A MAAAAAAAAAAAN OF CONSTANT SORROW

Everett’s redemption in the song scene in O Brother is an easy comparison to the archery contest in the Odyssey. In this very important scene, he shows his true colors both to his wife and to everyone, although, just like in the archery contest, the crowd doesn’t understand who he is at first. This blog post is a long and rambling discussion about the leading couples in both the Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou, and what their reunion scenes tell us about each.

He shoots down a leader by foiling the campaign of the reform-championing politician. He also gets a chance to display his archery singing prowess. (I just noticed that in O Brother, singing has a bunch of meanings. It can represent storytelling, prophecy, boasting, deception, seduction, fighting, etc., and the meaning is dictated as much by the situation as it is by the song!) Most importantly, Everett manages to impress his wife: I am the great lead singer of the Soggy Bottom Boys! 

Now obviously, the situation between Odysseus and his wife is different from that between Everett and his ex-wife. Odysseus’s wife is faithful, almost blindly so. She remains celibate for twenty whole years, even though she believes him to be dead in a shipwreck, and even though it’s socially unacceptable for her to go this long without remarrying. When she sees her husband disguised as a beggar, she doesn’t doubt his character (in fact, her belief of his stories about Odysseus and her conversation with him in general suggest she might suspect more than she lets on) but his identity remains a mystery. 

But Penny knows full well who she’s looking at when she, her soon-to-be husband, and Everett meet up in the shop. However, she can’t trust Everett to be a fundamentally good and marriageable man. Everett must reveal his virtue, not his identity, during the song. Interestingly, Penny also knows that Everett is alive, though in jail. In a cute little land/water inversion, she makes up a false story about Everett being hit by a train (not shipwrecked), when she knows that he’s actually in jail for law without a license.

The characters of Penelope and Penny seem to be opposites in general. While Penelope is so faithful to Odysseus that she didn’t remarry for twenty years, Penny seems to have found another boyfriend the moment Everett was arrested. Penelope is so helpful to Odysseus that it’s hinted that Athena is telling her what to do, but Penny is a constant drag on Everett, almost like she’s been planted there by someone who wished harm on Everett. She’s the one who tells him to go on a second mission, this time to retrieve her wedding ring from the bottom of a lake. She continually messes up his quest by rejecting him. She’s the one with the killer “counted to three” line.

These characters both seem one-dimensional, though, despite (or maybe partially because of) their differences. Penelope is so loyal, and Penny so nagging, that they end up like opposite ends of the good wife to bad wife spectrum. I’m tempted to bring up the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, but Penny isn’t sleeping around, really (she seems to be monogamous with her new fiancée). She’s just not interested in marrying Everett after he went and practiced law without a license. Not that I blame her or think she made the wrong decision in her initial rejection. At all. 

Indeed, Everett is presented as a fast-talking criminal in O Brother, while Odysseus seems like a war hero and a “bona fide” fighter. The differences in the character of these two men drastically change what a reasonable response to their homecoming looks like. In Everett’s case, he deserves to be dragged through the mud a bit for being a jerk, but in Odysseus’, he’s more sympathetic. He fought for the Greek army and was delayed on his way home! In this case, though the “testing” phase of his homecoming is morally sketchy and frankly annoying, he deserves more respect than Everett in O Brother. And he gets more. Whether that’s due to his character or his wife’s is left as an exercise to the reader.