The Ovidian Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Desire, and Education in Augustan-Era England

Abstract

"The Ovidian Eighteenth-Century: Authorship, Desire, and Education in Augustan Era England," argues that Ovidian eroticism shapes and transforms understandings of passion, gender, and consent for Restoration and eighteenth-century writers. The Ovidian love motif—which casts men as hunters, women as prey, and love as a hunger or appetite—was inverted and liberated by female authors in the Restoration and early eighteenth-century England to express a female-forward sexual desire. This type of sexuality not only loses popularity over the course of the eighteenth-century but becomes actively scorned alongside a disciplining of female sexuality.I argue Ovid's work is the most pertinent lens through which to view the way early writers performed a type of sexual education. Elite gentlemen read, translated, and imitated Ovid at or before adolescence, yet women were by and large prohibited from such an education. Women readers were therefore at a deficit, and early women writers especially sought to address this deficit by presenting the most important aspect of Ovid as it pertained to women's lives: its depiction of how men view love, passion, seduction, eroticism, and even the marriage market. If men are receiving the Ovidian love motif in the elite classroom, better women readers draw on the motif so as to know how to either avoid being prey, or perform it for their pleasure. Furthermore, I contend that British authors' use of Ovid shows how they see their own works positioned culturally: beginning with Aphra Behn who cultivates an alignment leading her to be called the "female Ovid" and ending with Samuel Richardson who casts his most irredeemable villain as "a greater master of metamorphosis than Ovid." This movement from authors who embrace Ovid to authors who scorn him is reflected in the cultural attitude toward the pleasure-forward version of sexuality seen in the figures of the Rake or Coquette, who are often the heroes of Restoration literature but are not celebrated in late-eighteenth-century Sentimental novels.