Discurso feminino, epistolaridade e representação nas Heroides de Ovídio

Abstract

This study examines Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of poetic epistles attributed to figures from Greco-Roman mythology (with a single exception, whose letter is attributed to a historical woman), most of them female. One of the central objectives of this research is to foreground the feminine voice in the work by connecting aspects of language to contemporary issues of gender. Given the scarcity of ancient texts authored by women, the Heroides, composed within a predominantly male cultural context, offer valuable insights into a constructed feminine perspective. The authorial power of the Heroides’ female characters is embedded in an intratextual compositional system that forms a symbolic community of female readers and writers established through the shared presence of these women within the corpus. Within this framework, the female “authors” of the work actively assume the roles of readers, writers and commentators on their own myths, thereby prompting a revision of narratives traditionally shaped by a male gaze. Thus these “authors” situate themselves within the textual legacy of Antiquity as a circle of intellectual women. The pervasive presence of the feminine voice throughout the Heroides invites us to view these figures as poetic authorities who strategically employ institutional resources of language and discourse to (re)textualize their narratives. This study focuses particularly on how Ovidian heroines integrate epistolary and theatrical elements to assert themselves as protagonists of their own stories. Indeed, elegiac motifs such as the symptoms of love, and epistolary topoi such as writing in absentia are intricately interwoven with theatrical conventions. The use of first-person narration and the delimitation of narrative space and time blur the boundaries between epistolography and drama, thus turning the Heroides into a form of epistolary theater. When Ariadne (Her. 10), for example, recounts events she alone witnesses, she offers the reader a pictorial representation of these moments and dramatizes her emotional suffering through vivid, gesture-centred description. This poetic space, which enables the visualization of “exclusive scenes” from myth, also emerges in the letters of Oenone (Her. 5) and Phaedra (Her. 4), particularly when they posit the presence of a reader-spectator for both their narrated episodes and their own figures, which are positioned at the centre of the page-as-stage. Through intertextual dialogue and performative textuality, these women, who construct their narratives in response to the narratives of other women, establish themselves as mutual models of feminine authorship. This process creates a dynamic of production that articulates both alterity and self-referentiality in the reconfiguration of their myths. These aspects reveal not only the formation of a virtual network of female reading and writing, but also an intricate poetic construction that is sustained by intratextuality and exemplarity. The present study proposes an intratextual reading of the epistolary theater fashioned by Ariadne, Oenone and Phaedra by comparing their epistles in order to highlight, on the one hand, the backstage of these heroines’ writing and, on the other, the active role of the reader-spectator in the composition and reception of these representations of female discourse in the Heroides.