Interpreting Ovid Amores 1.5 Visually: Dissertation Shard
Ovid’s Amores is a naughty, tongue-in-cheek and playful take on the usually highbrow genre of Latin love elegy. While Ovid’s writings are generally described as ‘visual’, there isn’t as much scholarly focus on the Amores as the text that sets the precedence for this signature style. Therefore, my dissertation aims to unpack the importance of how Ovid sees the events of the Amores, and why he presents them in this way.
The poems in the Amores are generally driven by Ovid either physically seeing real events, or visualising them as ideal hypothetical/imagined situations. To analyse the visual parts, I’ll be focussing on the events and descriptions which stem from verbs of sight (e.g.: ‘vidi’/‘I saw’ denotes literal sight) and verbs/nouns which suggest sight (e.g.: ‘imago’/‘image’ denotes visuality). I’ll also be relying on Laura Mulvey’s work on the gaze within film theory, and in particular her model on the presentation of women as a dichotomy between ‘virgin’ and ‘whore’. This model exists within elegy (as David Fredrick demonstrates), where the ‘candida puella’/virgin stands in as the beautiful object of the poet’s desire, while the ‘dura puella’/whore is demonised for being an unattainable and sexually threatening bitch who sleeps with everyone but the poor poet. I’ll also be using Mulvey’s term ‘scopophilia’, which refers to the way the virgin is seen as a collection of desirable parts, and is a non-threatening fetish serving the male protagonist’s pleasure, as well as the term ‘voyeurism’, which refers to the way the whore is seen as the evil opponent to the male protagonist, and who thwarts his attempts at sex with her and thus deserves sadistic punishment for it.
For the purpose of this shard I have chosen to look briefly at Ovid’s Amores 1.5 to demonstrate how my analysis will work (by way of introduction, 1.5 is best known for being programmatic in establishing the themes and style for the rest of the collection of poems, as well as offering a very problematic and much-debated first glance at his relationship with his beloved).
The first verb denoting sight only appears in line 9, with “ecce” (‘look!’) immediately calling the reader’s visual attention. This has prompted some to argue that the lines preceding “ecce” are fantastical and even religiously revelatory in Corinna’s sudden appearance disturbing the pastoral scene setting; whatever the case may be, it is significant that the poem opens with fantasy before leading into reality, which in itself, as we shall see, also seems fantastical. Thus, “ecce” alerts us as the audience/viewer to look with Ovid at the sudden injection of reality into the fantasy.
The first mention of Ovid’s own sight occurs with “ante oculos… nostros” (‘before my eyes’) in line 7, rather than “vidi”, which makes an appearance a few lines down. Corinna’s ‘standing before Ovid’s eyes’ might arguably demonstrate her agency, being the subject of the verb, yet on the other hand it seems more likely that she has been postured in this way. “Stetit” has a range of meanings including ‘she was fixed/stuck’; Patricia Salzman-Mitchell’s work is particularly relevant here, where she interprets the gaze as being a tool to ‘transfix’ people into objects. Though she is exploring this phenomenon within the context of Ovid’s later work, the Metamorphoses, the power of Ovid’s gaze to transfix even this early on in his corpus is evident.
Next, the first “vidi” on line 19 prompts an enumeration of Corinna’s beautiful features (“what shoulders, what arms I saw and touched…”); feminist scholars have thoroughly discussed how Ovid objectifies Corinna by reducing her to a sum of her body parts, while omitting symbols of autonomy in her head and face. Ignoring all the salient creepiness of the text (e.g.: lines 13–14 “I tore off her tunic… however she fought to cover herself with her tunic…”), we can see that these lines set a clear example of the aforementioned scopophilic gaze, since Corinna is being viewed as a collection of fetishised and consumable parts.
The second “vidi” on line 23 describes the perfection of Corinna’s entire being (lit. “I saw nothing that wasn’t praiseworthy…”), which might arguably counteract the scopophilic model since this description doesn’t ‘rend her to desirable pieces’. However, we along with Ovid are in fact still viewing Corinna in a scopophilic way, if we take into account that the description of Corinna’s “corpus” (‘body’) forms one of a number of examples in the Amores where Corinna stands as a metaphor for elegy as a genre in itself. “Corpus”, as in English, can refer to a body of work, and thus Ovid once again objectifies his love interest to suit his own fantasy; here, he is in love with elegy itself.
With this in mind we can observe that it is the verbs of sight that set up the objectifying phrases, and thus Corinna’s first introduction within the Amores sets her up as a beautiful and prized object to be captured. We can also observe that this riffs off Propertius 1.1, in which he places the power of gaze upon his beloved, claiming to be her victim (‘Cynthia first captures him with her little eyes’), while here Ovid is openly admitting that his beloved is the victim of the amatory game from the get-go. Therefore, as the poet, he renders Corinna into a generic image of normative masculine desire, as is suitable for the genre, yet he is fully aware that he has pictured (i.e.: viewed) her not as a real person but as an impossible literary construct. From all this, we can conclude that since his sight limits what the audience sees to only the most conveniently desirable aspects of the narrative, Ovid has maintained the terms over exactly what is seen throughout the poem and thus occupies a position of control.
Another aspect to Ovid’s sight which I intend to explore more fully is the fact that his sight often foreshadows physical contact, which again indicates that sight is the first step towards his complete control over the terms of the narrative and elegiac game. Notice in this poem that the verbs/mentions of sight (underlined in blue; “ecce”, “ante oculos… nostros”, “vidi”, “vidi”) appear before verbs which indicate physical contact (underlined in pink; “tetigique”, “premi”, “pressi”). Therefore, by also engaging with and influencing the narrative scene in this way, Ovid blurs the fiction he sees and the reality he touches to create a seamless tapestry of elegiac idealism. His control thus becomes twofold as he manipulates the presentation of the Amores’ characters and events to his desires, both within the narrative as a lover and, as discussed, externally to the narrative as its poet.
For the purpose of my full dissertation, I’ll be looking at many other poems of the Amores and focussing on how Ovid applies both scopophilic and fetishistic gazes to Corinna and his full cast of characters, as well as how his perspective functions throughout the Amores as a whole. I’ll also be drawing comparisons back to his predecessor Propertius’ vision/sight and to vision/sight in later myths from the Metamorphoses, and I intend to round off by discussing some political implications of why Ovid uses elegy to demonstrate the mechanisms of visual power. Wish me luck!
Bibliography
Ovid, Amores. Showerman, G. (tr.) Ovid, Heroides. Amores. Loeb Classical Library 41 (Harvard MA, 1914)
Fredrick, D. “Reading Broken Skin: Violence in Roman Elegy” in: Roman Sexualities, (eds.) J. Hallett, M. Skinner (Princeton, 1997), 172–93
Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in: Screen, vol. 16 (1973), p.6–18
Salzman-Mitchell, P., A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image and Gender (Ohio, 2005)
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