Vance's wife is reading a book about a man 'who refuses to accept his loss': author

A classicist said she saw "all kinds of ironies" after an NBC News profile on Usha Vance, the successful lawyer married to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), observed a literary opus she was reading about "male rage."

Vanity Fair spoke with classicist Emily Wilson, who did a new translation of Homer's Iliad, published in 2023. The profile talks about Vance as a member of a "slow pace" book club and that she began reading it when her 7-year-old son became interested in mythology.

Wilson saw "all kinds of ironies" in the fact that the wife of Donald Trump's running mate would have picked up that classic to read for pleasure.

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"The Iliad is a poem about how men fight for control of women’s bodies—the whole plot is premised on that, and on the rage that happens between men over who gets to have absolute control over women’s bodies," Wilson told Vanity Fair.

Another theme Wilson described, is what happens when a powerful man can't face the fact that he lost.

"In this case, Achilles refuses to accept a loss, and what happens" is "deadliness" and the ultimate "death count" from that loss, Wilson continued. "What is the cost to the fragile coalition of social bonds when a loss is intolerable, and the only possible response to a loss is infinite rage and infinite desire for destruction in revenge."

Vanity Fair also asked how some in the "alt-right" have adopted the poem. Wilson said she thinks that probably half of those interested "are robots." The rest are likely "looking for justification for their own vision of the world."

She noted that the poem isn't an actual account of history. But some of those men like to "imagine ancient history involved this wonderful land where there weren't really any women, and nobody bothered listening to them, and that these texts were totally simplistic..."

Born in the U.K., Wilson became a citizen a few years ago and said she finds the democratic institutions of a society to be important.

Read the full interview here.