Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides

Introduction: Re-Reading Ovid's Heroides

Introduction Re-Reading Ovid's Heroides In dreams, a writing tablet signifies a woman, since it receives the imprints of all kinds of letters. Artemidorus, Onirocritica A little over fifteen years ago, Florence Verducci tellingly referred to Ovid's Heroides, a collection of fifteen letters in elegiac verse from mythological heroines to the heroes who have abandoned them,l as the "one work ... which seems stubbornly to resist any final exhumation from the crypt of Ovidian disrepute."2 Since 1985, however, critical reassessments of Heroides 1-15 have emerged/3 all striving to redress the collection's previous marginalization from the study of Latin poetry. Yet many questions about this text still remain unexplored, especially in the area of gender studies. Indeed, the Heroides can contribute in many ways to the current debate about the construction of gender and identity in Augustan Rome. The striking premise that each poem represents a letter composed by the heroine asks us, according to the conventions of the epistolary genre, to read the Ovidian collection , at least on one level, as the authentic narratives of the letter writers, that is, as the written products of women.4 In every epistle a female speaker fashions a picture of herself. Further, the story that each heroine recounts is a (heterosexual) love story. These letters focus the narrative spotlight squarely on hero and 3 4 Introduction heroine, male and female, as they take shape (acquire identity) in and through the erotic relationship. By means of three different approaches-an examination of genre, of feminine desire, of Sappho's poetic voice-I show how the Heroides provocatively and relentlessly explore the connection for women between desire and the instability of identity. More precisely, the Ovidian collection unmasks the woman's protean and ephemeral nature whenever she embarks on an erotic relationship with a man. In the context of desire, in one letter after another, the Ovidian heroine's self turns out to be no more than a variety of performances she puts on for the sake of capturing once again the desire of the lover who has abandoned her. And yet, here one must ask two questions. Ultimately, whose hand is at work behind the letter, Ovid's or the heroine's? In other words, is Woman really no more than a shape-shifting performer of roles, or is this the comfortable and self-(pre)serving illusion that the male poet holds out to his male readers? And, does it matter to distinguish between Ovid and heroine as author? The poet draws his material from prior texts concerned with the actions and emotions of heroes. From the margins of these texts he plucks the women who play secondary, if at times compelling , roles in the narratives, and places them center stage. Dido relates her version of the story of Aeneas' devastating visit to her kingdom; Penelope offers her perspective on the seemingly endless wanderings of Ulysses. Ovid seems to empower his heroines to re-create their narratives from an entirely subjective point of view. He tantalizes the reader with the possibility of radical recountings of established, traditional tales. And yet, whether she examines only one of the epistles or peruses the entire collection, the reader does not marvel at their innovative perspective but rather wrestles with a general and overwhelming sense that somehow she has heard it all before. Much of the critical writing about the Heroides has censured Ovid for the repetitiveness that pervades the collection, an occasional begrudging bow to his wit or to his capacity for a brilliant turn of phrase notwithstanding.5 As if in response, a more recent trend discovers critics attempting to deny the iterative nature of the text, or, at the opposite extreme, refusing to address the problem in any fashion.6 The repetition in these poems, however, does not deserve censure, nor can it be lightly dismissed. On Re-Reading Ovid's Heroides 5 the contrary, I suggest that the idea of repetition lies at the heart of the Heroides as one of the major interpretive issues of this text. A reading of the poems requires full exploration and resolution of three striking issues that all touch, to varying degrees, on the notion of repetition. The collection features throughout its fifteen letters noticeably repetitious language, characters, and narratives. Is this just bad poetry or must an interpretation of the Heroides take into account the iterative quality of the...