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Poetic Projection in Juvenal's Satires
- Arethusa
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 44, Number 2, Spring 2011
- pp. 221-243
- 10.1353/are.2011.0009
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article discusses how Juvenal's use of a particular female figure illuminates the destabilizing nature of his authorial voice. Her resemblance to the satirist calls into question Juvenal's effectiveness and purpose as a moralizing poet. This female "surrogate" satirist acts as a prism of meaning that simultaneously addresses the conventions of the genre and offers a window into Juvenal's complex mode of poetic self-representation. Juvenal's poetic projections present inconsistent perspectives that diffuse issues of sexual identity, class, and empire in the Satires. Juvenal's inconsistency ought not to be considered a form of indirection but a defining feature of his satire.