Shona Edwards, University of Adelaide
There is a long history of scholars using optical metaphors to describe knowledge. In the study of ancient literature, metaphors of reflection and mirroring have been extensively used to describe the processes of imitation and reception of texts. This paper argues that metaphors of reflection and mirroring are limited by a hierarchical relationship between the reflection and the source, where the reflection is always dependent on and by definition secondary to the source. When applied to texts, this hierarchy inherent in the language of mirroring can produce an assumption of the inferiority of imitation texts. This paper investigates the use of metaphors of reflection in relation to Ovid’s Heroides 7 and the figure of Dido, and suggests that we can push these metaphors further, towards metaphors of refraction and diffraction.
The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (1997: 273) suggests that the metaphor of reflection reproduces ‘the same’ and is at its core recognisably a replication or reproduction, in terms that may be familiar to classical philologists who describe processes of imitation and mimesis. Haraway, and later Karen Barad (2007), recognise that metaphors of reflection utilise scientific understanding of how light behaves, and have argued for the reading of texts through metaphors which deploy a more detailed understanding of wave theory in quantum physics.
Refraction describes the redirection of waves as they pass from one medium to another, as they are distorted or bent in their redirection. Refraction as metaphor has been used to describe the adaptation of texts or to describe difference between a source text and imitation text, as refraction describes change in direction. In recent work Megan Drinkwater (2022: 31) has deployed the metaphor of refraction to describe Dido’s imago at Heroides 7.69 as having “prismatic effect” and as a “focal nexus,” “refracting our attention back onto the imagines in Virgil’s text.” Drinkwater frames this refractive pattern as reinforcing the Aeneid’s multiple ghosts, and Ovid’s Dido follows this fragmented path, “she deflects our gaze.”
This paper will suggest that diffraction, too, may serve as a productive metaphor to describe the process of reception or adaptation of texts. In wave theory, diffraction describes the spreading out of waves of light after passing an obstacle or passing through an aperture, splitting the light into its component parts. For Haraway (1997: 273) these diffraction patterns “record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference.”
This paper makes a diffractive reading of the many Didos in Ovid’s reception of Virgil’s Aeneid 4 as represented in Heroides 7, where she is recognisably the same and yet vitally different to her Virgilian counterpart. A diffractive reading of Dido traces the component parts, the Virgilian origins and Ovidian interferences which then ricochet through history beyond Virgil and beyond even Ovid himself.