| Ovid's Metamorphoses has been studied as an important source for English writers and artists in the later reign of Elizabeth I, but no analysis of the cultural role of Ovidianism has fully addressed how it defined gendered subjectivity. Examining the link between the aesthetic interest in Ovidian representations and the broader cultural renegotiations of gender occurring in the period, this dissertation argues that both Ovid's anti-epic and many of those works for which it is an intertext are engaged in defining an interiorized female subject who responds actively or symbolically to the violence of male desire epitomized by rape, but represented also by hunting or war. Analyzing its imagery of bodies transforming to trees, fountains, animals, and the opposite gender, and its insistence on the cultural efficacy and legitimacy of emotion as a response to violence, this study of Ovidianism reveals the way subjectivity can be defined by a discourse responding to specific cultural challenges. The first chapter focuses on the Ovidianism of Elizabeth's court in processional entertainments (especially at Sudeley Castle in 1592) and in John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis. It examines how Ovidianism both critiqued and surprisingly supported representations of the queen's metamorphic gender. The second chapter offers a crucial reassessment of Ovidianism in Spenser's Faerie Queene, analyzing how this discourse creates possibilities for female figures to assert agency outside the limitations of the poem's action. Reading the insistently Ovidian Book III, and other metamorphic episodes and figures (such as Adicia in Book V and the many Proserpina figures), the chapter argues that Spenser's Ovidianism creates a crucial place for feminized critique at the level of abstract allegorical signification. Finally, the third chapter investigates Shakespeare's Ovidian representations of female grief as a defining attribute of character. In the public theater, the Ovidianism of a play like Titus Andronicus constructs feminized grief as the source, not just of the actor's power to create fictions, but also of the subject's agency, in this case to enact revenge. Often grieving or expressing other types of extreme or culturally remarkable emotion, and constantly subject to the erosions of bodily identity figured in metamorphosis, these female figures negotiate limited but powerful kinds of agency. |
