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The Female Body in Latin Love Poetry View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository The Female Body in Latin Love Poetry Erika Zimmermann Damer A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classics. Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: Sharon James, advisor. James O’Hara, reader. Alison Keith, reader. Paul Allen Miller, reader. Eric Downing, reader. i © 2010 Erika Zimmermann Damer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ERIKA ZIMMERMANN DAMER: The Female Body in Latin Love Poetry (Under the direction of Sharon James) This dissertation seeks to rethink the female body in Latin love elegy in its aesthetic and political significance, and argues that the sexualized body creates poetic subjectivity. It juxtaposes close readings of the elegies of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid alongside contemporary theorizations of the female body found in Irigaray, Kristeva, and Grosz. By expanding critical focus to encompass all the women of elegy, this dissertation demonstrates a surprising ambivalence towards the female body in a genre that claims to celebrate female beauty, and offers a new view of elegy’s role within Roman conceptions of gender, sexuality, bodies, and empire. Chapter one offers a brief introduction to contemporary feminist theories of the body as well as an overview of critical literature on the elegiac body. Chapter two examines Lucretius’ diatribe against love, Horace Epodes 8 and 12, and the Augustan marital legislation as major background for elegy’s female body. Chapter three explores the representation of elegy’s “other women.” The imagery of blood associates the elegiac mistress with grotesque representations of her family members, and of the elegiac procuress, the lena. This chapter draws on Kristeva’s abject body, as well as ancient notions of feminine corporeality, to argue that the elegists make the female body a stumbling block for their speakers and that this conceptual failure is manifested in iii grotesque images of the female body he catalogue of cultus and that Tibullus and Ovid incorporate this poetic topos in their own elegies. The catalogue of cultus substitutes descriptions of luxury goods and adornment for a coherent image of the puella’s sexualized body in Propertius, while Tibullus uses cultus to respond to Propertian elegy and to Catullan invective. Chapter five finds the sexualized female body in Cynthia’s and Acanthis’ bodily-centered speeches. This chapter argues that Cynthia mobilizes the sexualized female body as a critique of the dominant voice of the male poet-speaker, and makes use of Irigaray’s concept of mimetismé to link the sexualized body with an elegiac feminine voice. iv Viro filiae carissimis nos, Paulo, amoris exemplum cana simus uterque coma v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have supported me intellectually, financially, and emotionally during the course of this dissertation, and I would like to express my profound thanks to them here. First, I give boundless thanks to Professor Sharon James, my director, for her unfailing patience, generosity, and all-around aid from day one of this dissertation. It has been a great pleasure learning most of what I know about Latin poetry, and many things I do not, but should, from her. I must also thank my incredible committee members Jim O’Hara, Alison Keith, Paul Allen Miller, and Eric Downing for their assistance, resistance, and good advice at every stage of the project. Jim O’Hara has mentored me through Latin poetry and Greek historiography, and has always generously offered his time, much-appreciated skepticism, and considerable insight into my projects. Special thanks are due as well to Ted Gellar-Goad for inviting me to participate in a panel on ancient bodies and jump-starting this project, and to Alison Keith, David Wray, and John Henkel for contributing to a great panel on Tibullus. I have received support from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, from the classics department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from Elon University during the long gestation of my dissertation, and I am grateful for the wonderful libraries, lovely accommodations, and delightful colleagues, faculty members, and students who have helped and challenged me. vi I owe many thanks to Hunter Gardner, Sarah Alison Miller, and Micaela Janan for putting me on the right track at the outset, to Phiroze Vasunia, James Reeves, and Werner Reiss for sharing their boundless knowledge, and to my dear friends Arum Park, David Carlisle, Sydnor Roy, Katerina Ladianou, Hallie Franks, Curt Butera, John Henkel, Kristina Killgrove, Chris Polt, Derek Smith, Amanda Mathis, Beth Greene, Liz Robinson, Ted Gellar-Goad, Margaret Macdonald, Sarah Hilliard, and Josie Thompson for thought-provoking conversations. If I have neglected to name some here, I do not thank them less profoundly. My eternal gratitude goes to my grandfather Elmer Suderman, who always asked me questions, and to my family who knew I could do it. And of course, I could not have had my dissertation and my dissertation baby without my beloved Paul and Helena. This is for you two. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Literature Review and Theoretical Background . 1 1.1: The Body, Subjectivity, and Roman Love Elegy . .1 1.2: Feminist Theories of Embodiment. 8 1.3: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Body . 9 1.4: Irigarayan Bodies and Mimetismé . 12 1.5: The Kristevan Abject . 15 1.6: Review of Prior Elegy Scholarship . 19 Chapter Two: Backgrounds to the Elegiac Female Body . .31 2.1: Republican Poetry and Science: Lucretius . 32 2.2: Republican and Early Augustan Prose . 37 2.3: Horatian Iambic and Elegy . 43 2.4: Augustan Legal Discourse on the Body: the Julian Laws . 55 Chapter Three: Blood Others: the other women of Elegy . .63 3.1: the Female Body in Tibullus . 66 3.2: Acanthis: Propertius 4.5 . 78 3.3: Dipsas: Ovid Amores 1.8 . 84 3.4: Invective against older women: iambic and elegy . .. 88 Chapter Four: Cultus and the Elegiac Body . 90 4.1: Cultus . 91 viii 4.2: Propertian Cultus . 100 4.3: Tibullan Cultus . 112 4.4: The Other Women of Tibullus Revisited. Cultus in Tibullus 1.9 . 119 4.5: Catalogue of Cultus sine puella . .130 4.6: Ovidian cultus and corpus . 136 4.7: Conclusions . 141 Chapter Five: Body talk: Women’s Speech on the body . 145 5.1 Female Speech in Elegy . 146 5.2: Cynthia’s Speech in Propertius 1.3 . 152 5.3: Cynthia’s Second Speech: 2.29b . 154 5.4: Real or Imaginary Female Speech: 3.6 . 158 5.5: Cynthia’s posthumous speech. Poem 4.7. 164 5.6: The “Other Woman” Speaks: Acanthis in Propertius 4.5 . 176 5.7: Conclusions . 185 Chapter Six: CONCLUSION . .187 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 194 ix CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1.1. The Body, Subjectivity, and Roman Love Elegy The body has provided a major avenue of inquiry both within classics and within the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. It has emerged as a central concern particularly for feminist writing, as the proliferation of readers, courses, and monographs on topics like Shildrick and Price (1999) Feminist Theory and the Body: a Reader, Butler’s (1993) Bodies that Matter, Luce Irigaray’s and Elizabeth Grosz’ terms “labial politics” and “corporeal feminism” suggest. Critical thought has transformed understandings of identity by beginning from a position of an embodied subjectivity that places the material body at the center of theoretical debates. The Roman body has also proven a useful ground for thought within classics, and has provided the focus to a wide variety of discussions about ancient conceptions of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, power, religion, and empire (e.g. Hallett and Skinner 1997, Braund and Gold 1998, Wyke 1999a, 1999b; Porter 1999; Hopkins and Wyke 2005). In recent years there has also been a major body of scholarship on Roman love elegy,1 which I here define narrowly as the four volumes of elegiac poetry produced by Propertius between 27 BCE and 16 BCE,2 Tibullus’ two volumes of elegiac poetry appearing between 27-19 BCE,3 and Ovid’s earliest elegiac collection, the Amores, published in its second, abridged edition between 7 BCE -1 BCE.4 Encouraged by the development of sophisticated criticism and appreciation of Roman elegy, this dissertation looks at the representation of the female body in Latin love poetry. My study examines the female body’s literary representations in elegy and is indebted to contemporary French feminism, but it also studies Roman cultural discourses about feminine corporeality and sexuality, as reflected in literature of the late Republic, the imbrication of women’s cultus in conceptions of sexuality, gender, and morality, and women’s speech on the body. I offer, through a reading of selected poems from the Propertian, Tibullan, and Ovidian corpora, an optimistic recuperative reading of the female body as a site for potential criticism of Roman values and for the construction of an embodied elegiac poetics. My dissertation attempts to work across generic boundaries and connect Roman love elegy into contemporary debates about women’s sexuality and the body in late Republican and early Augustan historiography and poetry. Elegy, in this reading, reflects the Roman cultural milieux of which it partakes, yet it also is productive 1 Lyne’s 1980 overview of the Latin love poets offers a standard example of a more encompassing definition of Roman love poetry that incorporates Catullus’ carmina and Gallus’ lost Amores. Liveley and Salzman-Mitchell’s 2008 collection on elegy and narratology offers a much more inclusive definition of Roman elegy incorporating all of Ovidian poetry in elegiacs.
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