Rachel C. Morrison, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper aims to shed light on the layers of Ovidian retrospection in Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s 1910 poem “Echo’s Complaint,” which imagines what Echo might have said to Narcissus if she had the words. Working in the tradition of the Heroides (Walters 2007), Ray imagines a complex interior life for a mythical woman whose side of the story has not often been told. In addition to engaging with Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses, Ray also alludes to John Milton’s reworking of Ovid’s Narcissus in Paradise Lost (Kilgour 2012) by having Echo propose that gazing at his reflection in her eyes might be a less risky alternative for Narcissus. Through Deleuzian repetition, I argue, Ray imagines an Echo rich with resonances to both Ovid’s non-Metamorphoses work and his subsequent reception.
Ultimately, Ray’s Echo meets the same fate as Ovid’s, but until then she is always the subject, the one gazing and pursuing. Ray’s Narcissus, who embodies whiteness and masculinity in the poem (Spigner 2014), never even speaks directly. Ovid’s Echo dreams of approaching Narcissus with blandis dictis and molles preces (3.375-6) like an elegiac lover; Ray’s Echo actually does so, begging Narcissus to let her kiss his “sunny hair,” “marble brow,” “dewy lips,” and “peerless eyes” (59-62) while suggestively recalling that she “trembled ‘neath” his smile (20). As a Black woman publishing at the turn of the century, Ray—rapturously praised by biographer Brown 1926 for her “delicate fancy” and “unaffected piety”—adhered to strict codes of decorum, “subscribing to the rigid standards of Victorian ladyhood” to “counter the racist stereotype of black female wanton sexuality” (Tate 1989: 63). Echo’s frank sexuality and focus on her own desire, refracted through both Ovid’s non-Metamorphoses works (the Herodies, Amores, etc.) and his reception by Milton in Eve’s prelapsarian relationship with Adam, is a striking choice in the context of Ray’s full corpus.
I read both Ovid’s Echo and Ray’s alongside Deleuze, who distinguishes repetition from generality by defining repetition as artful and intentional. Since generality “belongs to the order of laws” (Deleuze 1994: 2)—it is generality, for example, that the sun repeatedly rises and sets in the same way—repetition “is by nature transgression or exception” (5). Generality can describe natural phenomena: the seasons repeatedly change in certain ways, a stream always flows in a particular direction, and so forth. Repetition “occurs when things are distinguished in numero, in space and time” (270) and it “is the power of language” (291). “Art does not imitate, above all because it repeats,” writes Deleuze, and this repetition is subversive and creates new meaning (293). An echo sounding back when someone shouts in a canyon is generality; Ovid, by personifying Echo and by giving her some control over exactly which words of someone else’s she repeats, begins to grant her the dignity of repetition rather than generality. Through layers of retrospective allusion to Ovid (including works other than the Metamorphoses) and his imitators, I argue, Ray completes Echo’s transformation from generality to repetition.