Et amans et poeta: Female Authorship from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Abstract

Debates on the nature and representation of female emotions go back a long way, and literary tradition, shaped almost entirely by men throughout the ages, bears the stigmas of these debates. For this reason, critics have occasionally wondered about the motivations driving authors, both men and women, who endeavor to represent the expression of turmoil in the female psyche. If there is no doubt, for example, that Fair Aude, who appears in the Song of Roland for no other purpose than to swoon and die, could only have been invented by a Turold who had no interest whatsoever in feminine sensibility, it is a different story for works in which heroines play a central role. We might recall, for example, the debate over Homer's identity which raged at the end of the nineteenth century: how could the author of the warlike Iliad have written the romantic Odyssey, in which enamored women and seductresses are represented so felicitously? In a period when women writers published their works under male pseudonyms, the works of Samuel Butler did not fail to intrigue and surprise their readers. In the absence of specific documentation of the bard's historicity, the argument that a woman wrote the Odyssey never truly caught on, though we are now much more open to the idea of dual authorship in Homer, male for the Iliad, female for the Odyssey. For Ovid, the documentation is much more certain, and to my knowledge, taking the paternity of the Heroides away from the male poet is out of the question. (2) In this canonical collection of epistles, the passion that drives the eighteen fictitious letters written by legendary heroines can be quite shaking. However, it is an illusion, a simple effet de reel (reality effect), as Barthes would say, the fruit of a splendidly successful labor of symbolic projection (88). Ovid was not a woman, and he did not have to be one to reproduce brilliantly the ambiguous torments of seduced and abandoned heroines. For quite some time now, stylisticians have been providing us with an explanation by demonstrating the artfulness, that is, the artifice, with which the Latin poet crafted the elegiac form of his epistles. (3) Ovid took the idea from grammarians and rhetoricians who would assign schoolboys pedagogical exercises in which they had to make illustrious historical or mythological characters speak in a language appropriate to their rank, age, and passions (Verducci 253 ff.). Whether Penelope writes to Ulysses (Letter 1), Phaedra to Hippolytus (Letter 4), Dido to Aeneas (Letter 7), Ariadne to Theseus (Letter 10), Medea to Jason (Letter 12), Sappho to Phaon (Letter 15), or Helen to Paris (Letter 17), the woman, scorned but still dignified, invariably denounces her fickle, cheating beloved all while begging him to return to her. In other words, the question is not whether the mythical heroine could have felt so burning a passion, but whether the author has learned to express the ardor of a frenzied heart according to the rules of verisimilitude and decorum. The success of the Heroides in the Renaissance is well-known; Ann Moss lists 71 full or partial Latin editions of them between 1499 and 1593 (66-79). (4) These moving monologues were first read in Latin, and then translated into French at the end of the fifteenth century by Octovien de Saint-Gelais. (5) This translation was an immense success, and printers frequently republished it at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as there are approximately fifteen known editions and manuscripts dating from between 1500 and 1546 (Brown 73)* Michel d'Amboise even devised responses to these fictitious letters in 1541, and Charles Fontaine, a friend of Clement Marot, produced a new translation of the first ten letters in 1552, adding a revised version of Saint-Gelais's translation of the remaining eleven. (7) As such, the influence of the Heroides on the birth of the elegy in France is not to be underestimated, as attested to most eloquently by the succession of imitations and counterimitations of them. …