DEATH AND THE FEMALE BODY IN HOMER, VERGIL, AND OVID Katherine De Boer Simons A ...

251 Pages·2016·1.57 MB·English

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 of the cultural and political nature of the body.
2
body from the social and political discourses imposed on it—just as biological sex is always
entwined with cultural gender, so the physical body is always entwined with cultural ideas
about what that body means. Foucault was particularly concerned with the ways bodies are
“disciplined” by modern political systems (Foucault [1975] 1977),3 but his discussion of the
social construction of the body has proven particularly fruitful for gender studies, with many
critics drawing attention to the divergence between real women’s embodied experiences and
the cultural discourses surrounding the female body. This distinction will be important in
Chapter 4 of this study, where I will discuss Ovid’s exposure of the divergence between
women’s embodied vulnerability and previous epic discourses that presented the female body
as threatening. As has been frequently shown in twentieth and twenty-first century scholar-
ship since de Beauvoir, femininity is a construct rather than a natural state: the cultural mark-
ers that denote femininity are imposed from the outside, rather than being innate qualities of
the female body.4 Further, intersectional theory has demonstrated that the supposedly unified

3 “What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manip-
ulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power
that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’ which was also a ‘mechanics
of power,’ was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that
they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the
speed, and the efficiency that one determines. Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bod-
ies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault [1975] 1977: 178). Yet Foucault is entirely indifferent to the distinct
coercions that operate on female bodies and does not acknowledge the ways the female body has been
particularly disciplined, dating back long before the 18th and 19th century developments he discusses.
See Bartky 1988 for a feminist response to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
4 See Butler 1990 and 1993 for foundational treatments of the way gender identity is performed
through the body; see Price and Shildrick (1999) for an overview of feminist theories of embodiment.
3
and natural category of women is, in fact, riven along multiple fault lines; particularly im-
portant for this project will be the intersection of gender and class.5 Women’s bodies are con-
structed, but as we will see in Chapter 2, on Homer, they are not constructed equally.
Classical studies has recently begun to explore the ways the body is embedded in a
variety of ancient discourses and how representations of the body can be used to produce and
enforce ideologies, especially gender norms.6 In addition to the proliferation of work on the
construction of the body in antiquity, scholarship on epic has long been interested in the por-
trayal of the dead and suffering male body.7 This emphasis is unsurprising given the extraor-
dinary variety and detail of descriptions of male death in epic poetry: men die by the sword,
by the spear, facedown in the dust, or upturned toward the sun. Death lays them low, loosens
their limbs, covers over their eyes, and sends them down to Hades. The suffering of the male
body in epic is, however, mitigated to the extent that both Homer and Vergil portray male
death with great sympathy and emotion. Griffin (1980; cf. Griffin 1976) in particular has
shown that Homer lends pathos to the deaths even of insignificant heroes through the use of

5 The term “intersectionality” was introduced by Crenshaw (1989), who argued that feminist and anti-
racist political movements were failing black women by subsuming them under the categories of ei-
ther “black” or “woman” without considering how those identities intersected to produce unique ex-
periences—and unique vulnerabilities (cf. Crenshaw 1993). Similar points had been made (without
using the term intersectionality) throughout the 1970’s, but the earliest expression of this idea dates
back to Sojourner Truth, who famously pointed out that the “privileges” extended by men to women
in the 19th century were, in fact, on offer only to white women of particular social classes. As she put
it, “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t
I a woman?”
6 Important contributions to the study of the ancient body include the collections of Wyke (1998a and
1998b), Montserrat (1998), Porter (1999), Wyke and Hopkins (2005), and Fögen and Lee (2009); im-
portant individual works include Rouselle 1988, Katz 1989, Carson 1990, Dean-Jones 1994, Gleason
1995, Richlin 1997, Stewart 1997, Demand 1998, Holmes 2010, and Lee 2015.
7 See e.g. Friedrich [1953] 2003; Fenik 1968; Marg 1976; Segal 1971; Griffin 1976, 1980; Schein
1984; Vernant 1991; Morris 1991; Morrison 1991; Heuzé 1985; Neal 2006; Holmes 2007.
4