Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Pursuing Daphne
- 2 Medusa's mouth: body and voice in the Metamorphoses
- 3 Embodied voices: autobiography and fetishism in the Rime Sparse
- 4 “Be not obsceane though wanton”: Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image
- 5 “Poor instruments” and unspeakable events in The Rape of Lucrece
- 6 “Your speak a language that I understand not”: the rhetoric of animation in The Winter's Tale
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
2 - Medusa's mouth: body and voice in the Metamorphoses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Pursuing Daphne
- 2 Medusa's mouth: body and voice in the Metamorphoses
- 3 Embodied voices: autobiography and fetishism in the Rime Sparse
- 4 “Be not obsceane though wanton”: Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image
- 5 “Poor instruments” and unspeakable events in The Rape of Lucrece
- 6 “Your speak a language that I understand not”: the rhetoric of animation in The Winter's Tale
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Summary
This chapter analyzes the connections among rhetoric, sexuality, and subjectivity in Ovid's Metamorphoses to enable us to see why disquieting convergences like the one between Daphne's use of figura – the form of her body – and the narrator's – Apollo's poetic tropes – continue to inform Renaissance appropriations of Ovidian narrative, particularly later imitations of Ovid that claim to speak to a difference between male and female experience. By examining what the often violent intersection between rhetoric and sexuality means for the speaking subjects of Ovid's poem, moreover, I hope to give a sense of how important it is for a feminist critique of the Metamorphoses and its afterlife that in it we encounter what Simone Viarre, following Roland Barthes, calls a “fusion between poetry and rhetoric” – a thoroughgoing conversion of rhetoric into a “poetic technique.” In other words, the punning movement of figura, the resonant word that signifies both Daphne's body and the god of poetry's speech, suggests a crucial place where a feminist analysis of the Metamorphoses might intersect widely acknowledged aspects of Ovidian poetic practice.
I have already emphasized Ovid's habit of turning poetic and rhetorical self-reflection into stories of desire and sexual violence: Apollo's rapacious desire for Daphne is also a poet's love for a figure; Pygmalion's desire to “move” his statue is also a sexual version of a rhetorician's aim to “move” his audience; Perseus first uses Medusa's os (against Atlas) as a kind of rhetorical prosthesis, enforcing the compliance that his “soothing words” cannot; the aetiological story of the Gorgon's head, in its turn, converts a rape and a beheading into the origin of the fountain of poetry; and so forth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare , pp. 39 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000