Queer Futurities in Ovid's Heroides

Ovid’s Heroides, as a Roman elegiac work, belongs to a genre that delights in gender role reversals and refuses its contemporary gender norms, while also disrupting the relentless forward push of linear time by depicting its protagonists languishing in idleness and circularity. In addition, this text takes the form of letters written from various fictional literary women to the male lovers that have abandoned them, delving into (a male author’s) representations of feminine points of view. All of these factors render it an ideal locale in which to explore how temporality and gender operate, topics that coalesce in the theme of reproduction, both literal and metaphorical. To that end, this dissertation investigates how temporality and gender operate in Roman elegy by applying the queer theoretical concept of “reproductive futurity” to Ovid’s Heroides. Reproductive futurity, a term coined by Lee Edelman, describes the conflation of the future with the figure of the Child, resulting in an adherence to a linear and teleological temporality. In order to have a future under such a logic, one must participate in biological reproduction and protect the resultant children from all threats, including queerness. By identifying how and where reproductive futurism is in operation, one can then pinpoint moments when the heroines do not adhere to its principles, creating new and surprising possibilities for futurity. Reproduction has served as a metaphor in many Augustan poets’ texts, figuring poems as children that carry on the legacy of their poet-father in perpetuity. When the writing ego of a poem is a woman, childbirth is no longer just a metaphor for a creative act, but a possible material reality. Consequently, these fictional women’s relationship to procreation and children can be read to create new models of the relationship between writing and temporality, models that do not assume that the preservation of writing conveys immortality. In reconsidering the forms the future takes, my argument also has implications for intertextual studies, as a non-linear temporality muddles the directionality of influence. In this way, reading through the lens of queer temporality levels traditional hierarchies in which older texts are valued as superior to or more important than later texts. The temporal layering reveals that literary influence is multidirectional and can be discussed nonhierarchically. The system of reproductive futurity creates constraints that the various heroines work through, beside, and against – for instance, Dido (Her. 7) demonstrates that reproductive futurism is not as monolithic as it may seem, and that employing its logics can have very queer results. The results of the heroines’ operating within reproductive futurism all provide glimpses of ways to access the future other than through the heteroreproductive act. These include finding a communality in death, redefining death and endings as containing hopeful potential, as Canace (Her. 11) and Medea (Her. 12) do, as well as embracing belatedness and failure, as in the case of Penelope (Her. 1). The heroines show us that the future can be accessed in part through recovering the materiality of the body and embracing its vulnerabilities. It can also be manifested through imagining otherwise, a process in which fantastical thinking serves as the first step toward creating a new and different future. Far from being the delusional outbursts of hysterical women, these flights of fancy, grammatically marked by contrafactuals, impossible wishes, and muddled verb tenses, in fact are the key to shifting conventional understandings of temporality.

Advisor: McCarthy, Kathleen