“The story…represented for thousands of years…in my own personal way”
“Students in my Literary Traditions sections,” Professor Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta writes, “may create an original work of art that interprets a text we read.” Like Penelope weaving a shroud for Odysseus’s father, Caroline Fortin depicted Homer’s Hades in the singular needlepoint above.
Caroline Fortin explains:
Homer’s depiction of the underworld in The Odyssey is . . . fascinating and descriptive, culturally accepted as the archetypal vision of the ancient afterlife. In my own interpretation, I have chosen to represent the underworld through the traditional craft of needlepoint.
At first look, there is a disparity between this soft, traditionally feminine medium and the idea of what is essentially hell. With my project and medium I wanted. . . viewers to reconsider what they might, at first, see as a deep dark realm, something to be feared.
In today’s culture, we tend to view the afterlife as an unknown, or something to be apprehended. In ancient Greek culture, however, the afterlife was seen as a familiar place; it was, essentially, just a step into the next life. For this reason, many heroes in mythology are challenged to contact the dead, or even to venture into the underworld itself. It is for this reason as well that Odysseus was able to make his brave journey into the realm of the dead, for though some aspects came as a shock, he could somewhat expect what was to come.
I wanted to portray that cultural familiarity through my work of needlepoint. Though the images depicted may be frightening or off-putting at first glance, the scene of the afterlife is something that need not necessarily be feared. Through the use of a traditional, somewhat “comforting” medium, I wanted to challenge the viewer to see this scene as something that can be considering normal, and even comforting.
Most conceptions of embroidery are of a grandmother writing down an age-old quote, or depicting a scene that would be meaningful to the family. I do both here in a slightly untraditional way; I used embroidery to portray a scene meaningful to a culture and a people, and I physically depicted a story for anyone who walks by to see.
One of my biggest takeaways from this project is the appreciation for The Odyssey that I gained. I will admit that I hated The Odyssey— reading it in high school and again in college was, at first, a massive chore. But spending so much quality time with the text and picking and choosing what elements would be important to represent really made me appreciate and recognize the beautiful and complex world building within the story.
I also gained an appreciation for storytelling in that era; the names and characters to be memorized even within just Book XI (“The Kingdom of the Dead”) are numerous and complicated, and I became downright impressed with the skills of bards and poets of the day.
Through the hours I spent listening to music and meditating on this scene while working, I thought about song and story as entertainment both then and now, and how the nature of humanity has not changed much. Both in our curiosity about the world and the way we choose to interpret, share, and bask in it, people have always had a unique way of envisioning the world around us, and the wonderment and community of humanity seems timeless.
I found comfort in the fact that I was representing the very same story that people have represented for thousands of years, but in my own personal way.