Erotic Pursuit and Narrative Seduction in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Abstract

The Metamorphoses is a poem full of tales of erotic pursuit. It is also a poem full of fictional narrators and audiences. These two features frequently intersect, since erotic pursuit is often the subject of an embedded tale, and sometimes — but considerably less often — the occasion for one. Erotic seduction is much more common as the subject for a story than as the objective of one. Narrative seduction in the frame, however — that is, a narrator's seduction of an audience into listening to, or even soliciting, a story — is quite common. Indeed, most embedded tales in the Metamorphoses are requested tales, and quite often the request is engineered by the prospective narrator. In considering instances of narrative discourse as ‘narrative transactions’, Barbara Hernnstein Smith has suggested that one should examine the general question ‘why … someone has chosen (or agreed) to tell someone else that something happened and why the latter has chosen (or agreed) to listen’. More specifically, Robert Scholes and Gerald Prince have both pointed to a figuratively erotic relationship between narrator and audience, viz. the fact that the narrator must first arouse desire for a story. Ovid himself seems to hint at this connection between erotic and narrative seduction by calling attention to the narrative situation in so many of his tales of erotic pursuit.

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