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Death and the Female Body in Homer, Vergil, and Ovid

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Death and the Female Body in Homer, Vergil, and Ovid DEATH AND THE FEMALE BODY IN HOMER, VERGIL, AND OVID Katherine De Boer Simons A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Depart- ment of Classics. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Sharon L. James James J. O’Hara William H. Race Alison Keith Laurel Fulkerson © 2016 Katherine De Boer Simons ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT KATHERINE DE BOER SIMONS: Death and the Female Body in Homer, Vergil, and Ovid (Under the direction of Sharon L. James) This study investigates the treatment of women and death in three major epic poems of the classical world: Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I rely on recent work in the areas of embodiment and media studies to consider dead and dying female bodies as representations of a sexual politics that figures women as threatening and even mon- strous. I argue that the Odyssey initiates a program of linking female death to women’s sexual status and social class that is recapitulated and intensified by Vergil. Both the Odyssey and the Aeneid punish transgressive women with suffering in death, but Vergil further spectacularizes violent female deaths, narrating them in “carnographic” detail. The Metamorphoses, on the other hand, subverts the Homeric and Vergilian model of female sexuality to present the female body as endangered rather than dangerous, and threatened rather than threatening. In Ovid’s poem, women are overwhelmingly depicted as brutalized victims regardless of their sexual status, and the female body is consistently represented as bloodied in death and twisted in metamorphosis. I argue that Ovid re-reads previous epic and disrupts the gendered system that uses the female body as a means of enforcing social values. His representations of female death and suffering expose a vulnerability of the female body that is inherent in the ancient (as well as the modern) world: women suffer a constant risk of ruin and death because of male desire and violence. Rather than presenting female sexuality as threatening to male heroes and heroic projects, Ovid presents male sexuality as threatening to women. iii To my parents. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my dissertation director and advisor, Sharon James, who read every word of this project many times, often late at night and with little advance notice. I am grateful to her for her generous advice and support, and for the many conversations that helped refine and clarify the ideas in these chapters. Jim O’Hara of- fered invaluable advice and expert knowledge at many stage of this process; his incisive and insightful comments helped me make much-needed improvements. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee—Bill Race, Alison Keith, and Laurel Fulkerson—for their thoughtful feedback and continued encouragement. My friends Erika Weiberg and Robyn Le Blanc were steadfast supporters of my work, reading many drafts and offering much encouragement and inspiration. Above all, I am grateful to my parents, Glenn and Kathleen De Boer, who have always believed in me and championed me in all my undertakings, little and great. My mother first inspired me with her love of literature and history; everything I am, I owe to her. Finally, I would like to thank the UNC Department of Classics and the UNC Gradu- ate School for the funding that made this dissertation possible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................1 Methodology..................................................................................................................2 Chapter Overviews.........................................................................................................9 CHAPTER 2: HOMER’S ODYSSEY......................................................................................12 The Sexual Ideology of the Odyssey............................................................................17 Women and Death in the Odyssey...............................................................................25 CHAPTER 3: VERGIL’S AENEID.........................................................................................55 Creusa and Caieta........................................................................................................58 Dido..............................................................................................................................66 Camilla.........................................................................................................................97 Amata.........................................................................................................................117 CHAPTER 4: OVID’S METAMORPHOSES........................................................................130 Terminal Metamorphosis...........................................................................................131 Reconceiving the Carnographic.................................................................................153 Women as Victims, Not Villains...............................................................................180 Rape and Death..............................................................................................181 Sacrificial Victims.........................................................................................192 Conclusion.................................................................................................................208 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION..............................................................................................211 WORKS CITED....................................................................................................................219 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Book 4 of Vergil’s Georgics tells the story of the double death of Eurydice, wife of Orpheus. In a long digression, the seer Proteus explains to the hero Aristaeus the reason for the inexplicable death of his bee colony: Aristaeus has provoked the wrath of Orpheus by in- advertently causing the death of Eurydice in the course of an attempted rape. In Proteus’ ver- sion, Eurydice fled from her assailant and failed to notice a snake in the grass: Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps, immanem ante pedes hydrum moritura puella servantem ripas alta non vidit in herba. At chorus aequalis Dryadum clamore supremos implerunt montes… She indeed, while she fled you headlong through the rivers, the girl, on the verge of death, did not see the huge serpent before her feet, guarding the banks in the long grass. But the youthful chorus of Dryads filled the high mountains with their clamor… (Geo. 4.457-461)1 Curiously, the narrator skips over Eurydice’s death: her imminent demise is indicated by mo- ritura puella (Geo. 4.458), yet just as she approaches the snake, the poet shifts to a descrip- tion of the mourning of her companions (Geo. 4.460-463) and husband (Geo. 4.464-466), leaving the reader to infer that death has occurred in the interim. This jarring transition, in which the poet averts his eyes from the moment of Euryd- ice’s death, fits a pattern in the depiction of dead and dying women in ancient epic. Some, 1 All translations are my own. 1 like Eurydice, die quietly, out of sight of both poet and audience, while others suffer violent and bloody deaths that are narrated in graphic, even fetishistic, detail. In this study, I explore that distinction in the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses, arguing that Homer and Vergil index the violence of women’s death to their social and sexual status, while Ovid un- does that pattern and destabilizes the previously fixed categories of transgressive and norma- tive women. I uncover a trajectory in epic representations of dead and dying women. Homer normalizes the brutal deaths of transgressive slave-women as part of the violence required for the restoration of order in the oikos and the confirmation of Odysseus’ political authority. Vergil similarly presents the brutal deaths of transgressive queens as necessary to the estab- lishment of the Roman political future, which is founded in part upon the domestication and control of Roman women. Finally, Ovid rewrites heroic and national epic, upending the pat- terns and paradigms of Homer and Vergil—including those that punish women for their sex- uality and subjectivity. Instead, Ovid highlights the many ways female bodies may be endan- gered by male sexuality and male heroic endeavors, converting the female body from a locus of danger to male heroes into a locus of danger to the woman herself. Methodology My research is founded on the insight, especially attributed to Foucault, of the body as a social construct, rather than a concrete object or fact of nature.2 We cannot separate the 2 This perception is often traced back to Karl Marx, who argued that economic class had a significant influence on a person’s experience of his or her body; however, Bordo (1993: 17-18) shows that Fou- cault’s idea of the “docile body,” the body shaped by social control, is well-described by Mary Woll- stonecraft in 1792, arguing that female bodies are socially constructed as delicate and domestic, rather than naturally so. De Beauvoir’s description of the body as a “situation” ([1949] 1952: 34) and her claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” ([1949] 1952: 287) are also foundational statements
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