What does the Old Woman represent in the book, House of Names: A Novel?

In many ways, the Old Woman -- who stands in, in Chapter Two, as an emblem of the past: of an age in which the old Gods had power -- becomes an almost Homeric figure within Tóibín's novel, not in the least due to how she is described. For the narrator notices that she "was old and very frail," and that furthermore, from "the way she squinted," she was near blind (107), and all of these traits are often used to describe Homer, especially as he appears within literary works. Take, for example, the beggar in The Odyssey -- a character often likened to the author, himself -- who is called old and blind, and whose song has the power to transport it's listeners to different realms. That the Old Woman furthermore participates in the oratory tradition of story telling solidifies this comparison. Thus does she stand in both as a historical figure who gestures toward the literary past from which Tóibín draws, and as a figure who metonymizes the very ethics of the Hellenic age. She is the sole figure within House of Names to do this. Her death in a sense therefore echoes the very death of classic ideology that she so emblematizes.