Gender Confusion in Ovid's Amores 2.15

Sharada Price

Texas Tech University

In Amores 2.15, Ovid combines elements from two poetic genres in an innovative way, borrowing from Greek epigram the topos of wishing to be near one's beloved (PMG 900, 901, AP Anon. 5.83-84, Meleager 174, Strato 190) and taking from elegy the topos of using gifts to seduce a woman (Propertius 1.3, Catullus 2 and 3).  Typically the elegists' gifts are of little value and the ring of Ovid's speaker is no exception (Sharrock, 1991).  As the poem reveals, despite being a piece of jewelry, even this gift is not worth very much (2).  Because the poem is addressed to this ring, the reader is led to expect that it may be mainly about the gift and the girl for whom it is meant; however, we soon see that the focus of the narrator's poem is himself.  The transformation topos from Greek epigram is put to unusual use since, unlike the Greek epigrams in which the speaker usually imagines that he is from the natural world near the beloved, like a flower or dolphin. Ovid's speaker fancies himself to be the very gift he is sending, allowing him more freedom in his fantasy.  Through a close reading of the poem, this paper will explore the ways in which the speaker unwittingly associates himself with feminine qualities.  For example, when he envisions that he is the ring he intends to give to his puella, he moves from being the masculine figure attempting to penetrate the beloved and becomes the penetrated when he imagines the girl slipping the ring onto her finger:  protinus articulis induat illa suis; /tam bene convenias, quam mecum convenit illi, / et digitum iusto commodus orbe teras! (4-6).   The narrator cannot, however, remain unaffected by the erotic situations he imagines and although still a ring, he has an erection:  sed, puto, te nuda mea membra libidine surgent, /et peragam partes anulus ille viri (25-26).  Alison Sharrock notes that "even though Roman sexuality is constituted on the basis of penetrability or otherwise, nonetheless even the penetrator himself can be characterized as suffering a vulnus through being a lover, and so the gendered categories will not stay neatly separate" (2002).  The speaker attempts to take on both gender roles saying, "As that ring, I'd carry out a man's part" (26).  Even with an erection, as a ring the speaker will not be able to have sex with the girl.  He fails to comprehend the confusion between masculine and feminine qualities apparent in his actions and thus demonstrates the same type of delusions about power and gender that we find throughout the Amores.