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  • Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination
  • J. Mira Seo
Victoria Rimell . Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. viii, 235. $96.00. ISBN 978-0-521-86219-6.

As Rimell effectively discusses in her introduction, current trends in Ovidian scholarship have focused on binaries of gender in erotics and poetic creation. In her view, recent analyses of the Ovidian lover persona and the artist surrogates of the Metamorphoses (Narcissus, Orpheus, Pygmalion) privilege the male gaze and male creativity at the expense of female subject-status. Rimell objects to these polarities, declaring that she will go beyond asking "about constructs of femininity, or of masculinity, or about whether Ovid can be judged an anti-, proto-, or pseudo-feminist, but instead about relationality, about the desiring subject in Ovidian poetry as a being-in-relation" (3–4). Drawing inspiration from Philip Hardie's recent treatment of desire as a thematic of Ovidian poetics (Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion [Cambridge 2002]), Rimell attempts to develop a Medusan paradigm for specular intersubjectivity to complement the self-absorbed and self-consuming paradigm of Narcissus' male gaze.

In mythology, Medusa's power comes from a complicated nexus of gazes: her own gaze must be met directly by another's to activate its effect, while to look upon her with impunity requires a mirror as an intermediary. This mirror, however, casts a reflection which will always incorporate one's own, thereby introducing the horrifying possibility that the viewer, like Perseus, may (mis)recognize the other as oneself. Rimell augments Ovid's rather spare account of Medusa with a bricolage of psychoanalytic and theoretical approaches. Medusa's female gaze castrates (Freud), objectifies, and thereby radically Others (Irigaray), though it also simultaneously activates a Narcissus-like recognition of the terrifying other within. Nonetheless, in contrast [End Page 255] to Narcissus, who mistakenly succumbs to his own desire for himself and thus never recognizes a true other (Lacan), Medusa's gaze is so powerful at drawing distinctions between subject and the other that those she gazes upon literally become marvelous objects. Therefore, Rimell argues, Medusa should be seen as a female artist analogous to or even competitive with Ovid and his male surrogates. There is much to recommend this complex paradigm, especially as a corrective to the excessively Lacanian positions of recent Ovidian scholarship on the Heroides in particular (e.g., S. H. Lindheim, Mail and Female [Madison 2003]), which seem to come perilously close to asserting Lacan's concept of the female as Lack or Absence as a trans-historical and universal truth. At least here Medusa gets to do something, unlike the disempowered and self-sabotaging Ovidian puellae and heroines found in Lindheim and L. Fulkerson, The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (Cambridge 2005).

Rimell's Medusa, however, seems to do both too much and too little: too much, because the evidence for a Medusan subtext is often tenuous, and too little, because the paradigm does not work consistently. All snakes seem to evoke Medusa, as does any reference to eyes gleaming like stars and most mentions of hair (one of Ovid's favorite themes). By this methodology, whenever repercussus appears, it triggers an awareness of Perseus' mirror-like shield and its reflection, thereby introducing the problem of subject-object confusion or the threat of castration (195 and passim). Similarly, words signifying astonishment or stupefaction in viewing (attonitus, stupeo) are cited in lengthy catalogues as evidence for a Medusan subtext. Rimell thus implies that word repetition is ipso facto significant, although Don Fowler and Jeffrey Wills should have made Latinists skeptical of such a position (D. Fowler, "On the Shoulders of Giants: Intertextuality and Classical Studies," reprinted in his Roman Constructions [Cambridge 2000]; J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion [Oxford 1996]).

Although we may still accept Medusa's potential hermeneutic value, her significance loses specificity over the course of the book. In the first chapter Medusa is the gorgonic image of the puella's revolting face pack (Medicamina), in chapter 2, a mythological threat behind the competitive glances of lovers (Ars Amatoria), and in chapter...

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