Jennifer Weintritt, Northwestern University
In Catullus 63, the protagonist Attis undergoes a change in grammatical gender after their castration in the fifth line of the poem. In some editions (e.g., Goold 1989), Attis, who was initially masculine, is uniformly feminine from this point on. In others (Mynors 1958), Attis is gendered feminine in the narration but masculine in the dialogue. In still others (Morisi 1999), Attis’ grammatical gender fluctuates between masculine and feminine at emotional inflection points. The very fact of Attis’ self-modification, coupled with their searching monologue (63.50-73), suggests that the poem has a place in contemporary efforts to show the historical depth of queer and trans identities (Love 2009, Heyam 2022); the discrepancy between modern editions even more so.
In this paper, I tell the story of how six gendered forms became disputed, for the manuscript tradition, although it is a poor one, is united in this respect: Attis is masculine in six places but feminine elsewhere after line 5. Drawing on commentaries, reviews, and correspondence, I argue that ideas about the temporality of gender fluidity, whether and how easily a person can experience a change in gender, have driven critics to problematize the manuscript readings and to emend these six gender markers variously, each according to their own view.
I focus on three important interventions in the poem’s textual history as it pertains to Attis’ gender. First, Joseph Scaliger’s 1577 edition, which is the first to question Attis’ now iconic assertion, ego mulier (63), on the grounds of the tense of its governing verb (fui 64). Mulier must be corrupt, Scaliger explains, because Attis is still a woman; puber is better. Next, Lachmann’s (1829) influential emendations of the manuscript’s masculine forms in three places (excitam 42, teneram 88, illa 89). Although Lachmann does not comment directly on his reasons, the surrounding scholarship and his correspondence point towards a preoccupation with the fixity of Attis’ gender after castration. Finally, in the late 20thcentury, George Goold, advertising a text “truer to Catullus’ words than any ever yet printed” (1989, n.p.), renders Attis entirely feminine after line 5 and emphasizes femininity in his translation. Goold’s commentary, however, sends a different message: Attis’ feminization is a poetic liberty with no grounding in reality.
Richard Tarrant warns that “even if we could succeed in completely reconstituting the original [text], we would have no way of knowing we had done so” (2016, 39). Nevertheless, the work of textual criticism continues. In recent years, some scholars have advocated for the pedagogical value of embracing the manuscript readings (Lewis 2014, Wesselmann 2021). Others prefer at least some emendation (Richmond 2001), as most Anglophone student editions do (Garrison 2012, Godwin 1993). In response to calls for new editions of Catullus (Harrison 2000, Kiss 2021), this paper acknowledges the fraught position of Catullus 63’s next textual critics—to produce a text, they must decide Attis’ gender, something even Attis struggles to do—and offers material for self-scrutiny about how one’s understanding of gender affects the text’s interpretation.