Feeling lonely within a community: The representation of loneliness in Ovid’s Heroides

Abstract

di In Ovid’s Heroides, the coupling of elegiac poetry with the epistolary form favours the deeper exploration of female emotions through the first-person narrative of the heroines’ emotional experiences. The present paper views Fulkerson’s literary community of Ovid’s Heroides also as an emotional community, in the model of Barbara Rosenwein. According to Rosenwein’s theory, members of an emotional community formulate their own emotional code, with emotional attachments and expressions of feeling recognizable to all members. Taking into account that Ovid’s Heroides function as a textual community that uses a literary genre to describe and shape the emotional behavior of its members within the collection, the present paper attempts to capture the discourse of loneliness through the vocabulary of the letter-writers in the ovidian epistolary collection. Based on the assumption that loneliness is a complex emotion with erotic rejection and sadness as key components, the present paper explores loneliness in the context of the hero’s absence and the passing of time.