Western Humanities Final Take Home Exam

Final Take Home Exam

Starting at birth, we learn the values and norms of our society typically from the very first people we meet in life: our parents. Whether biological or adopted, literal or figurative, these individuals take on the responsibility of teaching a young and naive creature right from wrong, and what it is that society expects of us. In four classic pieces of literature, The Odyssey, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Perceval: The Story of the Grail, and Hamlet, we are able to observe the societal values of each culture displayed through parent-child relationships. By observing these relationships, we can learn about the context of the society each piece was written in, as well as the values the societies esteem so highly that they are taught to the most impressionable members.

The most obviously displayed parent-child relationship in Homer’s The Odyssey is the one between Odysseus and his son Telemachus. This fact alone displays a presence of a highly matriarchal society in Greek culture. Even though Odysseus is out of the picture for twenty years of Telemachus’s life, Telemachus still seems to regard and respect his father more highly than the parent who raised him, Penelope. “All the nobles who rule the islands round about,/…down to the last man they court my mother,/they lay waste in my house!…” (Fagles 85).

Telemachus has a tendency to backlash against his mother and her suitors, and for a (somewhat) good reason. He knows that the throne of Ithaca is rightfully his, but he has yet to prove his strength as a warrior, let alone a ruler. However, the only person who can teach Telemachus how to be a true warrior is his father. Therefore, poor Telemachus is in a bind; he has the power to rise up and tap his potentia...

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...s inaction, and, ultimately, his own demise. This is a time where Shakespeare introduces the idea of humanism, and that Hamlet must figure out for himself how to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet has the power and intelligence to assess the situation and how to solve it, but instead he goes insane with paranoia, sadness, and stagnation.

Overall, all four pieces of literature use either a figurative or literal parent-child relationship to display the cultural values and context that the pieces were written in. In the end, we all need a figure that we can look up to that can guide us toward a higher level of thinking. Parents are never perfect, but they do what they can to teach us the lessons we need to move forward in life. To successfully understand the values that a society holds dearly, all we have to do is look to the people who taught us our own: our parents.