Ovid`s Tragic Heroines: Gender Abjection and Generic Code-switching, Jessica A. Westerhold

Ovids Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovids incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poets persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female nature, and are generically marked as tragic. Ovids masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities.

Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovids poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovids reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovids process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry.

Ovids Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovids poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovids Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poems genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.