THE WOMEN of the AENEID Vanishing Bodies, Lingering Voices S
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THE WOMEN OF THE AENEID-- Vanishing Bodies, Lingering Voices -- 1of 14 THE WOMEN OF THE AENEID Vanishing Bodies, Lingering Voices S. Georgia Nugent The "constant changeability" that Vergil's Mercury predicates of "woman" ( mutabile semper femina , 4.570) might well be applied to the Aeneid itself. For readers' understanding of the poem continually evolves, reflecting changes in historical circumstances, cultural mores, and critical fashions. Essays in this volume discuss ways in which the elusive meaning of Vergil's epic has been quite differently understood, for example, by readers for whom the sun never set on their national empire and by readers whose nation was embarked on a war they believed to be unjustified and unjust. Not surprisingly, just as Victorian imperialism or the Viet Nam War inflected, in their time, readers' understanding of the Aeneid , so has the political and intellectual movement of feminism in recent decades led some readers to look at the Aeneid in a different way, to ask new questions of the text, and to reevaluate its significance. In the context of widespread critical reappraisal and reevaluation of the role of women in literary texts, it is worthwhile to examine female characters and their deployment in the Aeneid , for they figure importantly in almost every book of the epic. The history of critical attention to the female figures of the Aeneid , however, is marked by paradox. There is no doubt that the Aeneid is profoundly centered around men, their aspirations and relationships with one another. And yet the divine figure of Juno and especially the human figure of Dido have always elicited great interest among readers. Both characters, it is true, have been largely perceived as fascinating obstacles in the path of the inevitable (and male-identified) mission of Aeneas. But that is not the whole story. While Juno has been seen in an almost unrelievedly negative light, Dido has been understood both as the most dangerous threat to the Roman project and as an enormously sympathetic tragic figure. St. Augustine provides perhaps the most stirring example of the emotional impact of Dido's tale, admitting in a well-known passage of his Confessions that he wept over her death when she was abandoned by Aeneas, although he did not weep for the death of his own soul when he had abandoned God. The great German classicist Richard Heinze called Dido "the only character created by a Roman poet to pass into world literature." Much more recently, in her exploration of "gender and the politics of reading Virgil," Marilynn Desmond notes that "to many readers, the Dido story eclipses the plot of the Aeneid as a whole." Thus Dido, who seems to present the greatest threat to the eventual founding of Rome that is the subject of the Aeneid , also emerges paradoxically as the focus of readerly sympathy and even, perhaps, as the most memorable creation of Vergil's epic. I shall argue here that this representational strategy, which casts the woman both as what must be rejected -- even destroyed -- and as what remains most indelibly present, is not unique to Dido, but characterizes Vergil's representation of other women in the Aeneid as well. This essay will explore three aspects of the depiction of women that contribute to this construct, all of which are dramatically exemplified in the case of Dido: the centrality THE WOMEN OF THE AENEID-- Vanishing Bodies, Lingering Voices -- 2of 14 of female suffering and its distinction from Vergil's portrayal of male suffering; the resistance female characters offer to what has been called the "dominant voice" of Vergil's poem; and, finally, women's frequent tendency in the poem toward (self-) destruction and/or disappearance. Even as they disappear from the narrative surface of the poem with alarming regularity, women remain deeply inscribed as traces in the Vergilian text. TAKE IT LIKE A MAN As one contemporary scholar has written, "Dido's suffering lingers in the mind long after Aeneas' plotting and piety have faded." The centrality, the defining quality of suffering in the perception of Dido's greatness is surely no accident. The experience of loss and its painful memory -- lacrimae rerum -- lie at the heart of the Aeneid , even if the celebration of empire-founding beckons on its horizon. In the bleak and shadowy landscape through which the men and women of the Aeneid pass on their way to that promised empire, they endure great hardship and pain, both physical and spiritual. As readers of the Aeneid , we are led to understand immediately, from his first appearances in the poem, that Aeneas is a character haunted by the anguish of suffering and loss, yet also deeply marked by a sense of responsibility to master (even, if necessary, to mask) that anguish for the sake of others. Early in Book 1, when Aeneas' ships have found refuge from the storm at Carthage, the poet tells us explicitly that Aeneas' words of encouragement are crafted for his men, to "put a good face on things," while the leader suppresses within himself his own grave concerns: Talia voce refert curisque ingentibus aeger spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem . (1.208-9) These are his words; though sick with heavy cares, he counterfeits hope in his face; his pain is held within, hidden. (M 290-92) In the figures of Aeneas and Dido, Vergil has created characters who differ dramatically from one another along a multitude of dimensions. But perhaps their differing capacity for absorbing and conferring meaning upon suffering is one of the most significant of those dimensions, not only for understanding the continuing tragic appeal of the Carthaginian queen, but also for understanding broader implications of the roles of women in the epic. Women in the Aeneid suffer greatly, but not well. The men seem capable of performing a marvelous alchemy that transmutes the seemingly senseless pain endured and inflicted for an elusive future goal into the fine stuff of heroism and civic virtue. But women possess no such philosopher's stone. Rather than absorbing and somehow transforming pain, the women of the Aeneid very often simply reflect it back into the community. Sometimes they do this in the form of outrage or even violence (as in their burning of the ships in Book 5 or seizing makeshift weapons in Book 11). More often they do it in the form of weeping and THE WOMEN OF THE AENEID-- Vanishing Bodies, Lingering Voices -- 3of 14 wailing, the onomatopoeic ululation of women’s lamentation that sounds continually at the periphery of the poem. And not infrequently, a woman reflects back into the community the pain she cannot endure by destroying herself, making of her own death an unmistakable message. Compensating to some extent for the prevalence of pain and sorrow in the Aeneid's moral universe is the father/son relationship, which -- it is clear -- grounds the more extensive systems of mutual commitment and obligation through which not only familial but civic order may be forged and preserved by men. It is not at all clear, however, that women are capable of participating successfully in the social relationships like those bonding father to son and comrade to comrade in a way that can confer meaning upon and in some sense transcend or redeem suffering. While it is by no means primarily women who endure hardship or suffer grief in the Aeneid , yet Vergil represents women, by contrast to men in pain, as suffering extravagantly, without measure, often without dignity, and without sublimation to a higher purpose. This gendered distinction is well illustrated in the tightly packed sequence of tragic events in Books 9-11, which includes the death of Euryalus and the reaction of his mother; the death of Lausus and the reaction of his father Mezentius, and the death of Pallas and reaction of his bereaved father Evander. Focusing not on the pathos experienced by these young men in meeting their untimely ends but on the pathos of reception as a parent is informed of tragic death, the clearest comparison may be made between Vergil's representation of Euryalus' mother and of Pallas' father, as they learn that their respective sons are dead. It is worth noting at the outset several fundamental distinctions between these characters. One lies in their identity or fullness of being in the text. Euryalus' mother is not a figure whose narrative significance extends, as does Evander's, through the course of the Aeneid , yet Book 9 confers considerable attention upon her -- without conferring a name. Her presence in the Trojan camp is first alluded to by Nisus, a presence that comes as a surprise, since it contradicts the reader's understanding that at the conclusion of Book 5 all of the Trojan women have elected to stay behind in Sicily. In this passage, in which Nisus and Euryalus discuss taking on a dangerous reconnaissance mission, Euryalus' father is immediately named, but his mother is simply called (proleptically) by Nisus, mater misera ("wretched mother," 9.216). When the two friends, having made their pact, present their plan to Ascanius, Euryalus asks only that Ascanius see to the welfare of his mother; should he not return, noting also that he could not bear to tell her of his departure. Ascanius responds emotionally that she will be like his own mother to him, lacking only her name. In fact, here and later, Euryalus' mother lacks any name. Vergil's choice to leave her unnamed inevitably renders her a more contingent figure than Evander. She enters into the text not as a subject but as a topic of men's discussion, an object of their concern -- to be sure -- but also an object for their disposition.