JONATHAN WALKER

BEFORE THE NAME:  OVID'S DEFORMULATED LESBIANISM

AT THE CONCLUSION OF BOOK 9 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Iphis and Ianthe, the poem’s only tale of female same-sex desire and its sole instance of female transvestism. Iphis’s imminent birth has just set the story in motion, when a paternal order of female infanticide threatens to shut down the narrative prematurely. With divine inspiration from Isis, however, Iphis’s mother Telethusa averts the infanticide by disguising her daughter as a boy. Thirteen years later, Iphis falls in love with and is betrothed to her girlhood friend Ianthe, who reciprocates her love under the impression that Iphis is a young man. Although she remains firm in her desire, Iphis can find neither a precedent nor a language for what she feels, and so she laments her predicament and the impossibility of consummating her love with Ianthe. Fearing that her bodily identity will be revealed once she and Ianthe wed, Iphis visits the temple of Isis with her mother to pray for help. The goddess answers their prayers by transforming Iphis into a man, effectively resolving the crisis and enabling the marriage between Iphis and Ianthe to take place.

Before this dénouement, however, Iphis anticipates a wedding at which there will be no groom, “just two brides” (“qui ducat abest, ubi nubimus ambae,” 9.763), and she confronts the intractable problem of comprehending a nameless desire.  Despite her undeniable emotional and erotic attraction to Ianthe, Iphis is confounded in her efforts to represent or express what she feels. The difficulty she faces should be a familiar one, though, for it is not unlike the problem that we encounter when reading her story, especially if we try to understand the elusiveness of her desire in an historically sensitive manner. Such representations of “lesbianism” in classical texts have frequently been characterized by critics in terms of “invisibility.” While it is relatively effortless for us, as modern persons, to perceive female same-sex desire in certain premodern texts, the texts themselves almost always find such a desire incomprehensible outside of a phallocentric and penetrative model of erotic activity, that is to say, the model of erotic activity. Most of these texts treat sex between women as a poor imitation of male-centered eroticisms, the effect of which is to render invisible any vestige of lesbianism that may have been conceptually or practicably independent of the masculine model.

Bernadette Brooten explains, for example, that in order to rescue Sappho’s poetry from her renowned homoeroticism, writers throughout history have displaced her desire and affection for women either onto a depraved prostitute of the same name or into a heteronormative conversion of sorts, in which she fell in love with a ferryman named Phaon, because of whom she then committed suicide. In either account, Sappho’s lesbianism is made safely to disappear.  Judith Hallett similarly demonstrates that elite Latin writers in Rome, with the exception of one satiric example, obscured the existence of contemporary female homoeroticism by masculinizing, Hellenizing, and anachronizing its representation: “female homoeroticism was an undifferentiated, unassimilated conglomeration of alien and unnatural Greek behaviors, which did not really take place in their own milieu or—if it did occur—did so in a completely unrealistic way.”  And despite many theoretical and institutional strides that have helped to uncloset the alterity of classical erotics, Ann Pellegrini believes that even “this new generation of classical scholarship suggests how queering the canon may not go all that far to redress lesbian invisibility.”

But most critics likewise warn that the enterprise of distinguishing lesbianism’s spectral shape in classical texts confronts not just an authorial masculinization of the women and a denial of the existence of female same-sex desires and practices. Such an enterprise also runs the critical risk of reading in modern categories of sexuality, on which classical writers and their conceptions of eroticism did not and could not depend. So how might we identify or name what we perceive to be a distinct lesbian desire in texts that seem to refuse, on every level, any such designation? Does not such an identification or description impose onto classical texts its own patterns of invisibility? And what is it, then, that we see when we say we see something like lesbianism in a classical text? Such questions of course have been durable ones, if only for the most fundamental of reasons that there exists no common erotic vocabulary between—or even among—the ancients and the moderns.

Like other classical texts, Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe (Metamorphoses 9.666-797) refuses to make what we would now call lesbianism at all visible, intelligible, or nameable, even though it is demonstrably the most extensive treatment of female same-sex desire in the extant literature of the period. Yet rather than suggesting here, somewhat tautologically, that Ovid provides one historical location for either the development or the invisibility of lesbianism, I want to argue that his narrative merely formulates the thought of the possibility of lesbianism, a sort of shadow without an object to cast it. If this formulation happens to be unsatisfying, then I have achieved the same effect that Ovid does in his tale. For although the story’s central conflict objectively involves the emotional attachment and erotic desire of one young woman for another, strikingly depicted from an embattled personal perspective, Ovid furnishes both his character and his reader with only one erotic paradigm—a phallocentric one—while leaving the existence of homoeroticism, of any kind, completely undepicted and unnamed.