"Matermorphoses: Motherhood and the Ovidian Epic Subject " (original) (raw)
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This chapter examines the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose two bodies are merged into one. A series of connections are drawn between Hermaphroditus and the representation of the primordial universe at the beginning of the Metamorphoses, where there is a continual oscillation between binary oppositions. By placing the Hermaphroditus narrative alongside the other ‘mythological’ stories of corporeal transformation, Ovid highlights how the apparent boundaries which exist in terms of textual genre are as fluid and unstable as those which are perceived to exist between genders. Ovid conveys this through the use of multiple allusions to ‘scientific’ accounts of ‘intersex’ beings in Empedocles, Plato’s Symposium and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Ovid’s portrayal of Hermaphroditus expresses the breakdown of corporeal distinction through blurring the divisions between truth and falsehood, while undermining the use of opposition as a basic organizing principle across the cultural spectrum.
A Critical Reading of Desire and Gender in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Essay, 2019
This essay will be exploring themes of desire and gender in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid, born around the middle of the first century AD1, once a lawyer and a later poet, had a keen interest in the science and politics of love. Desire and love throughout Metamorphoses are often intertwined, with no obvious distinction between the two, with the moment one falls in love being determined by sight and aesthetical beauty2. Though he was recognised and won awards for his poetry, at the time of writing Metamorphoses, he was banished by the Augustinian government3, the cause of his banishment has oft been contemplated by scholars
The Influence of Motherhood in the Construction of Female Identity
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Still, She Persisted: Materiality and Memory in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
2020
This paper examines how a complex of ideas involving memory and materiality can offer a new way to view metamorphosis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Through the embodiment of power in transformed things, Ovid uses several of the episodes in the poem to push back against mutability and loss of speech, and to assert a different kind of permanence. Much of Ovid’s discourse about memory and materiality is linked through the trope of aetiology, i.e., the explanation of how something that exists now came into existence at a specific point in the past. Aetiology is by its nature a form of mnemonic device: it both highlights the enormous gulf separating past and present, and ensures temporal and cultural continuity. The aetiological narrative thus establishes its subject as a sign of permanence in an otherwise constantly changing landscape.
Voices and Vacancies in Verse: Metamorphoses and Gendering the Ovidian Soliloquy
Millennium Journal of English Literature, Linguistics and Translation
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a poem saturated with stories and heavy with the most colourful narrative elements. One such is the soliloquy, which Ovid bequeathed to poets and dramatists like Chaucer, Faustus and the Bard. Metamorphoses houses five soliloquies, all, interestingly, in the mouth of female characters. This essay attempts to understand the ‘gendering’ of the soliloquy through its aetiology and implications on the characters, narrative, themes and audiences. Medea, Scylla, Byblis, Myrrha and Atlanta are the only Ovidian soliloquists of Metamorphoses. This puts them in a difficult position, for they are a granted agency and comprehensive selfhoods and characterhoods through the expression of complex psychological interiorities. But at the same time, their identities are suffocated with erroneous rationales, moral didacticisms and tragic endings. The soliloquies operate within the liminality of gender and gendered literary traditions. The essay culminates in an open question: ho...