Reading Rival Positions:
Dido and Penelope in Ovid's Heroides

Alena Allen (Cathedral Catholic High School)

Much scholarly research has been done in the past few years exploring Ovid's intertextual references in the letters of the Heroides.  Indeed he seems to have selected each heroine with a specific source text in mind and then to have developed his character against the backdrop of that source text.  Such a juxtaposition creates in the mind of the reader a mental drama between the two literary versions of a heroine, for example between Vergil's Dido and Ovid's Dido.  Scholars, notably Laurel Fulkerson and Sara Lindheim, have recently investigated the intratextual content of Ovid's letters.  Lindheim in her book, Mail and Female (2003), discusses how Ovid combines the literary forms and traditions of both the epistle and elegy to construct one common voice with which all heroines speak.  In her book, The Ovidian Heroine as Author (2005), Fulkerson points out that Ovid's doctae puellae, in addition to sharing common vocabularies, poetic influences, and situations of abandonment, also seem to affect one another's understanding of their situations.  Fulkerson details the influences of the heroines' letters on each other as they rewrite their own stories.  Such intratextual investigations raise interesting questions about Ovid's intentions.  Is Ovid creating yet another drama in the mind of his reader by inviting the reader to imagine what his heroines might have to say to each other?

In this paper I will explore the drama Ovid creates, at least in the mind of one fevered reader, between the letters of Penelope, Heroides I, and Dido, Heroides VII.  Ovid's Penelope writes urging her wandering Trojan war hero to quit dallying with his foreign love, Circe/Calypso, and to return home to her, his legally wedded wife.  Ovid's Dido writes pleading with Aeneas to delay longer with her thereby postponing his divinely destined journey to his proper home in Italy. This paper will suggest that these two heroines write their letters in the attempt to effect the exact opposite behavior from their epic lovers, and thus the epistolary stances they take are in fact rival positions.  Does each heroine offer the reader a view from the other side in order to increase her understanding of "the other woman" and her opposite relationship situation?  As Ovid's audience knew, the poet begins his Ars Amatoria by urging people who do not know the art of love to read his poem and become skilled.  Perhaps in the Heroides, by inviting his readers to an engage in a mental drama between the positions of two different heroines, Ovid offers his readers a dialectical form of instruction in the ever fascinating art of love.