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Non Aliena Tamen: The Erotics and Poetics of Narcissistic Sadomasochism in Propertius 1.15

2002; Texas Tech University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1935-0228

Gary Mathews,

Linguistics and language evolution

Recent scholars of and Roman elegy have paid special attention to gender role reversal, (1) focusing on whether the amator's claim of servitiurm amoris represents genuine subservience or is a pose calculated to keep him in the dominant position as lover or poet. (2) Many scholars have argued that the Propertian amator remains dominant in both respects. On the erotic front, the amator never acknowledges any subjectivity on Cynthia's part; instead, he treats her either as a debased or idealized object or as a helpless victim or creature of uncontrolled, destructive passion, that is, as a fantasy rather than as a real woman. (3) As poet, he maintains dominance insofar as, being the one with the pen, he retains complete control over how is represented. Whatever erotic role she is given, she is still just a construction representing ideas he wants to write about, especially themes and aspects of his own poetry. (4) He presents her with no stable character, but alters her behavior and significa nce according to whatever literary point he wishes to make. (5) This correction of the longstanding scholarly view of as an autobiographer candidly recounting his sufferings at the hands of a fickle mistress has been salutary. But by insisting on such strict binaries as dominance/subservience, masculine/feminine, and literary textuality/representation, this corrective also risks ignoring, or at least obscuring, important and complex dimensions of Propertius's explorations of erotic subjectivity which touch on both Cynthia and the amator. It would be regrettable if recent emphasis on the literary qualities of Propertius's poems, for all its value in alerting us to what we might miss when reading the poems as straightforward autobiographical confessions, were to foreclose entirely an interpretation of the poems as mimeses. (6) There is no reason why the persons the poems represent should not be regarded as characters in a fictional world with all the reality we ordinarily assign to such characters through conventional suspension of disbelief--no more than such a mimetic reading should preclude other interpretive strategies. True, the character Propertius presents himself as composing autobiographically, but there is a crucial difference between that character and the empirical author. The latter may identify with the former, but he may also assume a stance of ironic distance. Indeed, often seems to hold the amator's erotic and poetic posturing up to keen, if in some ways also sympathetic, critical scrutiny. is writing about a poet in love; but that character is not just writing about his affair, he is actually living it. Whereas as empirical author can control everything in his fictional creation, the amator cannot control everything in the world he writes about, since he is a part of it. (7) He may wield a pen, but the world he lives in is bigger than the world he can represent, let alone control. His frustrations with that world and with Cynthia especially, which make up so large a part of what he wants to write about , mainly arise from his confrontation with this fact. Since Cynthia herself has a separate existence in the fictional world that has created, she can assume whatever subjectivity he sees fit to represent for her: whether directly, as in her speech in 1.3, or indirectly, through the amator's observations and interpretations of her behavior. Of course, the amator is not necessarily a reliable narrator, but like any author, can tip us off to his narrator's unreliability by revealing bias, exaggeration, and other peculiarities of his speech and manner--indeed, by exposing his fantasies for what they are. Although shows us Cynthia only through the amator's eyes, he can nonetheless, by inviting us to look through and beyond the amator's presentation of her, provide some clue as to what her subjectivity might be. …