Family and Domesticity

A central theme of “Ulysses” is the role of the family and domestic life. Ulysses is obviously struggling to reacclimatize to life at home. After years at war and then at sea, he is an outsider in his own home. The “still hearth,” the ultimate symbol of domesticity, is mentioned early on (2). Ulysses seems to feel that he cannot belong by the hearth. Instead, he belongs at sea, facing danger but also adventure.

He also demonstrates a sense of misalignment with the people who make up the domestic sphere — his wife and child. It is noteworthy that the other characters who constitute Odysseus’s domestic sphere in the Odyssey, his dog Argo and his nursemaid Euroklyia, do not appear in this poem, perhaps to further the sense that Ulysses is isolated in his own home. His wife, so heroic in the source text, is...