Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa Evelyn Adkins Christopher Nappa Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018 Pp. xii + 224. $75.00. Christopher Nappa offers a new reading of Juvenal's Satires that moves beyond persona theory to examine how the author and his works simultaneously critique and participate in what he fears is the decline of traditional, elite Roman masculinity. Nappa analyzes not only how the idea of "Juvenal" constructs and is constructed by the Satires, but also how he undermines himself and his project through his own rhetoric. In the introduction (1–22), Nappa describes his use of and departure from persona theory, then lays out the book's central concepts of identity, anxiety, and autonomy. The elements of identity that Nappa says he will focus on are class, ethnicity, gender, and wealth, though he treats ethnicity only sporadically. Likewise, the discussion of gender could be more consistent, especially in the first few chapters, and better theorized, with reference to more recent publications such as Kirk Ormand's Controlling Desires (2009) and the essays in Mark Masterson et al.'s Sex in Antiquity (2014). Turning to autonomy, Nappa rightly points out that full autonomy was possessed by almost no man in the Imperial period. The Satires express Juvenal's anxiety that the criteria of masculinity have changed in such a way that he and those like him are being dragged down the social ladder and made ridiculous. Nappa explores the implications of this for Juvenal's literary project in Chapter One, "The Failed Satirist and the Failed Man" (23–60). Through an extended close reading of Satire 1, he shows how Juvenal undermines himself and his works by: participating in the literary culture he critiques, yearning for the wealth and status of those he attacks for gaining these through unorthodox means such as gender and class inversion, and saying that he will use anger to compensate for a lack of poetic talent. He fails as a man and satirist because, unlike his literary model Lucilius, he lives under an imperial system that makes open critique dangerous. In Juvenal's inabilities to escape from literary tradition and speak freely, we see his "first and greatest example of manhood unmanned" (60). The next two chapters focus on ways in which manhood may be unmanned. "The Body and the Failure of Autonomy" (61–92) draws on the theory of "mind-blindness" developed by Blakey Vermuele for eighteenth-century English satire to analyze how Juvenal uses bodily imagery to dehumanize his targets. Nappa demonstrates how individuals in the Satires are reduced to body parts, beaten, obliterated, emasculated through old age, and transformed into unstable symbols such as decaying or reused statues or a schoolboy's declamatory exercise. These images of bodies deprived of autonomy express Juvenal's fears about loss of status and masculinity. Where Chapter Two examines external factors that may make a man involuntarily ridiculous, Chapter Three, "The Dangers of Debasement: Manhood and Class" (93–126), explores what happens when men willingly debase themselves. Nappa argues that figures such as Lateranus, Creticus, and Gracchus [End Page 148] in Satires 2 and 8 display anxieties about class betrayal through markers such as inappropriate religious behavior and gender transgression. Juvenal fears not only that individuals will act badly, but also that their bad behavior will spread to others. Freedom from social restraint is shown to be attractive, even to Juvenal, who undermines his project by displaying and thereby potentially spreading the very behavior he critiques. The final two chapters turn to Juvenal's greatest anxiety: that there may be no real, Roman men in the first place. "A Woman's World" (127–65) focuses on Satire 6 and Juvenal's fears that women from adulteresses to empresses are excluding Roman men from a world that should be theirs. Nappa argues that the poem is less about women, however, than it is about "failed masculinity" and even "a failure of Romanness" (130). Juvenal targets adultery in particular out of a concern that elite Roman blood may be diluted through the birth of illegitimate children...