Cox, F. 2018 - Ovid's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing: Strange Monsters
Ovid's Enduring Influence
Ovid's works continue to resonate in the contemporary era, influencing various aspects of modern life and literature.
Contemporary women writers have increasingly engaged with Ovid's works, exploring themes relevant to third-wave feminism and modern concerns.
Ovid's appeal lies in his playful subversiveness, fascination with female psychology, and the intersection of his stories with contemporary issues.
Contemporary Values in Ovid
Ovid's deliberate use of shock, mischief, and cleverness aligns with contemporary values.
His stories offer mythical keys to extreme forms of human behavior and suffering, including issues like:
Holocaust
Plague
Sexual harassment
Rape
Incest
Seduction
Pollution
Sex-change
Suicide
Hetero- and homosexual love
Torture
War
Child-battering
Depression
Intoxication
Ovid's Myths and Modernity
Ovid’s myths are acquiring new meanings as the world catches up with his imagination in novel ways.
Modern medical advancements, such as gender reassignment surgery, reflect Ovid's themes of transformation.
The imaginative construction of electricity pylons as giants in Iceland demonstrates a contemporary engagement with myth-making.
Contemporary Issues in Ovid's Myths
Ovid's myths reflect modern illnesses and disorders, such as cancer, anorexia, narcissism, and malignant greed, through his theme of transformation.
Awareness of rare diseases like Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (stone man syndrome) and Epidermodysplasia verruciformis informs contemporary writers' engagement with Ovid.
Ovid at Crossing Points
Renewed interest in Ovid often occurs at crossing points and thresholds, both temporal and geographical.
These resurgences happen in cross-cultural zones and points of interchange, reflecting increased movement of immigrants, refugees, and emigrants.
This accounts partly for renewed interest in Ovid and his Tristia, which are his songs of exile.
Ovid and Contemporary Women Writers
Marie Darrieussecq's image of Ovid's ghost marveling at a woman translating his works on a computer highlights the contemporary relevance of his voice.
Contemporary women writers are responding to Ovid in unprecedented ways, influenced by the currency of myths and his fascination with female psychology.
The shifting, protean qualities of Ovid's artistic world make it especially well suited for third-wave feminists who want to engage more widely with social and political issues.
Themes Addressed by Women Writers
Contemporary women writers use Ovid's myths to address themes such as:
Ecological concerns and earth mutation (Oswald and Shapcott)
Plight of refugees and immigrants (Warner and Tawada)
Trauma of bodily metamorphosis through puberty or illness (Tawada, Shapcott, Smith, Alison, Zimmerman)
Horror of war (Stanescu, Curdy, Balmer, Shapcott, Warner, Zimmerman)
Terror and insecurity from financial crisis (Curdy, Shapcott, Darrieussecq)
Exploration of different sexualities (Roberts, Smith, Pollard)
Unifying Themes
The Unifying theme is an urge to explore gender issues from a consciously gendered position, rather than remaining focused on reclaiming a female voice. Authors such as Carol Ann Duffy and Eavan Boland, who engage very dynamically with Ovid, are notable not the subjects of individual chapters.
Many authors studied experience themselves as monsters, either as freakish or as prodigies of nature, which underscores the link between literary creativity and monstrosity.
The Equation
The creativity within women, allied with a refusal to be bound by pre-existing rules, can be seen in the way in which so many of the women writers who engage with Ovid defy generic conventions.
Yoko Tawada blends different myths, Josephine Balmer uses the term ‘transgression’, Stanescu's poem presents itself in different guises, and Alice Oswald’s book incorporates a paratextual apparatus that includes learned footnotes.
Women Writers & Monstrosity
Helene Cixous depicts the situation of women who need to write but are deemed monstrous for doing so. The more repressive the regime, the more violent the passions fueling the underworld of female creativity.
Ovid is often invoked to depict illnesses such as anorexia nervosa.
Cixous’s writing woman rejects the site of death and performs the role of both Penelope and Ariadne, spinning a thread that will lead to salvation.
Transformation
The writing process for women is a practice of transformation. Women learn to exult in their creativity by undoing the work of death, enabling pursuit of a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations.
Cixous suggests that women are no longer doomed to play muted, dead roles; they can transform the script.
Cixous subverts the Homeric myth of the sirens by showing that once women are no longer seduced by the songs of men, their capacity for creativity is infinite.
Cixous and Feminism
Cixous's essay became a foundation of second-wave feminism by reversing the Homeric myth of the sirens by showing that once women are no longer seduced into believing the songs of men, which will relegate them to the death of silence, their capacity to generate new songs and stories is infinite.
Though influential, it is a difficult text. Third-wave feminism arose to counter the exclusivity of second-wave feminism and extend liberating discourse to women from all backgrounds.
Feminism and Language
Feminist philosophers like Jo Triglio expressed concern about the difficult and specialized language in feminist philosophy, rendering it inaccessible to most people.
Feminist philosophy must play a part in promoting feminist change, not limited to academic discourse.
Cixous's later works bear a stronger stamp of third-wave feminism, the rallying cry to alert the world to outrages that are being perpetrated.
Cixous's rallying cry
Cixous's rallying cry to alert the world to outrages that are being perpetrated in her play, highlights imagery to portray the world's dispossessed.
Warns against the comfort in de-familiarization as a result from classical trappings.
Feminism and the Modern World
Contemporary feminism is underpinned by a sense of fear as it negotiates the risks of the modern world.
Responses to Ovid are more likely to occur at temporal and geographical crossroads.
These currents of fear and anxiety, allied with an urge to recognize new potentials, have enabled new dimensions to filter into the Ovidianism of contemporary women writers.
Ovid as Partisan
Genevieve Liveley warns against interpretations of classical poets like Ovid that are so partisan and tied to a specific moment in literary history that they risk speaking only to a limited few.
One response to this danger has been the engagement with the wider political and cultural sphere on the part of women responding to Ovid, allied with a recognition of the potential in mutability and metamorphosis.
Power of Change
Eavan Boland explores the power of change and choosing to change, acknowledging possibilities for liberation through metamorphosis by not fully belonging.
Boland explores her love of classical poetry as a way of reshaping the classical tradition. She foregrounds Ovid's exile poetry as she articulates her relationship with him.
“The epigraph from Virginia Woolf that Boland selects for the volume firmly establishes this theme of exclusion: ‘The outsider will say “in fact, as a woman, I have no country.”’
“It is unsurprising, therefore, that she should foreground Ovid’s exile poetry as she articulates her relationship with him in this volume. The first section is entitled ‘Song and Error’, a clear allusion to the famous ‘carmen et error’ that Ovid claimed had driven him into exile.”
“The final section ‘Edge of Empire’ looks back both to Ovid’s conflicted relationship with Rome and to Boland’s relationship with Britain.”
Liberation Underpinning
Rosi Braidotti's analysis of the way in which the female self develops in the contemporary world.
“Braidotti selects various facets of the human condition, such as nomadism, sexual difference and embodiment, and explores how these develop in a post-structuralist culture, obsessed with technology, cyberworlds, and monstrosity as it manifests itself within a penchant for gothic worlds and vampirism”
Her book presents the Zeitgeist as one that lends itself especially strongly to retellings of Ovid.
“For these are strange times and strange things are happening’”
“Like Boland, Braidotti selects the words of Virginia Woolf as her epigram, words which catch the same tension between movement and stasis that Boland depicts: ‘I am rooted, but I flow.’”
“The emphasis that she thus places upon dynamism and uidity explains in part the rationale of her book: ‘If the only constant at the dawn of the third millennium is change, then the challenge lies in thinking about processes, rather than concepts’”.
“Published in 2002, the same year as Warner’s study of Ovid entitled Fantastic Metamorphoses, Braidotti’s book presents the Zeitgeist as one that lends itself especially strongly to retellings of Ovid, since: ‘Transformations, metamorphoses, mutations and processes of change have in fact become familiar in the lives of most contemporary subjects’”
“While Braidotti does not focus explicitly upon Ovidian reception in her study, she nevertheless wrestles with many of the questions besetting the women writers of this book, who have used Ovidian myths to help them think through their processes of developing as women, as socially and politically responsible thinkers, as cultural commentators”
Fusion of Dark
Braidotti explores shared interest in the fusion of dark insecurities and emancipatory potential inherent in metamorphosis explored by many of the writers, shaped by being nomadic, homeless, or a refugee.
It is neither equivalent nor is it merely metaphorical, as some critics of nomadic subjectivity have suggested. These are highly specific geo-political and historical locations—history tattooed on your body.
Discourses of Third Wave Feminists
Highlight the difficulty of establishing a fixed categorization for a movement that relishes the endless opportunities for reinvention and discovery.
“This ‘lived messiness’ fuels Ali Smith’s version of ‘one of the cheeriest metamorphoses in the whole work [Metamorphoses]’, the story of Iphis and Ianthe.”
“Not only does Smith explore the self-awareness and discovery of young girls coming to terms with their lesbian sexuality in contemporary Scotland, but her novel also includes meditations on the nature of ‘reality shows’ such as Blind Date, where emotions are liable to be manufactured, and both contestants and spectators are vulnerable to losing their footing in the real world.”
“Furthermore, even as Smith’s heroines discover each other and themselves, they are militating for a better, more just society as well as daubing grafti slogans campaigning for better conditions for women and also for more responsible custody of the earth.”
Modern World vs Ovid
Perversity of the modern world, which we increasingly accept as ‘normal’.
Playful exuberance and joyful exploration which is shadowed by an examination of society’s injustices and ills both epitomizes third-wave ideals, and offers one response to Ziolkowski’s anxious question at the end of Ovid and the Moderns:
“Every age gets the Ovid it deserves. What sort of Ovid will the new millennium bring forth? Where, indeed, can it go beyond the frothy trivializations at the turn of the millennium? Will continued skepticism (sic) toward government and religion combined with an intensified solipsism sustain a new and perhaps more serious aetas Ovidiana?”
A. S. Byatt
Likely to meet Ziolkowski’s hope of treating Ovid seriously.
In Philip Terry’s millennial anthology, Ovid Metamorphosed, Byatt writes of how her responses to Ovid and his myths shaped her as a writer, to the point of her selection of the name Arachne as her email identity, in Byatt the fusion of self-disgust, monstrosity, excitement, grief, pain, and liberation experienced by a woman in the grip of metamorphosis define the themes of this book.
Ines story; a middle-aged woman who, felled by grief for her elderly mother with whom she had peaceably shared a flat in London, falls ill, and while recovering, discovers that she is progressively turning to stone.
“At first sight, we might expect a story about a woman becoming petrified during a period of mourning to respond to the myth of Niobe, but it becomes clear that Ines is a closer relative of Galatea. It is notable that she is at a crossroads in her life, is experiencing profound change. Even though it was her mother who had died, Ines thinks of her former self as belonging to the past also.”
Vulnerability
Instances of transition make the human self more vulnerable to metamorphosis, and it is unsurprising that Byatt should select half-light as the backdrop for her story.
As Ines allows the final vision of her mother to haunt her memories, she transforms the books and poetry she has read so that they infuse her telling of this moment.
Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ depicts an earth whose matter has been transformed into stone and iron.
The contrast between the increasingly hard stone and the soft flesh, and fluid innards, establishes a quintessentially Ovidian dynamic.
Unrestricting Agency
The stranger her predicament, the more she suspects that there is something freakish, monstrous about her, the more fascinated she becomes by her condition to the point of perceiving its beauties
Even as Ines’s body is escaping from her control, is turning her into a monster, there is a part of her that exults in its strange loveliness.
As a bookish, scholarly woman it was natural for her to consult dictionaries, which could at least shed light upon the nature of the different stones appearing on her body, even if there were no answers about what kind of medical phenomenon she was experiencing
Beauty of Terminology
In a twist on the epic convention of listing, which Ovid himself parodied in the Metamorphoses, she sat in the mythical half-light, dwelling on the beauties of the terminology such as ‘pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff’
In a reversal of the Pygmalion myth, as she watches her body turn from flesh to stone, she not only recalls Narcissus, as she preens in the mirror, but also echoes the gestures of Pygmalion who adorned his beloved statue with jewels as he transformed her from statue to living, breathing woman.
Ariel
As Ines roamed alone, trying to find a final resting place, the site where her body would finish petrifying and halt, she came upon a clearing filled with broken, half-formed stone figures
Significantly, as she imagines the transformation of her eyes into pearls, she once more glances back to the myth of Pygmalion, who selected pearls with which to adorn Galatea
Stonemason
The disappearance of her former self is illustrated by her vanishing voice. As she identifies the stonemason, who appears to be in charge of these broken statues, she summons up the courage to quiz him, but her voice has grown faint and rusty through disuse.
As he looks upon her, he heals her feelings of self-disgust, by recognizing what has happened to her. He restores the original sense of ‘monstrum’ to the idea of a ‘monster’: Ines is a marvel, a miracle. Thorsteinn, who had spent his working life focusing upon the processes of metamorphosis, finds himself transformed through meeting so miraculous a figure as Ines, and seeks her permission to make a visual record of her over time, and asks her to accompany him back to Iceland so that he can do this.
Stone Thoughts
Thorsteinn’s attitude towards her as a work of art is light years away from that of the anaesthetist who came to see her after her operation, congratulating his profession for the neat handiwork of her reconstructed torso while failing to recognize her distress and sense of loss.
Paradoxically such stone thoughts, resulting from her transformation from an animate woman to a petrified form, are harbingers not of an ultimate paralysis, but of a new stage of life, in a new form, that awaits Ines.
Thorsteinn watches her run from him into her new world: She […] began a dancing run, into the blizzard. He heard a stone voice, shouting and singing
Trunt, trunt, og tröllin í fjöllunum
Storys Themes
idea of grief and loss catalysing metamorphosis
Reshaping of myths to express framework of illness
transformative power of cross cultural clashes
Power of perspective - “to transfigure our notion of the ‘monstrous’ into the ‘marvellous’. It is time to turn to the individuals chosen as exemplary ‘writing women and strange monsters’ and to examine the changes that they both depict and urge.”