The Trauma of Ovid’s Mythic Women: Rape, Captivity, Silence

Ovid’s poetry contains an inordinate number of mythic rape episodes and allusions to rape. Rape—especially divine rape—is a common topos in Graeco-Roman mythology, but not every ancient writer approaches it in the same way. Ovid, contrary to his predecessors and contemporaries, focuses especially on the female victims of rape and on the variety of their traumatic experiences. In this dissertation, I discuss select rape victims from Ovid’s mythical works—the Heroides, the Metamorphoses, and the Fasti—and analyze his narratives through the lens of trauma theory. In his more detailed accounts of sexual violence, he describes not only the peritraumatic symptoms of female victims, but also post-traumatic symptoms. When faced with the threat of rape, Ovidian women may fight their attackers, freeze (voluntarily or involuntarily), attempt to flee, or dissociate. After rape, their responses are just as varied: Briseis becomes trauma-bonded to her captor (Heroides 3), Io recovers and returns to her family (Met. 1), Philomela takes revenge on her rapist (Met. 6), Lucretia commits suicide (Fasti 2), and the Sabine women settle into their forced marriages (Fasti 3).For each of the chosen rape episodes, I perform a literary analysis of Ovid’s text and compare his language to that of modern western accounts of peritraumatic experiences and PTSD symptoms associated with sexual violence. Ovid’s attention to the multiplicity of rape trauma symptoms indicates a general interest in the lived experience of oppressed people, but more specifically in the experience of women. The similarities between his rape tales and modern psychological rape trauma studies further show that he had some fundamental understanding of how rape can impact a victim’s body and mind.Doctor of Philosoph