A. Everett Beek (North-West University)
The construction of gender within Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a subject of perennial interest, largely because of the characters’ self-determination, and even transformation, of their gender identities. Characters who transform their gender, such as Iphis, Tiresias, Caenis/Caeneus, and Salmacis/Hermaphroditus, provide the clearest look at how gender is constructed (Kamen 2012, Liveley 2003, Pintabone 2002). Nevertheless, there are subtler ways in which gender can be defined, transgressed, and uniquely expressed within the works of Ovid (Sharrock et al. 2020, Raval 2002, Keith 1999), particularly characters’ speech.
Speech in Ovid is a valuable but under-studied expression of gender (much more work has been done recently with Ovidian silence (e.g. Natoli 2021, Keegan 2002), which can to some extent be applied to speech). Within the Metamorphoses, direct speech by the characters falls into gendered patterns. Public speeches to large groups tend to be the province of male characters, especially when urging collective action (such as rejecting Bacchus’ cult) or advocating a particular course in an important decision (such as awarding the armor of Achilles). Female characters, by contrast, mostly speak to small audiences in private settings.
Deliberative soliloquies are perhaps the most clearly gendered pattern of speech in the Metamorphoses. These are speeches in which a character debates privately with themselves to determine their course of action in an uncertain situation. Such speeches are especially associated with unmarried young women who are in love, and who find that the actions conducive to their love affair are in conflict with other expectations upon them; prominent examples include Medea (7.11-71), Iphis (9.726-63), Byblis (9.474-520), and Scylla (8.44-80).
Achilles makes a gender-bending exception to this pattern when he engages in his own deliberative soliloquy (12.106-21). At Troy he harmlessly strikes Cycnus with his spear, much to his amazement. Cycnus boasts that his skin is impenetrable as a result of his divine parentage. Achilles tests this claim further, but, after failing to injure Cycnus, sinks into a soliloquy in which he questions his weapons, questions his own abilities, seeks confirmation of his martial skills, and decides how to pursue his attack.
This moment when Achilles engages in stereotypically feminine speech coincides with the moment when he is unable to perform his masculinity, that is, when he is unable to penetrate his opponent. (Boreas similarly soliloquizes at 6.687-701 when his marriage proposal has been declined, a similar slight against his masculinity.) This display of feminine mannerism plays into a larger picture of Achilles’ gendering: though Achilles is a nigh-unconquerable warrior, and himself mostly impenetrable (and he does, in this episode, defeat Cycnus by crushing him to death), his masculinity is complicated by feminine behaviors. Not only did he attempt to avoid fighting in the Trojan War, but he did so by disguising himself as a girl (as is alluded to at Met. 13.162-70). As Cyrino 1998 has shown, Achilles’ exceptional prowess in the highly masculine field of battle allows him to engage in more feminine behaviors without his essential masculinity coming into doubt.