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Introduction Gender and the Politics of Reading Virgil A golden bough. The torch is passed on. His son clutches his hand, his crippled father clings to his back, three male generations leave the burning city. The wife, lost. Got lost in burning. No one knows what happened to her, when they became the Romans. Rachel Blau DuPlessis1 The monopoly which Latin exercised in formal education combined with the structure of society in the West up until the past few generations to give the language its strangest characteristic. It was a sexually specialized language, used almost exclusively for communication between male and male. Walter J. Ong, SJ.2 irgil's Aeneid has historically been read in circumstances that support social and cultural hierarchies, a fact characterized by Thomas Greene: "Virgil's earlier poetry was taught in Roman schools even before his death, and from then on, from the first century to the nineteenth , he was generally at the core of European education. . . . If he [Virgil] teaches the schoolboy style, to the man he imparts nobility"3 (emphasis added). Given such a Eurocentric reading context, one would expect the reception of the Aeneid to epitomize the patriarchal concerns of Western culture. And to a large extent, it does. As a narrative of cultural origins, the Aeneid delineates a Roman foundation myth based on patrilineal Trojan survival that necessitates the loss of Creusa in book 2, the death of Dido in book 4, and the final achievement of a political alliance between the Trojans and the Italians through the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia—the justificationfor the wars in Italy that constitute the last half of the epic.4 The history of Virgil readership has frequently emphasized the imperial mythic program of the Aeneid, as we shall see. Nevertheless, to many readers, the Dido story eclipses the plot of the Aeneid as a whole, and the reception of the Aeneid story has at times foregrounded the character of Dido, often at the expense of Aeneas.5 Although Dido is one ofthe most memorable characters in the Aeneid, her story actually occupies a small part of the narrative: when the Trojan I V Introduction refugees are shipwrecked off the coast of Carthage in Aeneid I, Dido receives them into her city. Through the help of the gods, who bring on a thunderstorm during a hunt, Dido and Aeneas eventually enter a cave and there succumb to their incipient desire. The cave scene is perhaps the most indeterminate moment in the Aeneid: the characters themselves never agree on the social significance of the events in the cave. Dido interprets their partnership as a marriage, not without reason, but incorrectly (at least accordingto Aeneas). When larbas—a neighboring African king—becomes angeredat Aeneas's comfortable presence in Carthage, he begs Jupiter to intervene. Aeneas is consequently reminded of his divine mission to found Rome, and he thereupon makes it clear to Dido that he is not bound by any legal or official marriage vows. His plans for departure precipitate Dido's final disintegration, and by the end of Aeneid 4 she commits suicide. Virgil's narrative continues for another eight books, which include Aeneas's journey to the underworld and his eventual conquest of Italy. As Dido's story, Aeneid 4 has had a separate itinerary all its own in Western literary traditions,- perhaps only Aeneid 6—the journey to the underworld—has been so frequently "cited" and rewritten over the centuries .6 Medieval and Renaissance vernacular literatures, in particular, focus attention on Dido, even to the exclusion of Aeneas. Indeed, a discernible tradition in the medieval vernacular adaptation of the Aeneid is characterized by the intense interest among vernacular poets in the character ofDido. Forvernacular readers from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, reading Dido—that is, thematizing Dido's story (sometimes only momentarily) as the central plot of the Virgilian text— constitutes a visible response to the Aeneid story. Bydisplacing the epic hero Aeneas, the tradition ofreading Dido disrupts the patrilineal focusof the Aeneid as an imperial foundation narrative. Readers ofthe Aeneid may focus on Dido and thereby call into question Aeneas, his destiny, the empire he founds, as well as the reiteration of imperial ideologies in the repetition of empires throughout the West.7 In the passage quoted earlier, Helene Cixous evokes Dido as a possible mythic ancestor and thus calls into question the place of Virgil's Aeneid in the history of Western culture. Once posed, Cixous's question about Dido may...

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