Vergil and the Feminine

Vergilius, 2021

This special issue of Vergilius answers to Elaine Showalter's 1985 prediction that we need "even more drastic re-estimations of the old masters. " 1 While the so-called Father of the West has not escaped feminist scrutiny, his works have rarely been seen as fertile territory for women's studies and gender studies, especially in comparison to Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Ovid. 2 In part because of the status of Vergil's epic as a canonical monument to patriarchy, imperialism, and male political-poetic authority, feminist readings of Vergil, or approaches to reading his works through the lens of gender as a discursive system, still represent a tiny portion of modern and contemporary scholarship. Thus the Cambridge Companion to Virgil (1997) fits "gender" into a single chapter (Ellen Oliensis on "Sexuality and Gender"), and the index entry for "women" also directs us to the same essay, with the (performative) subheadings "abandonment or exclusion of " and "as threat in Aeneid." 3 In many major studies of the politics

Vergil and the Feminine, ed. Elena Giusti and Victoria Rimell, 2021

Vergil’s Sixth Eclogue has long been pedestaled as the pin-up boy of the poet’s light-touch, soft-focus Callimacheanism. Using the sensibility of a materialist feminism inspired by Amy Richlin, this article argues that there is more going on in this program piece than the allusive, Alexandrian play of homosociality. Taking a cue from the obliquely exploitative relationship of poet to muses signaled in the proem, I track a number of ways in which the poem’s women are exploited or controlled, from Pasiphae, to the Phaetondiadae, to the nymph Aegle, to feminized trees angled to serve the fantasy of male poetic power. Ultimately, these attempts at domestication and exploitation, unified in the programmatic buzzword deducere, are met with the uncontainable agency of women pushing back.

Vergilius, 2021

Locating the feminine figure of “art as a teacher” (Aen. 8.442: arte magistra) invoked by Vulcan at the climax of his seduction by Venus and production of the shield of Aeneas among adjacent personifications in Latin literature (that of virtue between Aeneas and Evander in Aen. 8.127–133, its model in Lucr. DRN 1.140, and Seneca’s quotation of Vergil’s description of Venus from Aen. 1.327–30 in Ep. 114–115), this paper uses the resources of queer theory—specifically, its search for alternatives to heterosexuality and more relational models of pleasure—to recover a Vergilian idea of art that not only contradicts the gender normativity and “heterosexuality” implied everywhere else in this poem of thwarted intimacy and masculine domination, but also points to some unexpected possibilities for the satisfaction of desire among differently gendered subjectivities.

1990

Women's Studies International Forum, 1987

the study of Greco-Roman civilization from a feminist perpective presents special problems: classical studies is one of the most conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal of academic fields, and women classicists, even those professing themselves feminists, remain strongly male-oriented. The historic use of classical studies as a self-enhancing cultural emblem and a gatekeeping mechanism designed to control access to education and power explains its present appeal to reactionary elitists, along with its tendency to attract female practitioners with an intense 'daughterly' ego-investment in the prevailing system. Research on women in antiquity, though popular and well-regarded among male and female classicists, is therefore conservative by feminist standards and makes relatively littleuse of the new cross-disciplinary scholarship on women. Critical neglect and/or trivialization of the work of the several women poets of ancient Greece provides a telling example of how knowledge that does not fit male disciplinary paradigms can be dismissed, even by women scholars doing women in antiquity research. Recent critiques of the field by both mainstream and feminist members nevertheless offer hope for gradual disciplinary change.

Dictynna

Several episodes in Vergil's Aeneid portray female characters, both divine and human, soliciting aid and/or information from other female characters. Thus Juno seeks the help of Venus to consolidate a marriage alliance between Dido and Aeneas (4.90-128); she later summons the Fury Allecto to her assistance in order to rupture an imminent alliance between the Trojans and Italians (7.323-40); and Allecto duly reports back to the goddess about her successful disruption of friendly relations between the two peoples (7.540-71). Elsewhere in the poem Juno sends Iris disguised as the Trojan matrona Beroe to persuade the Trojan women to fire the ships (5.604-63) and she incites Juturna, in the last book of the poem, to break a treaty between the Trojans and Latins as it is being enacted (12.158-9). Entirely on the mortal level, Dido consults her sister Anna about the political consequences of her growing love for Aeneas (4.6-55), while Amata inflames the Latin women with her own hostility to the proposed marriage of her daughter Lavinia to the Trojan stranger (7.395-405). 2 These scenes have usually been discussed in relation to Greek and Latin literary models. The interview between Juno and Venus in Aeneid 4 (90-125), for example, has been recognized by Georg Knauer as alluding to the scene in which Hera requests the loan of Aphrodite's girdle in Iliad 14 (153-225), 1 and by Damien Nelis as also alluding to the visit Athena and Hera pay to Aphrodite in Apollonius' Argonautica (3.7-112). 2 Similarly, the scene in which Dido confides her love for Aeneas to her sister Anna has been shown to be modelled on passages in Apollonius' Argonautica in which Medea's sister Chalciope takes her into her confidence, 3 as well as the confidante scenes of Greek drama. 4 As Richard C. Monti has argued in connection with the Dido episode, however, "even after literary imitations are securely identified ... one must further consider how Vergil integrates the imitations into the ensemble of his poem," 5 including the social and political values of the epic. This paper therefore reconsiders passages in the Aeneid in which female characters act in concert with other female characters by situating these Women's Networks in Vergil's Aeneid Dictynna, 3 | 2006

Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 1992

Choice Reviews Online, 2005

RCCS annual review, 2011

Drawing upon an extensive bibliography concerning the role of women in Western culture, this article aims to deconstruct the common idea that male domination was always peacefully and universally accepted. Thus, it calls attention to the fact that in Greece (where our tradition conceptually originated), parallel to the established canon of thought, there were significant disruptions revealing other ways of conceiving and representing the feminine, thereby demonstrating the need to re-signify our reception of the classical tradition.

The Classical Journal, 2003

Poets and Critics Read Vergil Ed. by Sarah Spence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 216. ISBN 0-300-08376-9. In 1995 Sarah Spence invited three poets and three classicists to participate in a symposium on Vergil. This volume represents that initial experience in print form. Spence expanded it to twelve chapters distributed across three unequal sections. Perhaps we are to think of Vergil's three main works (Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid), and twelve is the number of books in the Aeneid. But it seems to me more as if we had twelve eclogues, twelve different vocalized scenes -- some true dialogues, some monologues, one a round- table. And like the Eclogues, it is perhaps best appreciated by connoisseurs of Vergil. This collection is not for those who are first-time readers of the Latin poet. The pieces are highly variable in quality. With all due respect for the brilliance and love Spence and Robert Fagles bring to Vergil's poetry, their conversation (pp...