Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides

by Sara H. Lindheim

    In the Heroides, the Roman poet Ovid wittily plucks fifteen abandoned heroines from ancient myth and literature and creates the fiction that each woman writes a letter to the hero who left her behind. But in giving voice to these heroines, is Ovid writing like a woman, or writing "Woman" like a man?
    Using feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to examine the "female voice" in the Heroides , Sara H. Lindheim closely reads these fictive letters in which the women seemingly tell their own stories. She points out that in Ovid’s verse epistles all the women represent themselves in a strikingly similar and disjointed fashion. Lindheim turns to Lacanian theory of desire to explain these curious and hauntingly repetitive representations of the heroines in the "female voice." Lindheim’s approach illuminates what these poems reveal about both masculine and feminine constructions of the feminine

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2003

Reviews

[Reales Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante libro, pero algunas consideraciones las consideraciones psicoanalíticas me parecen tomadas de los pelos como cuando habla del deseo femenino al falo y la envidia de Safo a los amantes hombres de sus amadas no por poseerlas, sino porque ellos tienen pene y, por ende, pueden darlo algo que ella no. Ahre tremenda simplificación literaria e histórica de Safo.

[貝晨珊 · Rating 5 out of 5]

EXCELLENT.

[Ashley Thompson]

Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides (Wisconsin Studies in Classics) by Sara H. Lindheim (2003)