FLIPPING GENDER WITH SALMACIS

The story [...] is told in book 4 (of the Metamorphoses) by one of the Minyeides (sister princesses) as they while away the time spinning and weaving in defiance of Bacchus/Dionysus. It is followed by [...] Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (271-388), told by Alcithoe: [...]. Their crime has been in part to flee from the manly epic demands of Bacchic poetics (classical tragedy) into the female elegiac world of private emotion, and the stories they tell have connections of many levels with each other and with the surrounding narrative. Most obviously, the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus deals with attempts at union by sundered lovers, ending in that total fusion that has always been the goal of lovers and which had been so determinedly attacked in book 4 of Lucretius' De rerum natura. (See especially M. Labate, "Storie di instabilità: l'episodio di Ermafrodito nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio", 1993).

The characters of the story, but especially the women, aspire to presence: Salmacis, who unlike her fellow nymphs has spent so much time looking at herself in the waters, gazes at Hermaphroditus like the sun reflected in a mirror, but cannot content herself with just looking but must seize the boy and join with him. In the final story union is achieved: what Pyramus, Thisbe, Helios, Leucothoe, and Clytie could not do, Salmacis achieves and finally two become one, neutrumque et utrumque, As many have observed, however, this final union does not have about it any sense of triumphal achievement. Hermaphroditus, when he realizes what has happened, describes it not as a uniting of male and female, but as a softening of his masculinity: he becomes a semivir (half-male), but the other half of the union is scarcely in evidence. The intertextual model is Catullus' Attis after he has castrated himself, and in the moment of realization when Hermaphroditus prays to his parents to make the pool a permanent testimony to his softening, it is as if the personality of Salmacis has completely disappeared: as Georgia Nugent remarks in her brilliant Irigarayan reading of the episode: "in the conclusion of the tale, Hermaphroditus remains, I believe, what he already is ---and that is a male subject, always fully conscious of himself as such." As she admits, however, that is not the whole story, and I shall return to the complexities of gender in this episode. (See Nugent, "This Sex Which Is Not One.")

As critics have found with the Salmacis episode, the engendering of these tales is a complex matter.

The reading I have given suggests [...] that Salmacis should have been satisfied with her contemplation of Hermaphroditus rather than attempting union with him. When she sees him, she brooks no delay: "vixque moram patitur, vix iam sua gaudia differt". Once more, if only she had attempted différence and deferred her pleasure, she would have been able to retain her identity, but instead she loses herself in the attempt to get close to her lover. However, Georgia Nugent has pointed out that there is another way to read Salmacis' desire to touch rather than to see her lover, in terms of the valuation of female touching over male gazing articulated by Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One. It is easy to place Salmacis' desire to touch and envelop Hermaphroditus as an inappropriate attempt to get beyond the proper distance that language imposes and which allows the sort of detached, playful contemplation with which she ought to have been satisfied, but Nugent's juxtaposition with modern conceptions of gender might make us hesitate in our evaluation of the episode.

For the deferral in "vix iam sua gaudia differt" cf. Amores 2.5.29, 3.6.87 (to the river which separates Ovid from the love interest), Heroides 19.3 (Hero and Leander), Metamorphoses 6. 514 (Tereus "vix animo suo gaudia differt"); Martial 10.44.5; and in the sermo amatorius Propertius 2.23.17)

The gendering of this story is, however, still more problematic and complex than even this would suggest, Salmacis' intolerance of delay, mora, and refusal to defer pleasure is hardly a female characteristic, but much more a mark of the male: one of the ironies of the Salmacis episode is of course that Hermaphroditus is already more than, or less than, a male, so Salmacis is throughout made parallel to all those male lovers in Ovid's rape scenes whose sight of the beloved is immediately and inappropriately translated into violent action. Her story is closely parallel to that of the Minyeides themselves, in that just as their revolt against the patriarchal order of Bacchus/Dionysus is figured as a virile insistence on continuing with women's needlework, so Salmacis refuses to live up to society's expectations that she go hunting with Artemis' retinue and spends all her time in the "bathroom" (actually, doing her vanity routines by her pond) combing/styling her hair and beautifying herself. But her whole attitude towards Hermaphroditus, and in particular her instantaneous move from spying to attempted possession, is one we can recognize as male.