“To speak is never neutral.” Finding the female body in Propertius

Erika Zimmermann Damer (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Recent scholarship has studied women’s role in Propertian elegy from a psychoanalytic perspective to explore crises in Roman identity and ideology during the transition from Republic to Principate [Janan 2001, Miller 2004]. This excellent work has not interrogated the different ways male and female speakers talk about elegiac love. By scrutinizing these different gendered strategies of speaking about the female body, I will argue that Cynthia’s female discourse can present the sexualized female body, the master signifier that guarantees elegiac discourse, in a way that the speaker’s male voice is fundamentally unable to do.

Propertius, like Tibullus and Ovid, famously attributes his poetic ability to encounters with his girlfriend’s beautiful body (Prop. 2.1.1-14, Tib. 2.5.111-112, Am. 2.1.37-38). Propertius elaborates upon Cynthia’s beautiful features in a series of poems in the opening of his second book (2.1.4-16, 2.2.5-6, 2.3.9-20). Still, his programmatic statement in 2.1 is emblematic of the speaker’s treatment of the female body and the sexual relationship that underlies elegiac discourse: seu nuda erepto mecum luctatur amictu | tum vero longas condimus Iliadas, 14-15. These lines present an elegiac impossibility. The speaker does not wrestle with his nude girlfriend, nor does he write long epic poems. Rather, even in 2.15, the poem most explicit about their love-making, the speaker grows angry because of the puella’s refusal to become totally nude, when she obstinately wears clothing to bed (vestis, 17). Thus, when the speaker describes Cynthia, he emphasizes her clothing or individual praise-worthy features, but he never has unmediated access to the nude female body.

Cynthia's speeches (1.3.35-38, 2.29.31-38, 4.7.15-20, 94), on the other hand, focus directly upon the sexual act, the sought-after consummation of the elegiac speaker [James 2003]. Poem 2.29 is emblematic of her frankness: she is not easy, and she speaks of the marks that two bodies would leave on her bed, and of the panting that would betray her cheating (33-38). Cynthia’s speech characterizes the sexual act as obvious and sex is the first thing she talks about rather than the inarticulable underpinning of elegiac poetry.

Luce Irigaray’s reclamation of the female body as the surplus of male discourse can help understand the different presentations of sex and the female body in Propertian elegy. The very materiality of the female body is what troubles the Propertian speaker. Using Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalytic thought (1985, 86-105), I will argue that the Lacanian conception of feminine sexuality as something that exists outside of, and overflows signification within, the symbolic realm of language can help to explain the Propertian speaker’s inability to articulate the reality of the female body.

Works Cited:

James, Sharon L. 2003. Learned Girls and Male Persuasion. Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy. Berkeley.

Janan, Micaela. W. 2001. The Politics of Desire. Propertius IV. Berkeley.

Miller, Paul Allen. 2004. Subjecting Verses. Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton.