Browsing by Author "Janan, Micaela"

This thesis seeks to analyze the longest story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, tale of Alcyone and Ceyx. Despite its length, its placement within the entire work, and the presence of the work's eponymous hero, Morpheus, the Alcyone's and Ceyx' story has no major commentary in English and has earned little attention from most scholars. What has been written on it often scants the darker details of the episode, persuaded that Ovid has here sketched a portrait of an ideal, happy marriage, albeit one crossed by circumstances. In order to counterbalance this overly optimistic reading, this commentary carefully analyzes the language, motifs, and intertextual references that thread through Ovid's version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story. Particular attention has been paid to: the ambiguities in Ovid's narrative of Alcyone's attitude towards parting from her husband; the story's portrait of the gods, including Alcyone's own father, Aeolus; allusions to the earlier epic tradition (Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid) in the Tempest scene; and the ecphrasis of the House of Sleep, including the character of Morpheus. This analysis will show that the tale of Alcyone and Ceyx is not a simple encomium to marital fidelity, but a picture of conjugal love darker than most Ovidian scholars have suspected.

“Negotiating Subjectivity: Gender, Communication, and Narrative telos in the Odyssey” investigates the relationship between gender and narrative structure in Homeric language. Textual and narrative inconsistencies provide a point of departure for examining how gender relations (i.e. patterns of communication between women and men) contribute to the narrative’s complication and resolution. By treating gender in the text as an impetus toward narrative change, this study reveals two alternating currents in Homeric language: first, how heroic male authorities establish boundaries between women and men to achieve a narrative outcome; and second, how male authority is problematized by the inconsistencies which leave such a teleological outcome in question. Illuminating these two trends as evidence for the relationship between gender and narrative, this dissertation advances the interpretation that the language of the Odyssey operates as a continuous re-negotiation of appropriate boundaries of propriety in communication between women and men.

Drawing on the writings of Lacan and Freud, I account for repetitive acts of female duplicity and heroic violence as complications to the aims of the narrative and the desires of its characters. With this approach, I observe an authoritative function in Homeric language that negotiates subjectivity by categorizing roles of women and men to establish a gender binary in the act of storytelling. By investigating this relationship between authoritative language and gender roles, I conclude that the anti-teleological elements which trouble the narrative outcome similarly vex the gender ideology established in the text: as the narrative resists completion, the repetitive re-negotiation of gender relations leaves the Homeric model for appropriate roles of women and men in doubt. Building on a series of readings in Homeric scholarship that argue for an overall transfer of female authority to male authority in the Odyssey narrative, my dissertation further demonstrates how the resistance of a teleological outcome exposes the epic’s ultimate failure to achieve an ideal of heroic male authority.

This dissertation challenges the notion of pastoral as a rural utopia by exposing the violence and danger innate to the bucolic world. The classical tradition has historically understood the pastoral world as an idyllic paradise standing in opposition to the dangerous city, which it casts as Other. By combining approaches drawn from narratology and intertextuality with a lens of critical classical reception, I demonstrate the inaccuracy of this dichotomy. In doing so, I argue instead for a re-conception of the ancient pastoral landscape as a dark and dangerous setting that exists on a continuum with the urban environment. This dissertation critically reevaluates traditional scholarly conceptions in ancient literature by prioritizing non-canonical texts.After an introduction, the second chapter argues that sexual and intimate partner violence are integral parts of the pastoral world that scholars have willingly overlooked for centuries. I explore physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in pseudo-Theocritus, Calpurnius Siculus, and Nemesianus to show that the relative safety of the locus amoenus in Vergil’s Eclogues is the exception, not the rule. The third chapter confronts one of the signature structural elements of pastoral poetry, the song contest. It dissects the elements that make up an amoebean exchange to argue that these contests that purport to showcase only poetic competition are in fact infused with verbal abuse and physical agonism as well. The chapter includes a close reading of Calpurnius’s sixth eclogue, which fails to launch the expected contest at all due to an exaggerated profusion of insults that literalizes the metaphor of words as weapons—with violent consequences. Thus, violation and violence are woven into the very structure of the pastoral song exchange.

The fourth chapter explores the relationship between danger and didaxis in pastoral. By looking at Calpurnius 5 alongside Georgics 3, I argue that Calpurnius uses descriptions of danger as narratological tools to justify transitions to the didactic mode. Ultimately, however, I conclude that the dangers of the rural landscape are too numerous and ingrained for even the most thorough precautions to fully protect against them. Thus, by the fifth and final chapter, I maintain that danger is an innate and integral part of the pastoral sphere, just as it is presented in the urban sphere. I argue that the common binary constructed between city and country in literature is a false one. Just as characters travel between the two settings, sometimes in the course of a single poem, so do the dangers native to one place migrate back and forth between them. By looking at one of Theocritus’s urban mimes alongside his bucolics and Calpurnius’s seventh eclogue, I reframe the traditional conception of the pastoral sphere as a safe haven. Instead, it is a dystopia with danger, violence, and strife at its very core.