Monsters and Monstrosity in Augustan Poetry by Dunstan Lowe

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 506 CAROLINE STARK Howard University, caroline.stark@howard.edu * * * * * * Monsters and Monstrosity in Augustan Poetry. By DUNSTAN LOWE. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2015. Pp. x + 278. Hardcover, $75.00. ISBN 978-0-47211951 -6. Like the figures Lowe explores in this welcome study, Monsters and Monstrosity is itself a hybrid text. Veering from the curious social practices of freak-fetishism in Augustan Rome to the metapoetics of sublime gigantomachy in Latin epic, Lowe conducts various explorations of monstrosity through a wide array of methodologies. While parts of the monograph are more successful than others at employing insights from the field of monster studies (see 27–32 for a literature review), all readers interested in the poetic techniques of Vergil and Ovid, as well as the shifting face of Augustan engagement with all that smacks of the “strange,” will find something ofinterest in this monograph. Monsters is particularlyvaluable foritscontributionstothestudyofgenderandmonstrosity,aparadigmofanalysis that surfaces in several chapters, and is a notable addition to scholarship on metapoetics and sublimity. Following a brief Introduction, in Chapter One (“Monster Theory”) Lowe defines the ancient monster, wisely eschewing a tidy conception; his analysis is replete with useful interrogation of the Greek and Latin terminology for monstrosity. He depicts the unique cultural context that allowed Roman “monsters” to shift from fear-inducing religious oddities and portentous errors of nature to objectified commodities embodying an aesthetic akin to that found in Augustan culture more widely. The monster as metaphor—for both text and object—is an extension of this transformation, and when viewed in an Augustan light, it begins to stand for novelty and innovation. Through readings of Horace’s multiform creatures, Neronian grotesques, and Vitruvian strictures, Lowe also delvesintotheAugustanaestheticsofamonstrousculturewarbetween“ancients” and “moderns.” In the second Chapter (“Real Monsters”), Lowe turns to the presence of monstrosity and deformed bodies within Roman life, particularly in the urban milieu. His analysis of the museological display culture that circulated around BOOK REVIEWS 507 mythical monsters contains much of note. Significant, if digressive, discussion is also devoted to ancient science concerned with spontaneous generation, environmental determinism, and the landscapes of monstrous birth. For Roman audiences, much of the monstrous production of these “othered” landscapes was considered eastern, exotic, and/or feminine, all features developed by the arguments of later chapters. Subsequent analysis of zoology and ethnography leads Lowe to consider modes of viewing the monstrous; the power of formlessness(and thisis key) rests in itsintractability. Lowe turns his gaze in Chapter Three (“Feminine Exteriors”) to Scylla, the Sirens, and Medusa, showing how all were reinvented and “maidenized” by Augustan poets. Psychoanalytic approaches most visibly emerge in this chapter, largely in service of exploring the “monstrous-feminine.” At the risk of generalization, for Lowe the Augustan approach to such figures is to combine misogynistic nightmare with some form of pleasurable curiosity, both visual and psychological.Within the learned poeticsofVergiland Ovid,one alsoencounters the implications ofrationalizinginterpretationsof Scylla and Charybdis (78–84), while the temptations of the Sirens tell a story particularly redolent of moral allegory(90–96). Medusa’s legacy featuresdiachronic changes similar to thoseof Scylla and the Sirens, but she largely symbolizes the visual; it is through Medusa that we encounter image-making and ekphrasis, as well as Freud, Cixous, castration, and the un-viewable face. Lowe’s analysis of Medusa in the Perseus episode of Ovid’s Met.is particularly strong(106–110). Chapter Four (“Feminine Interiors”) focuses on the Harpies and Furies, those “nightmares of femininity” (114). Unlike the previous chapter’s Scylla or Medusa, Augustan Harpies and Furies “represent sheer threat, undisguised by beauty or pathos” (115). Lowe incorporates in this chapter Bakhtin’s grotesque and carnivalesque, but the fit with Bakhtin is by no means perfect (122). In line with one of Lowe’s main points concerning monstrosity, there is a further metapoetic slant to reading these negative bodies: the blurry in-between notion exemplified by Horatian satire—the “lower” genre—is akin to a lower creature like a Harpy. Lowe suggests that within Vergil’s epic, the Harpies’ lack of shame and modesty (and their unclean excretions) pollute a poetic world in which they do not belong. Although I have some reservations about his readings...