A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses’ by Stephen M. Wheeler (review)

188 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 male dominance. Keith, however, recognizes that the epics themselves often invite contradictory and more complex readings that the ancient commentators leave unexplored. The following three chapters explore three thematic associations of the female in epic. Chapter 3 discusses the pattern of the assimilation of woman to landscape (>The Ground of Representation=). Through such characters as Ennius=s Ilia in the Annales, Caieta and Lavinia in Vergil=s Aeneid, and Hypsipyle in Statius=s Thebaid, among others, Keith shows how epic poets >repeatedly feminize the ground of heroic action through the symbolic and literal immersion of specific women into the topography of epic,= thus valorizing the gendered opposition between a feminized nature and a masculinised culture. Chapter 4 looks at the role of women as instigators of war (>Exordia pugnae: Engendering War=). Here Keith suggests that the contemporary prominence of upper-class Roman women and the use of Cleopatra in Augustan propaganda offer several points of contact with Vergil=s representation of the militant female in the Aeneid. The later epics of Lucan (Julia, Cornelia, and Cleopatra), Silius (Juno [Hannibal]), Statius (Furies, Argia, Lemnians, Jocasta), and Valerius Flaccus (Lemnians) are shown to conform to this pattern also. Finally, in chapter 5 (>Over Her Dead Body=) Keith explores the pervasive sexualization of female death in epic, in which a beautiful female corpse often serves as the catalyst for the reestablishment of political order. In another series of illuminating and original close readings, including Ennius (Ilia), Lucretius (Iphigenia), Vergil (Dido), Ovid (Orion=s daughters), and the carmen de bello Actiaco (Cleopatra), she points out the thematic and aesthetic prominence of dead and dying women in Latin epic. Throughout the book appear many insightful and provocative readings. While the format of the work allows for only a summary treatment of these many important themes, Keith covers much ground and introduces many exciting new ideas for future scholarship. The study also allows little room for counter-examples to these patterns, but Keith always allows interpretive room for the possibility of critiques of these paradigms within the epics themselves. The book is a significant and important addition to the study of Latin epic. (SARA MYERS) Stephen M. Wheeler. A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid=s >Metamorphoses= University of Pennsylvania Press 1999. x, 272. US $77.50 In this wide-ranging book, Stephen M. Wheeler displays much learning and an unwavering sympathy with the work he is discussing, coupled with a commendable reluctance to rush to judgment. The introduction follows an account of much modern criticism with Wheeler=s central point that >Ovid presents his poem as a fictive viva-voce HUMANITIES 189 performance.= Indeed, he relies throughout on a theoretical structure of a variety of different authors and audiences to make his points. For this reader, at least, the theoretical analysis serves to obscure rather than illuminate the many interesting conclusions arrived at, conclusions which could have been expressed much more clearly and elegantly in ordinary language. Chapter 1, >Metamorphosis in the Reader,= starts with a straightforward analysis of the first four lines, showing the changing natural assumptions of a reader taking the words as they come. Wheeler goes on to contrast Ovid=s picture of a universe divinely created for the benefit of man with the stories that immediately follow. In chapter 2, Wheeler argues that Ovid=s diction supports the illusion of oral presentation, not as a literal truth, but as an implicit assumption by both writer and reader. This may be a useful approach but, when Wheeler calls in aid the suggestion that Ovid denigrates all references to writing in the Metamorphoses, he surely overstates his case. Chapter 3, >The Divided Audience,= starts with the observation that, just as authors sometimes put a narration into the mouth of a character, so they may strike a pose when narrating directly themselves. This uncontroversial point is not helped by Wheeler=s citation of Ovid=s protestations at Tristia 2.353B56 that he is chaste even if his muse is not. Passing to the audience, Wheeler makes the point that they must co-operate with the author by accepting his premises but that, nevertheless, they will inevitably bring...