Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form (review)

Gregory Heyworth's formalist monograph, about the ways in which Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria (among other works) have influenced the change in literary form from "romance" to "epic" during the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries, takes up the definition of the genre to rehearse (at least implicitly) various debates that have circulated over the past 115 years. What W. P. Ker initiated in Epic and Romance (1896) and Northrop Frye continued in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976) (following his much more famous but similarly structuralist The Anatomy of Criticism [1957]), has been updated, very recently, by Kevin S. Whetter, in Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (2008), and now, in relation to genre and form, by Heyworth, following Frye on romance as a likely structural nexus for all fiction (p. 179). In regard to Heyworth's particular treatment of the difference between romance and epic, he argues as instrumental a shift over time in the thematic and formal reception of the early line of Ovid's Metamorphoses—"forms changed into new bodies"—the tension between form (forma) and body (corpus) or genre and love, as illustrated in six paradigmatic medieval and early modern works, three medieval and three early modern.

In Part 1, "The Sociology of Romance," on medieval romance, Heyworth reinterprets the Ovidian idea of bodily change and, then, shows in Part 2, "Romance Form and Formality," on the early modern, how form—genre, shape, convention—is subsequently affected. Heyworth suggests that selected Ovidian myths of corporeal metamorphosis and the modes of Ovidian (courtly) and Augustinian (Christian) love shaped the twelfth-century lais Bisclavret, Guigemar, and Eliduc of Marie de France; the romances Cligés and Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes; and the fourteenth-century romance and lai of the Knight and Franklin of Geoffrey Chaucer. With the advent of Aristotle's Poetics into Europe in the mid-sixteenth century—as anticipated by Petrarch's lyrical sonnet sequence in Rime sparse and evidenced in William Shakespeare's romance tragedy Romeo and Juliet and John Milton's classical epic Paradise Lost—genre changed, and "Ovidian myth" (no longer merely classical myth) became a vehicle for metaphor in describing the personal.

Why Heyworth selects Ovid as a touchstone for his generic task stems from the poet's double emphasis on amatory love (Ars amatoria, Heroides) and the historical development of civilization (Metamorphoses): "Ovid was the first to construe the mutability of form as the simultaneous principle between both poetry and civilization. In prosecuting this reciprocity wherein poetic postures commute societal customs and vice versa, Ovid invented the history of culture" (pp. 4-5). Clearly this will not be a historical or new-historical survey of the literal literary reception of Ovid. How Heyworth links the Ovidian and Christian in the medieval and early modern period verges on the Robertsonian: "like Christ, Ovid is a magister amoris, a teacher of a philosophy of love. . . . One of the great, unrecognized attractions of Ovid for Christian Europe is that Augustinian caritas and Ovidian cupiditas obey the same cultic injunction" (p. 3). What Heyworth means is that Ovid moves from the body at the beginning of the Metamorphoses, or from "mutability of form," to civilization, or its cultural etiology, as we see by the end, at the apotheosis of Augustus. The first line of Ovid's epic offers a metonym for characterizing in little the cultural differences Heyworth wishes to stress.

In each chapter Heyworth selects one or two classical metatexts from Ovid concerning either form or the body to compare with the poet/lover involved in the respective literary text. In Chapter 1, "Hunting for Civilization: Marie de France and the Sociology of Romance" (pp. 25-58), well-known Ovidian myths of the reversal of the hunt (in the courtship of Ars amatoria; in the hunts of Venus and Adonis and of Meleager and the Calydonian Boar in the Metamorphoses) and Celtic myths of the Otherworld...