Voices and Vacancies in Verse: Metamorphoses and Gendering the Ovidian Soliloquy

Abstract

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a poem saturated with stories and heavy with the most colourful narrative elements. One such is the soliloquy, which Ovid bequeathed to poets and dramatists like Chaucer, Faustus and the Bard. Metamorphoses houses five soliloquies, all, interestingly, in the mouth of female characters. This essay attempts to understand the ‘gendering’ of the soliloquy through its aetiology and implications on the characters, narrative, themes and audiences. Medea, Scylla, Byblis, Myrrha and Atlanta are the only Ovidian soliloquists of Metamorphoses. This puts them in a difficult position, for they are a granted agency and comprehensive selfhoods and characterhoods through the expression of complex psychological interiorities. But at the same time, their identities are suffocated with erroneous rationales, moral didacticisms and tragic endings. The soliloquies operate within the liminality of gender and gendered literary traditions. The essay culminates in an open question: how authentic is the female voice narrated by a male author?