AMY RICHLIN'S CRITIQUE OF THE SALMACIS MYTH

We may compare two feminist works on the nature of ‘the gaze’ in Ovid to illustrate how the poet has held a problematic fascination for feminist classicists and how his poetry lends itself to a variety of receptions and interpretations. The first of these is Amy Richlin’s now seminal work of feminist classical scholarship from 1992, Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, and the second, Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell’s A Web of Fantasies: gaze, image, and gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Both authors are indebted to feminist film theory for the debate surrounding the nature of ‘the gaze’, and both examine how the nature of the viewer/ the viewed is constructed in Ovid to reflect his constructions of the male/ female (following Mulvey). 

Richlin positions her work within cultural studies, as written for both classicists and feminists, and unlike earlier scholarship she tackles a mixture of Greek and Roman sources that are specifically concerned with sex and sexuality. It is a radical feminist text in opposition to earlier feminist scholarship, which was heavily (and, Richlin thinks, to its detriment) influenced by Foucauldian theory. In contrast, Richlin wanted to focus on the ‘sameness rather than difference’ between classical and contemporary cultures. Taking the radical feminist standpoint on ‘pornography’ outlined above, Richlin argues that Ovid’s poetry, and particularly the Metamorphoses, are pornographic.

Richlin’s assertions about the nature of pornography are essentialist and reductive as they perpetuate the patriarchal concept that there is one ideal, non-violent female sexuality. She also does not distinguish in texts between the literal and the figurative, arguing, for example, of the trope of ‘lover-as-soldier’ throughout Ovid’s work, that ‘metaphors often convey a literal perception, and a poet who sees love as comparable to battle might well see violence as part of love.’ Richlin’s agenda thus creates great bias in her use of sources and blinds her to alternative readings (for example, the theory discussed below that Ovid’s puella may be a poetic construct or device), forcing the source material to conform to her theory. 

However, her treatment of the rape of the boy Hermaphroditus by the nymph Salmacis at Metamorphoses 4.285-388 deserves comment as the episode’s conclusion has implications for Ovid’s treatment of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe. Richlin argues that the reversal of traditional roles in the Hermaphroditus story is shown by Ovid to be abhorrent as it ‘results in a permanent and threatening confusion of gender’, not only for Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, but for all future male bathers in their pool, who Hermaphroditus prays will be turned into semiviri (eunuchs, or literally half-men, 386). Richlin comments: 

We see male rapists who dress as women, even a male raped because he is dressed as a woman, and these events turn out well; when a female acts male, the result is the unmanning of all men, and the narrative makes it clear that this is a bad thing (e.g., 4.285-86). 

When we then come to the story of Iphis and Ianthe five Books later, we are mindful of this ‘permanent and threatening confusion of gender’, and so perhaps understand why Iphis’ biological sex must change in canon in order for there to be a happy ending to her tale.


Ali Smith also chooses to include two passages from Woolf in an edited volume of her favourite writing by other authors, including a section of Woolf’s diary and a scene from Orlando; Smith 2006. Although I have used Woolf here predominantly to explore the use of water imagery in Girl Meets Boy, Woolf’s metabiographical novel Orlando (1928) is another crucial intertext containing both an exploration of the fluidity of gender and the blurring of generic boundaries. As well as purporting to be the autobiography of a young man who one day wakes up as a woman, many of the novel’s characters display both female and male attributes (Sash), change sex (Shelmerdine), or wear the clothes of the opposite sex (Archduke / Archduchess Harry / Harriet), and boundaries are blurred between fiction and biography, author and creation. Orlando’s story is framed by two recurring Ovidian tales from the Metamorphoses, those of Daphne and Apollo, and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. That both of these tales also appear in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew suggests that this was a mediating text for Woolf in her reading of Ovid. Woolf uses gender fluidity and Ovid’s particular brand of metamorphosis (that something of the original character is maintained post transformation) in Orlando to explore the very different roles and expectations of men and women in 1920s Britain. The opening line of Orlando reads: ‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex…’ (5). This statement immediately makes the reader question the veracity of this assertion and foreshadows the unstable gender categories that we meet throughout the novel, and we are also reminded of Ovid’s own characteristic tendency to subvert statements that he has just presented as fact. The line also pleasingly foreshadows Ali Smith’s own assertion that ‘She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life’ (Smith 2006: 45).