Personification and Emotion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the animation of inanimate things in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially those that embody emotional experiences. In the Introduction, I define both keywords in my title and situate this study relative to recent research on Ovid’s poem, on personification in antiquity, and on emotions from both ancient and modern perspectives. In Chapter 1, I offer a typology of personification in the Metamorphoses, finding three prevailing types: environmental personification, divine metonymy, and the personification of intangible things. In Chapter 2, I scrutinize the concept of invidia with the help of emotional “scripts,” or narrative scenarios that give rise to this emotion. Finding that hierarchy, both social and ontological, informs one common iteration of this emotion, I appraise its occurrence in Book 2 of Ovid’s poem, where Invidia is personified, and in Book 6, where we encounter a similar personification called Livor. I also consider Invidia and Livor within a tradition of metapoetic personifications that comment on the poet’s experience of writing poetry, with examples from Virgil and Callimachus. In Chapter 3, I consider Invidia from a different angle, as a “hitwoman” in the tradition of Virgil’s Allecto, also comparing Ovid’s Tisiphone and Fames. I find in Ovid’s unprecedented personifications an allegory for aesthetically displeasing poetic inspiration. The vivid corporeality of Invidia and Fames, moreover, may be explicable with regard to contemporary art, especially statuary grotesques. In Chapter 4, I look at Ovid’s Mercury and Morpheus in the context of the literary tradition of epic messengers, finding this tradition hinted at, but subverted, in the descent of Mercury in Book 2, then restored in the depiction of Morpheus in Book 11, who may be read as an avatar of the poet. In Chapter 5, I return to Ovid’s hitwomen by examining the landscapes they inhabit in terms of “landscape symbolism,” or the mirroring of characters’ inner experiences in their environments. In contrast to the often-discussed locus amoenus, these landscapes are distinctly unsettling, amounting to a locus suspectus, or uncanny (in the Freudian sense) experience for the reader. In Chapter 6, I explore a narrow tract of Ovidian reception, looking at the repurposing of Ovid’s Invidia in a Medieval French educational anthology called the Florilegium Gallicum, to find that she and the similar characters Tisiphone and Fames were well suited to this form of education for their consistency with Christian sensibilities. At the end of this study, a series of appendices supplement my arguments, including an examination of an intertextual exchange between Ovid and Virgil, a structural comparison of Ovid’s “hitwoman scenes,” examples of Furies and hitwoman-like bodies in art, and collations of portions of the Florilegium Gallicum against the transmitted text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.