‘Formd into words by your divided lips’

Dryden's complaint about the 'feminization' of Ovid's Heroides, as the text's Latin title, Epistolae Heroidum, is translated as Letters of the Heroines, is symptomatic of the problematics of gender as they relate to the text which is the subject of this essay. Dryden draws attention to a fact of fundamental importance: that the Heroides is in no sense a straightforwardly 'feminine' text, despite its almost exclusive concentration upon the modulations of the female voice. Its transmission demonstrates the Heroides to be a text written, translated and adapted by men for the consumption of men, and that its meanings are thoroughly grounded in the masculine dynamics of rhetorical culture.2 This raises problematic questions about the functions of the female voice for the male poet, and about the inequalities of value attached to women's appropriations of male voices. When the male poet speaks in a female voice, seemingly, he demonstrates his linguistic and inventive power; when the female poet uses a male voice, she is deemed to be locked into mere reproduction and circulation, with little hint of the 'subversive mimesis' that Luce Irigaray has attributed to women's words.3 A masculine verbal economy, however constituted or theorized, would seem to be the precondition of female utterance, whatever the biological sex of the speaker

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Rhetoric · Classical Antiquity Studies · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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