Emma Scioli, University of Kansas
This paper presents a re-evaluation of Heroides 13, Ovid’s letter from Laodamia, a young Greek bride, to her husband Protesilaus, in light of its pervasive rhetoric of the body. Laodamia’s multiple references to bodies – real and imagined; integral and injured; human and nonhuman – along with her fantasies of imitation, substitution, and intertwining among these bodies – form the thematic fabric of her letter. While most of the Heroides express longing for a physical reunion between writer and addressee, Laodmaia’s letter is unique in its sustained meditation upon shared embodied experience.
Erika Zimmermann Damer (2019) has established the importance of understanding the puellae of Roman elegy as embodied subjects, although she does not treat the Heroides in the scope of her inquiry. This paper considers the embodied self of the letter writer and its relationship to the absent body of her lover in terms of intercorporeality, a concept developed by the twentieth-century French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “To describe embodiment as intercorporeality,” as Gail Weiss has written, “is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies” (1999: 5). An exploration of the mediation among bodies within the context of Laodamia’s letter is the central focus of this paper.
The analysis begins with Laodamia’s experience of pain, revealed early in the letter. Her shock from Protesilaus’ sudden departure for the war at Troy and their forced separation is powerfully described by Laodamia in terms of its effects on her body. After losing sight of Protesilaus’ receding ship, she blacks out (lines 24-5); when she comes to, her dolores (“pain”) also return (line 29). Laodamia pens her letter as a response to and an expression of this pain.
Lisa Folkmarson Käll has argued that pain, rather than establishing distance between embodied subjects, fosters intercorporeality: “the experience and expression of pain cannot be isolated within or at the boundary of the skin. The expression of pain breaks forth and unfolds between self and other” (2013: 36). Laodamia’s fantasies of engagement between self and other are manifested in the following actions, each receiving close analysis in the paper: imitation (she insists on copying Protesilaus’ manner of dress, lines 34-42); substitution (she imagines her own blood flowing from Protesilaus’ wound, lines 79-80); and embrace (she fantasizes about her reunion with Protesilaus as an intertwining of their arms and mouths, lines 115-22).
The paper concludes with consideration of Laodamia’s ultimate expression of intercorporeal interaction with Protesliaus, her intimate relationship with a wax figure of him (lines 137-48). While scholars have long been fascinated by Laodamia’s remarkable confession that she addresses the wax figure with words and embraces, seeing in it evidence for her “pathological character” (Jacobson 1974: 211), or her “desire to assert authorial control” (Fulkerson 2005: 111), this paper reads the striking interaction between human and nonhuman bodies instead as the culminating expression of a desire for intercorporeality fostered by Laodamia’s embodied experience of pain.