Gender and Genre in Ovid’s Remedia amoris [thesis]

Description

This dissertation investigates the roles that gender and genre play in Ovid’s last erotodidactic poem. His partly successful attempt to advise both men and women illustrates the importance of the gendered relationship between teacher and student in erotodidaxis, and his statements about the nature of elegiac poetry require us to acknowledge the effect of genre when we read anti-erotic didactic. Ovid’s advice to women fails to achieve parity with the advice to men, but it is an integral part of the poem, and Charles Murgia’s claims of structural disunity can be dismissed. The Remedia overthrows the amatory rules of the Ars amatoria by upsetting didactic decorum. The male bias of decorum as defined in the Ars prevents the most basic tactics of the Remedia from being applied by women. Despite her talents, Circe is strangely incapable of contravening decorum in order to fall out of love. Her failure is a warning to all the Remedia's female students, just as Ulysses stands as the paradigm of correct male behavior. Ovid uses poetic decorum to challenge the reader. The seriocomic defense of his Musa proterva prepares us to be offended by the indecorous sex described thereafter. But the widely acclaimed poetic beauty that Ovid uses to describe the death of Phyllis is in fact detrimental to the female students to whom the passage is addressed. Poetic decorum is the Remedia's paradox. Ovid’s emphasis on the relation of elegiac meter to erotic content and his warning of the dangers of love poetry hint that the Remedia is a poem that its own students should not read. In this opposition of poetic form and didactic goal, Ovid is the opposite of Lucretius, whose Epicurean program is benefited by versification. Yet the basic content of the Remedia can be taken seriously, at least by men: the mythical examples show that the female student is in greater danger than the male, but the historical reception of the poem offers a key to its essential practicality.