Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T11:53:58.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Epistolary Fictions: Authorial identity in Heroides 15

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Vicky Rimell
Vicky Rimell
Affiliation:
King's College, London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Heroides 15, Sappho's letter to Phaon, is an enigma in its present context for many different reasons. What is Sappho doing, heterosexualised, at the end of a string of elegiac epistles written by women plucked straight from myth and each given their fifteen minutes of fame? Despite the mythology that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was a real woman and a real writer, the Greek love poet par excellence; not only that, she was and is a figure who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for women, not for the local ferryman. This Sappho looks very written, yet as the only heroine–writer, and as the love-poet often cited as Ovid's influential predecessor, she can represent the culmination and reification of the Heroides' illusion of female authorship.

In doing so, Sappho functions as the crucial figure in a collection of poems in which the Ovidian author writes in disguise; in what becomes finally a life or death situation, her poem radically questions the definition and definability of authorship, gender and identity. We are constantly asked, and are prompted to ask: Just how authentic, or how written is Sappho in this self-conscious erotic alignment of His ‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author conspicuously to write, through and over, the poetess whose work he recommends should be read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love-affairs he hints at on several occasions?

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 45 , 2000 , pp. 109 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altman, J.G. 1983 Epistolarity: approaches to a form (Columbus, Ohio).Google Scholar
Attridge, D. (ed.) 1992 Acts of literature (London and New York).Google Scholar
Baca, A.R. 1971 ‘Ovid's epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15)’, TAPA 102: 29–38.Google Scholar
Barchiesi, A. 1988 ‘Narratività e convenzione nelle Heroides’, MD 19: 63–90.Google Scholar
Barchiesi, A. 1992 P.Ovidii Nasonis Epistulae Heroidum 1–3 (Florence).Google Scholar
Barchiesi, A. 1993 ‘Future reflexive: two modes of allusion and Ovid's Heroides’, HSCP 95: 333–65.Google Scholar
Barthes, R. 1979 A lover's discourse: fragments, trans. Howard, R. (London).Google Scholar
Brownstein, R.M. 1984 Becoming a heroine: reading about women in novels (London).Google Scholar
Campbell, D.A. 1982 Greek Lyric I (London).Google Scholar
Casali, S. 1995a P.Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula IX Deianira Herculi (Florence).Google Scholar
Casali, S. 1995b ‘Strategies of tension (Ovid, Heroides 4)’, PCPS 41: 1–15.Google Scholar
Casali, S. 1995c ‘Tragic irony in Heroides 9 and 11’, CQ 45: 505–11.Google Scholar
Castle, T. 1982 Clarissa's ciphers: meaning and disruption in Richardson's ‘Clarissa’ (Ithaca and London).Google Scholar
Chambers, R. 1984 Story and situation: narrative seduction and the power of fiction (Minneapolis).Google Scholar
Courtney, E. 1990 ‘Ovid and an epigram of Philodemus’, LCM 15: 117–18.Google Scholar
Cunningham, M.P. 1949 ‘The Novelty of Ovid's Heroides’, CP 44: 100–6.Google Scholar
Day, R.A. 1966 Told in letters: epistolary fiction before Richardson (Michigan).Google Scholar
de Jean, J. 1989 Fictions of Sappho 1546–1937 (Chicago and London).Google Scholar
de Vries, S. 1885 Epistula Sapphus ad Phaonem (Leiden).Google Scholar
Derrida, J. 1980 La Carte Postale. De Socrate à Freud et au delà (Paris).Google Scholar
Dörrie, H. 1967 ‘Die dichterische Absicht in den Epistulae Heroidum’, A&A 13: 45–6.Google Scholar
Dover, K. 1978 Greek homosexuality (London).Google Scholar
Eagleton, T. 1982 The rape of Clarissa: writing, sexuality and class struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford).Google Scholar
Farrell, J. 1998 ‘Reading and writing the Heroides’, HSCP 98: 307–338.Google Scholar
Felman, S. 1993 What does a woman want? Reading and sexual difference (Baltimore and London).Google Scholar
Foley, H.P. (ed.), 1981 Reflections of women in antiquity (New York).Google Scholar
Fränkel, H. 1945 Ovid, a poet between two worlds (Berkeley, Los Angeles).Google Scholar
Gallop, J. 1988 Thinking through the body (New York).Google Scholar
Galinsky, G. 1975 Ovid's Metamorphoses: an introduction to the basic aspects (Oxford).Google Scholar
Gleason, M. 1995 Making men: sophists and self-presentation in ancient Rome (Princeton).Google Scholar
Greene, E. (ed.) 1996 Re-reading Sappho: reception and transmission (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London).Google Scholar
Greer, G. 1998 ‘Organ concerto’. Review of Howard Jacobson's No more Mr Nice Guy. Times Literary Supplement, April 24.Google Scholar
Gubar, S. 1981 ‘The blank page and issues of female creativity’, Critical Inquiry 7: 243–63.Google Scholar
Hallett, J. 1979 ‘Sappho and her social context: sense and sensuality’. Signs 4: 447–464.Google Scholar
Harvey, E.D. 1996 ‘Ventriloquizing Sappho, or the Lesbian Muse’ in Greene, (ed.).Google Scholar
Hatherly Wilson, L. 1996 Sappho's sweetbitter songs: configurations of the female and male in ancient Greek lyric (London and New York).Google Scholar
Henderson, J. 1986 ‘Becoming a heroine (1st): Penelope's Ovid’, LCM 11: 7–10, 21–4, 37–40, 67–70, 82–5, 114–21.Google Scholar
Hinds, S. 1985 ‘Booking the return trip. Ovid and Tristia I’, PCPS 31: 13–32.Google Scholar
Jacobson, H. 1974 Ovid's Heroides (Princeton).Google Scholar
Jacobus, M. (ed.), 1979 Women writing and writing about women (London).Google Scholar
Johnson, B. 1980 The critical difference. Essays in the contemporary rhetoric of reading (Baltimore).Google Scholar
Kamuf, P. 1980 ‘Writing like a woman’ in McConnell-Ginet, S., Borker, R. & Furman, N. (eds.) Women and language in literature and society (New York): 284–99.Google Scholar
Kauffman, L.S. 1986 Discourses of desire: gender, genre and epistolary fictions (Ithaca and London).Google Scholar
Kenney, E.J. 1970 ‘Love and legalism: Ovid, Heroides 20 and 21’, Arion 9: 388–414.Google Scholar
Kennedy, D.F. 1984 ‘The epistolary mode and the first of Ovid's Heroides’, CQ 34: 413–22.Google Scholar
Kennedy, D.F. 1993 The arts of love: five studies in the discourse of Roman love elegy (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Konstan, D. 1994 ‘Forward: to the reader’, MD 31: 11–22.Google Scholar
Lefkowitz, M.R. 1981 Lives of the Greek poets (Baltimore).Google Scholar
Knox, P.E. (ed.) 1995 Ovid's Heroides: select epistles (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Lesky, A. 1966 A history of Greek literature (New York).Google Scholar
McIntosh Snyder, J. 1989 The woman and the lyre: women writers in classical Greece (Bristol).Google Scholar
Miller, N.K. 1980 The heroine's text. Readings in the French and English novel (New York).Google Scholar
Murgia, C.E. 1985 ‘Imitation and authenticity in Ovid's Metamorphoses 1.477 and Heroides 15’, AJP 106: 456–74.Google Scholar
Nagy, G. 1973 ‘Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the white rock of Leukas’, HSCP 77: 137–77.Google Scholar
Otis, B. 1966 Ovid as an epic poet (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Page, D.L. 1955 Sappho and Alcaeus: an introduction to the study of ancient Lesbian poetry (Oxford).Google Scholar
Palmer, A. (ed.). 1898 P.Ovidi Nasonis Heroides (Oxford).Google Scholar
Perry, R. 1980 Women, letters and the novel (New York).Google Scholar
Rosati, G. 1996 ‘Sabinus, the Heroides and the poet-nightingale. Some observations on the authenticity of the Epistula Sapphus’, CQ 46: 207–16.Google Scholar
Sharrock, A. 1994 Seduction and Repetition in Ars amatoria II (Oxford).Google Scholar
Skinner, M.B. 1993 ‘Woman and language in archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a woman?’ in Feminist theory and the classics, Richlin, A. & Rabinowitz, N.S. (eds.) (New York) 125–44.Google Scholar
Stehle Stigers, E. 1979 ‘Romantic sensuality, poetic sense. A response to Hallett on Sappho’, Signs 4: 465–71.Google Scholar
Stehle Stigers, E. 1981 ‘Sappho's private world’. Women's Studies 8: 47–65.Google Scholar
Stowers, S.K. 1986 Letter writing in Graeco-Roman antiquity (Philadelphia).Google Scholar
Tarrant, R.J. 1981 ‘The authenticity of the letter from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides XV)’, HSCP 85: 133–53.Google Scholar
Verducci, F. 1985 Ovid's toyshop of the heart: Epistulae Heroidum (Princeton).Google Scholar
Wilkinson, L.P. 1955 Ovid recalled (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Wyke, M. 1987 ‘Written women: Propertius' scripta puella’, JRS 77: 47–61.Google Scholar