Gender Identity and the Elegiac Hero in Propertius 2.1

The elegiac lover's well-known stance of sexual servitude and his characterization of both himself and his verse as mollis establish a feminine persona for the male lover that becomes one of the chief topoi in elegiac poetry. ¹ Of the elegiac poets, Propertius is often considered to be the inventor of the image of servitium amoris. Throughout the first three books of the Elegies, the Propertian lover appears hopelessly enslaved to a mistress he describes as domina. The elegiac enterprise in general, especially in Propertius' amatory texts, seems to subvert Roman conventions of masculinity by assigning to the male narrator traits typically associated with women: servitium, mollitia, and levitas. The male lover thus presents himself as devoted, dependent, and passive and, in turn, often depicts his mistress as dura. The gender inversion implicit in the narrator's stance ostensibly allows the Propertian lover to embrace a philosophy of life that overturns traditional gender roles and violates the principles under which women are subject to male authority. ²

Indeed, one of the most striking features of Propertian elegy, as both Maria Wyke and Barbara Gold have argued, is the way the male narrator often takes "the woman's part," enacting what seems to be the woman's conventional role of subservience and "softness." ³ While, in the Monobiblos, Propertius largely maintains the fiction of gender reversal, the amator often undermines his own rhetoric of subservience by constructing mythological exempla that depict him in the role of rescuer, protector, and hero to a defenseless and captive mistress. ⁴ In this paper, I shall argue that the heroic persona the male lover implicitly imagines for himself in Book 1 becomes more overt in the second book. My study will focus on Propertius' programmatic poem 2.1, a text that offers a dramatic example of the ways in which the speaker in Book 2 vacillates between an image of himself as the mollis poet of elegy and an identification with the values and ideals associated with masculine epic. ⁵

Throughout Book 2, the narrator identifies himself with the images of disease and vulnerability characteristically associated with the Sapphic and Catullan traditions of portraying eros as disintegrating and disabling to the lover. ⁶ Propertius carries on this tradition not only by having the male lover explicitly characterize himself as subject to the violent ravages of desire, but also by dramatizing the experience of fragmentation through the conflicting gender identities he associates with the male lover. Unlike the Catullan lover, the speaker in Propertius' poems does not try to overcome his "feminine" powerlessness and vulnerability by urging himself to exert the manly self-control and dignitas expected of any Roman male citizen wishing to live up to his social and moral obligations. ⁷ The Propertian amator, instead, expresses gender dissonance in the way he subtly shifts between epic and elegiac discourses and between conflicting images of himself and his mistress. Moreover, the increased association of the elegiac mistress with literary production in Book 2 heightens the ambivalent nature of the speaker's gender identity and dramatizes more forcefully the amator's vacillations between his identities as lover and poet. ⁸ Despite the narrator's repeated declarations that he rejects the more lofty occupation of epic poet, he, nonetheless, often identifies himself with the ideals and discourses of that manner of writing. In so doing, I shall argue, the Propertian speaker not only circumvents the feminine persona that he establishes for himself in the first book, he also reveals a discourse that often eludes categorization. To be sure, the fact that Propertius' elegiac discourse constantly resists formulation coincides with the problematization and destabilization of traditional generic categories in Augustan poetry. ⁹

Elegy 2.1

Propertius' opening programmatic poem takes the form of the recusatio, a form that traditionally refuses engagement with other kinds of discourse such as epic or encomium. ¹⁰ As Paul Allen Miller argues (1998), Propertius' opening poem shows that...