The Translatio of Memory and Desire in The Legend of Good Women: Chaucer and the Vernacular Heroides

What impels me to write to you all the time? . . . at every moment the order to write to you is given, no matter what, but to write to you, and I love, and this is how I recognize that I love.

Jacques Derrida, “Envois,” The Post Card

Word for word, if you like, syllable for syllable. From the moment this economic equivalence—strictly impossible, by the way—is renounced, everything can be translated, but in a loose translation, in the loose sense of the word “translation.” . . . In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible.

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other¹

I

As a meditation on epistolarity and desire, Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card explores the psychic structures that are established and maintained by the textuality of love letters: according to the conceit of The Post Card, the missives collected therein originated as Derrida’s private correspondence. Despite their publication and their status as literary letters, the amatory epistles in The Post Card retain a raw and compelling urgency that is the hallmark of epistolary discourse in the face of thwarted desire. The Post Card thus illustrates how the literary love letter interpellates its audience in the rhetoric of desire so that the implied reader stands in for the addressee. As a result, the literary love letter—even the most obviously fictive—seems authentic to its readers. Ovid’s Heroides represent the most ancient example of a collection of literary love letters; like Derrida’s postcards, the Heroides invite the reader to participate in the circulation of desire.

The first fifteen Heroides (the “single letters”) are addressed by women to their absent male lovers, whether they are unfaithful, unattainable, or simply lost. Heroides 16–21, known as the “double letters,” purport to record an epistolary exchange between three pairs of star-crossed lovers—Paris and Helen, Hero and Leander, Acontius and Cydippe. The three male letter-writers of these double letters adopt a language of subjugation similar to their female interlocutors so that their discourse is marked by desire rather than gender. In the single letters, each speaker identifies herself as an abandoned woman at the start the poem,² and each letter rehearses the memory of love and catalogues the broken promises of the lover, a reiteration of memory and desire explicitly intended to bring about the return of the lover. The Heroides thus conflate erotic desire and epistolarity so that the act of composing a letter enacts the desire of the letter-writer, and the letter itself substitutes for physical contact with the beloved. The fictional writers of each letter are well-known characters from ancient texts;³ in addition, the tragic ending of each love affair is always already known: Laodamia, Phyllis, Dido, Canace, and Hero commit suicide; while Oënone, Ariadne, Hypsipyle, and Hermione are abandoned to their fates.⁴ Each of these heroines either kills herself or declares that she wishes to die. According to ancient textual traditions, all of the women in Heroides 1–15 except for Penelope and Jason’s two lovers—Medea and Hypsipyle—eventually die for love,⁵ so that these epistles commemorate death as the constitutive category for female desire.⁶ In Derridean terms, these are letters that fail to arrive at their destinations: of all these absent heroes, only Odysseus actually returns to resume married life with Penelope (Heroides, 1), and only after a prolonged absence. In addition, the discourse of desire in the Heroides is inherently transgressive. The language of desire in Roman poetry developed from the Latin love elegy, so that the linguistic register of the Heroides belongs to the meretrix—the courtesan who was drawn from the ranks of the freedwomen. Neither slave nor matron, prostitute nor wife, the meretrix could express forms of desire that would be inappropriate for a married woman, who was expected to be moderate and circumspect.⁷ While the women in the Heroides claim to be married or betrothed to their...