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Ovid's Heroines and Feminine Discourse: Metamorphoses 7 and 10

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Ovid's Heroines and Feminine Discourse: Metamorphoses 7 and 10 CHAPTER TWO OVID'S HEROINES AND FEMININE DISCOURSE: METAMORPHOSES 7 AND 10 The voice of the distraught heroine, such as Myrrha or Atalanta, surfaces repeatedly in the Metamorphoses' middle books. Ovid indulges the neoteric taste in the representation of the woman in emotional turmoil and explores her situation in far more depth than that of any other type of female character. The female voice as such in Metamorphoses 6-10 is drawn from the classical traditions of elegy, dramatic monologue, and medical theory. Ovid's extensive treatment of heroines' psychological quandaries did much to legitimize the rep­ resentation of subjectivity (both for female and, in the Middle Ages, for male character as well); yet the "voice" and the subjectivity accorded these heroines deserve further scrutiny. A number of pas­ sages from the Metamorphoses illustrate the specific nature and qual­ ity of Ovid's contributions to the representation of female interiority. Medea's flight in book 7, during which she scans the Aegean and surrounding terrain, seems one of Ovid's purely "ornamental" pas­ sages as it heaps up mythological allusions. But even in this brief passage, Ovid employs allusions to myths (Paris, Cygnus/Phyllius) to reflect the deeper concerns of the vengeful Medea and so shows medieval poets how to suggest interiority through myth above and beyond the more straightforward lover's lament or internal mono­ logue, thus extending the limits of traditional medieval ethopoeia. The focal point of this chapter will be Orpheus' song in book 10, which manifests numerous hallmarks of Ovid's poetics, with its many imbed­ ded heroines' interior monologues and its extended inset tale. This song, which constitutes the great bulk of book 10, gives the book an internal coherence virtually unrivalled elsewhere in the poem; the song's function as an extended poem-within-a-poem also repays close scrutiny, for it is here that we may gain some insight into Ovid's own program with the larger poem and with his representations of the feminine in general. The examples of Medea, Orpheus, Myrrha, and Atalanta offer a cross-section of passages which are in many 18 CHAPTER TWO ways characteristic of Ovid's strategies in rendering male and female interiority and emotional conflict. Book 7: Medea The Medea tale covers roughly the first half of book 7 of the Metamorphoses and contains the first of the many extended interior monologues of female characters in books 6-10, as Medea struggles over whether to remain loyal to her father and homeland or to betray both by helping Jason carry out her father's orders. Ovid's tendency to model the heroines' monologues in the Metamorphoses on the speeches of Euripides' heroines is generally accepted; later in this chapter I will explore the many parallels between Myrrha and Euripides' Phaedra. Zeitlin comments on the heroine's monologue m Euripides: Woman speaks on the tragic stage, transgressing the social rules if she speaks on her own behalf ... by virtue of the conflicts generated by her social position and ambiguously defined between inside and out­ side, interior self and exterior identity, the woman is already more of a "character" than the man, who as an actor is far more limited to his public social and political roles. Woman comes equipped with a "natural" awareness of the complexities that men would resist, if they could. Situated in her more restrictive and sedentary position in the world, she is permitted, even asked, to reflect more deeply ... on the paradoxes of herself. 1 Zeitlin goes on to argue that in tragedy mimesis is bound up with gender, that in Greek drama, "for the most part man is undone (or at times redeemed) by feminine forces or himself undergoes a type of 'feminine' experience. On the simplest level, this experience involves a shift, at the crucial moment of the peripeteia, from active to passive, from mastery over the self and others to surrender and grief ... tragedy, understood as the worship of Dionysos, expands an awareness of the world and the self through the drama of 'playing the other,' whose mythic and cultic affinities with the god logically connect the god of women to the lord of the theater."2 Ovid draws on this Euripidean exploration of the feminine, this using women "to think with," when 1 Zeitlin, Playing the Other, 362, 363. 2 Ibid., 363-64. .
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