity as the warrior-hero. This is what facilities their nostos in the way Bonifazi had defined it, a psycho-geographical journey back home, during which the identity is preserved.

Of course, The Odyssey ends with Athena asking Odysseus to end the war with Penelope’s suitors, who would become the King of Ithaca if they had won her hand. Odysseus wins the battle and peace is restored in Ithaca. In Game of Thrones, Arya Stark defeats the Night King, who would have become the Lord Of Winterfell (amongst the rest of the seven kingdoms) had he won. Albeit, he was not Sansa’s suitor, but he was Winterfell’s suitor, and Sansa and Winterfell are similar in more ways than one.

What is particularly interesting, is that even though both Odysseus and Arya willingly or unwillingly divorce their respect identities in order to survive and be reborn, in the end they retain their destined identities. They return and thrive as the warrior hero even though they were Nobody and No One for a while.

It goes without saying that it is primarily Arya’s homecoming and her retention of the quintessence of her identity, both familial and individual, that provides the viewer with a powerful example of potent, independent femininity. In a world governed by patriarchal norms that allow no space to individualistic femininity, homecoming is not a woman’s dominion. Women are married off, passed as possessions from family to family. Their identities are malleable, they adopt the names given to them. And there is no homecoming for the bearer of this borrowed identity. There is only a temporary home-going, a short lived stay in a familiar space.

Not only is Arya Stark’s hijacking of the trope of homecoming a challenge to Campbell’s patriarchal monomyth, her retention of the identity she had aspired to as a child is a confrontation with misogyny itself, for here is a woman who returns as the warrior whose helmet she had donned as a girl. In the face of nightmarish circumstance, Arya Stark stood as the warrior-hero who rose from the ashes of her being. But burning down her identity cannot rob her of it. To quote her teacher at the Temple of the Faceless God, “A girl [was] not No One. A girl [was] Arya Stark,” and she went home.

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1. Anna Bonifazi, “Inquiring into Nostos and its Cognates,” The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 130, No. 4 (Winter, 2009): 481, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20616206.
2. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996)
3. Bonifazi, 501
4. Joseph Campbell, “Prologue: Myth and Dream” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Commemorative Edition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3.
5. Campbell, 28.
6. Campbell, 111.
7. Valerie Estelle Frankel, Introduction to From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend, (USA: McFarland and Company, 2010), 3.
8. Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004), 145.
9. Tim Van Patten, “Winter is Coming” in Game of Thrones, Season 1, (USA: Home Box Office Inc., 2011), Available at: http://www.hotstar.com. Accessed on 6th May, 2019.
10. Ibid.
11. Game of Thrones: Season 7 Episode 4: Inside the Episode (HBO).” YouTube video, 5:45. “GameofThrones”, August 6, 2017. https://youtu.be/X17pjukf8rA
12. Campbell, 63.
13. Book 1, The Odyssey, 3.
14. Campbell, 83.
15. Campbell, 83.
16. “House of Black and White”, Game of Thrones, Season 5. Available at: http://www.hotstar.com. Accessed on 6th May, 2019.
17. Campbell, 84.
18. Book 9, The Odyssey, 223.
19. Book 21, The Odyssey, 560.
20. Bernard Knox, Introduction to The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, (New York: Penguin, 1996), 55.
21. “The Dragon and the Wolf”, Game of Thrones, Season 7. Available at: http://www.hotstar.com. Accessed on 6th May, 2019.
22. Frankel, 22.

Bibliography

Bonifazi, Anna. “Inquiring into Nostos and its Cognates.” The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 130, No. 4 (Winter, 2009): 481-512. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20616206.

Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004.

Campbell, Joseph. “Prologue: Myth and Dream.” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Commemorative Edition, 3-8. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Frankel, Valerie Estelle. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend. USA: McFarland and Company, 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Patten, Tim Van. Game of Thrones. USA: Home Box Office Inc., 2011. Available at: http://www.hotstar.com. Accessed on 6th May, 2019.