Writing Yourself to Death: Strategies of (Mis)reading in Heroides 2

Abstract

For many years the standard interpretation of Ovid's Heroides was that they were an undifferentiated mass of iemale misery, tiresome to read and partaking of Ovid's besetting sins2. Critics hâve done an excellent job in recent years of showing that the corpus is, in fact, a poetic tour de force; the process of rehabilitation (begun by Jacobson in the 1970's) has been greatly facilitateci by examining the ways in which the Heroldes are imbued with prior literary sources. This focus on intertextuality marked a significant advance in the sophistication of work on the Heroides; another useful tool for studying the letters is intratextuality3 the ways the individuai poems of the Heroides relate to one another and this tool in fact better explains the surface monotony of the corpus. Without ignoring issues of intertextuality, I will concern myself in this study with the ways Phyllis' letter indeed, her story models itself on several of the 'foundational taies' of abandoned women4.

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