Classical World

This thin, expensive, but by no means slight volume stands at the forefront of criticism of Ovid's Heroides. For many years now, the basic interest of these poems has been the art of Ovid, whether to present various types of the abandoned woman with wit or sympathy, or to imply the fundamental helplessness and dependence of all women through his vocalization of the fifteen heroines of his first collection. But now comes a scholar in Fulkerson who concentrates on the heroines as writers expressing themselves as best they can. And Ovid is deliberately minimized, who for her purposes is not the important person in the writing of these poems.

There is a second problem which Fulkerson also attempts to solve in this book: how to turn the constant repetitions, which others view as inartistic and boring, into positive and useful devices for characterizing some enticing connections among the letters. This is where the final term of the subtitle comes into play: the heroines write as members of a writing and experiencing [End Page 458] community, and therefore the letters they write bear witness to this active and sympathetic community of writing women. Not that they all lived at the same time and place, but Fulkerson argues that the repetitions are intratextual evidence for the fact that certain heroines read and knew the texts and arguments of the letters of others, that they develop their own letters (poems) in response to what they have found in their predecessors' verses. Sometimes one heroine will see the errors of her model and act and write to change her situation. That, we are told, is why Hypermestra, reviewing her situation and the errors made by Canace, similarly involved with a severe father and a weak lover, saves herself and spurns the thought of suicide. She was moved by reading Canace's suicide note to resist the urge to defeatism. Sometimes, on the other hand, a heroine misses the chance to better her situation following the model text she reads and makes her situation worse. The letter of Briseis to Achilles (Her. 3) is not a great piece of heroic thinking and acting, but it is energetic and passionate, and Briseis gains some admiration from us. By contrast, in Her. 8, Hermione, who is stuck with a mate in Neoptolemus whom she regards as a kind of rapist like Agamemnon, weakly presents her situation to Orestes (her rightful husband in her mind) and fails to attain the plucky status of Briseis.

There are difficulties in Fulkerson's methodology. No external evidence exists or has been heretofore suggested, to the effect that the heroines read letters from their models or rivals. How they would have gained a chance to read the texts is a question that parallels the old question of how any of these fictional letters would have reached its destination, usually far away across the sea. Fulkerson challenges some interpretations of the myths that surround her heroines. Did Phyllis kill herself only moments before Demophoon arrived to rejoin her? I might ask: did Phyllis really kill herself at all in the world of Ovid's poem? Was Phaedra persuaded by reading the letter of Ariadne to Theseus that she herself was destined to be abandoned by Theseus and hence she seizes her opportunity while Theseus is absent to push her somewhat incestuous case with Hippolytus? But it may be trivial to press Fulkerson on her use of mythology and on this new fiction of a special reading community of women. This is a book for graduate students and scholars, and it should arouse much interest in its readers. Fulkerson covers all the fifteen Heroides, using each chapter to compare poems and to present a special reading. It was a pleasure for me to read this well-printed volume.