Reading Broken Skin

Ovid is not simply being flippant when, in Amores 1.7, he suggests an amorous bite as the alternative to beating his mistress. Torn dresses, pulled hair, scratches, and bruises are scattered throughout Roman elegy, often in association with lovemaking. If this genre employs the female body as a metaphor for its Alexandrian poetic qualities, how should this broken skin be read? Does violence betray its attempts at “taking the woman's part,” confirming that it is an “obstinately male” genre? ¹ This essay situates elegiac violence in the context of two distinct ways of representing the mistress: erotic description, which fashions an incomplete but aesthetically perfect body as poetic metaphor (candida puella); and jealous suspicion, which produces a degraded body liable to verbal or physical aggression (dura puella). These modes converge in the genre's often professed (but rarely obtained) goal of intercourse with the puella, where Callimachean metaphor apparently becomes penetrable flesh. Such an approach points toward the reclaiming of epic as a genre closely associated with elite masculinity. But masculinity, as defined through political and social competition, was at the end of the first century Bce an increasingly hollow form of theater, “a loathsome and bitter burlesque,” as Carlin Barton has put it. ² Its recuperation in elegy is therefore parodic, but not simply funny; for its male authors, elegy's wounds are ambiguous metaphors for the transformation of elite masculinity into text.