Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage: From Plautus to Chaucer

Seven. Chaste Artemis and Lusty Aphrodite: the portrait of women and marriage in the greek and latin novels

129 Seven Chaste Artemis and Lusty Aphrodite the portrait of women and marriage in the greek and latin novels Regine May c In a discussion of adultery in the nineteenth-century novel, Tony Tanner argues: The bourgeois novelist has no choice but to engage the subject of marriage in one way or another, at no matter what extreme of celebration or contestation. He may concentrate on what makes for marriage and leads up to it, or on what threatens marriage and portends in disintegration , but his subject will still be marriage.1 Marriage is one of the structuring patterns of society, modern as well as ancient. Despite obvious differences from the modern novel, the ancient novel can be seen to reflect the wishes and fears of its society. As the stability of society rests on the avoidance of adultery and the procreation of lawful children, adultery and chastity, as two opposite poles of (female) behavior, can be seen as central themes of the ancient novel. The Greek novel comprises two subgroups. The first, the so-called ideal romances (Chariton’s Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus’s Ephesiaka, Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus’s Aethiopika), portray a loving couple reunited in bliss after a string of adventures . During their trials, they display a remarkable preoccupation with chastity and the prospect of matrimonial bliss. They aim at marriage and lifelong bliss thereafter and use all their resources to preserve their chastity for one another. The issue of chastity is more loosely handled for the male protagonists, who are allowed extramarital experiences, unlike their female counterparts.2 In the second group of Greek novels, the comic-realistic romances (e.g., the epitomized pseudo-Lucian’s Loukios, or The Ass or the fragmentary Lollianus’s Phoenikika), this plot is replaced by the (anti)hero’s infidelity, his problems with sexuality, and changing partners. Greek novels of this kind are preserved rather fragmentarily,3 but the two Roman novels, the Satyrica by Petronius and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, provide ample evidence for this more antiidealistic and satirical approach. The structure of the ideal novels, with their heterosexual couples, focuses on the ultimate attainment of matrimonial bliss, which makes the portrait of the female characters especially important. These heroines are so predominant in the plot that some scholars have suggested that women were the main intended readership of this kind of fiction.4 In accord with the idealized and romantic world of Greek ideal novels, the heroine is a high-minded, chaste woman of noble birth whose love for her (future) husband is sincerely and deeply felt. She invites empathy, reader identification, and admiration. Her beauty and mind are so perfect that she appears rather artificial, and her characteristics are, as Del Corno (1989) has shown, attributable to a stylized use of stereotypes drawn from different literary genres, especially tragedy and comedy .5 Frequently these heroines are compared with or mistaken for a goddess— often for Artemis, more rarely for Aphrodite.6 The recurring comparison of these heroines with Artemis, the goddess of chastity, serves a particular function. They are chaste to the point of obsession (e.g., Heliodorus’s Charicleia), because the novels finally result in marriage and thus ultimately in the continuation of the family. Adultery and unfaithfulness by the heroine is a priori unthinkable in a story centered around marriage and (ultimately) the begetting of lawful children. On another level, this chastity and its defense give the heroines the capacity to ensure their selfidentity against tyrannical rulers or other men attracted by their unusual beauty, who have the women in their power and, in this genre, commonly want to seduce them. The erotic power the women in turn have over their pursuers is mainly based on their unavailability to them. The chastity theme is also found in Christian literature contemporary with the novel (cf., e.g., Revelation 14:4). Christian “novels” like The Shepherd of Hermas,7 the Acts of Paul and Thecla, or the pseudo-Clementine Recognitiones Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage 130 concentrate on it in a context where religious vows prevent the heroes and heroines from having any sexual encounter. Their heroines make their chastity a symbol of their purity and the outward sign of their Christian belief. The earliest extant novel, Chariton’s Callirhoe, was probably written in the first century A.D., and chances are that Petronius knew it or...