“My tree stays tree”: Sylvia Plath and Ovid’s Daphne

Critical appraisals of Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre remain dominated by psychoanalytic readings that conflate the writer’s life and work. Poems such as ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ are presented as emblematic of what is perceived to be Plath’s autobiographical identification with -- and self-positioning in her work as -- Electra-mourning- Agamemnon (Plath’s father, Otto, died of complications related to untreated diabetes shortly after her eighth birthday). One consequence of this biographical bias is that when the presence of classical allusion in her work is noted, scholarly focus falls on Plath’s brief references to Greek tragedy. Within this critically-constructed biographical matrix comprising Plath, her father, and the classics, however, is the little-noted fact that it was Otto who first introduced Sylvia to Latin. This essay re-focalizes discussions of Plath’s classicism around her literary engagement with Latin literature and with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular. I focus on Plath’s engagement with the tale of Daphne across five of her poems: ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad’, ‘On a Plethora of Dryads’, ‘Pursuit’, ‘Virgin in a Tree’, and ‘Elm’, and I explore her poetic responses to the allegorical and thematic possibilities suggested by the tale to her as a woman artist in the 1950s. Using Ovidian myth to speak of contemporary women’s lives, Plath engages with the tale in a search for artistic and sexual independence. In conclusion, I argue that Ovid’s tale of Daphne is as programmatic for the themes of Plath’s poetry as it is for the Roman poet’s epic text

An intertextual analysis of the novel Girl Meets Boy and the use of feminist and queer theory by Ali Smith in her reception of the tale of Iphis from Ovid's Metamorphoses (9.666-797)

In this thesis I discuss Ali Smith’s reworking of Ovid’s tale of the girl-boy Iphis from his Metamorphoses (9.666-797) in her 2006 novel Girl meets boy. I examine how Smith has brought Ovid to life for twenty-first century readers, first through an exploration of feminist and queer critical readings of Ovid and the influence of those theories on Smith’s method of classical reception, and secondly through an analysis of intertextual references. My matrix of interpretation draws upon the theories and experimental writing of Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, alongside an examination of intertextual allusions to Ovid himself, Virginia Woolf, John Lyly and William Shakespeare. I argue that Ovid readily lends himself to feminist readings of his work, and that by combining critical theory and creative writing, Smith establishes a new and liberating queer feminist model for classical reception

'Ovid, Plath, Baskin, Hughes'

Many critical treatments of the poetic interaction of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have overlooked Hughes's 1997 translation of 24 episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tales from Ovid. This paper argues that the connections between Hughes, Plath, and Ovid that erupt in Hughes’s final two collections of poetry are similarly complex and longstanding. I begin by considering Hughes’s 1988 essay ‘Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of “Sheep in Fog”’, in which he becomes the first critic of Plath’s work to note her engagement with Ovidian figures. Building on Hughes’s argument that the mythic figures of Phaeton and Icarus provide the interpretative key for understanding Plath’s Ariel poems, I provide further examples of Ovidian figures in Plath’s poetry. To focalise the allusive nexus between Ovid, Plath, and Hughes, I compare Plath’s poem ‘Sculptor’ (1958) – dedicated to Leonard Baskin and in which Baskin is cast as Ovid’s Pygmalion – to the tale of Pygmalion as translated by Hughes in Tales from Ovid. I present some further evidence for Plath’s presence (or conspicuous absence) in Tales from Ovid, before discussing some implications of Hughes’s (re)arrangement of the translations. Finally, I suggest that while Birthday Letters represents an explicit engagement with Plath, Tales from Ovid presents an implicit dialogue with Plath’s work and her own Ovidian allusion

"Reader, I married him/ her": Ali Smith, Ovid, and queer translation

This essay discusses Ali Smith's queer translation of Ovid Metamorphoses 9.666-797 in her 2007 novel Girl meets boy. I argue that Smith's presentation of a contemporary gender-queer Iphis and Ianthe not only fictionalizes the critical argument proposed by Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, but repoliticizes Ovid for our modern world. Building upon theories of feminist translation, I first draw upon Butler to propose a queer translation praxis. Reading Girl meets boy through this Butlerian lens, which foregrounds multiplicity and insists upon the politically subversive potential of repetition—that is, the production of queer copies that disrupt the original—I illuminate how Smith translates, re-translates, and re-writes Ovid’s text, making queer identities that are apparently made to disappear in the Latin original visible, or 'loosed' in translation. Second, I draw out the queer implications of Smith's use of repetition throughout the novel, in which three alternative translations of Ovid’s tale appear in the novel, in literal, dialogue, and creatively transformed forms. Finally, I draw out some of the political issues at play in Smith’s choice to translate Ovid's tale of Iphis and Ianthe in 2007 before same-sex marriages were legalized in the UK

Saviana Stănescu’s Barbarian women: the Empire writes back to Ovid

This article discusses the Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu and her continued engagement with the works of Ovid, tracking the feminist methodology which links her varied work. While Ovid’s self-definition against the ‘barbarian others’ he encounters in Tomis is crucial to an understanding of the exile poetry, in a postcolonial world the ideologically loaded nature of the term barbarus must be recognized, and its use and replication in modern translations and receptions interrogated. Characterized by an astute critical awareness and a committed political engagement, Stănescu’s classical receptions draw out the damaging real-world consequences for a people labelled ‘barbarians’. Her work offers a defence of the reviled Black Sea inhabitants of Ovid’s exilic poems by providing a critique of the colonial representations of the ‘barbarians’ therein, and exposing the power mechanisms of ancient and contemporary imperialism alike

The feminine Ovidian tradition

While the growing body of literature on the relationship between feminist theory, classical myth, and classical scholarship has contributed to an understanding of general scholarly trends, there has not been a sustained examination of the relationship between feminist scholarship and classical receptions. Furthermore, the field of classical reception studies focuses almost exclusively on male authors and widely ignores female voices. This thesis addresses these lacunae through detailed discussions of the Ovidian receptions of four women writers active between 1950 and the present: Sylvia Plath, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Josephine Balmer, and Saviana Stănescu. The thesis tracks the ‘difference made’ by feminist scholarship on their varied receptions, and the ways in which recurrent concerns in their engagements prefigure, echo, or explicitly draw upon feminist theory and feminist Ovidian scholarship. This thesis poses the argument that women’s classical receptions offer a critical tool to advance feminist classical scholars’ attempts to ‘reappropriate the text’, by reclaiming female narrative authority from the male poet and interpellating the ‘resisting reader’. This diverse, yet characteristically feminine, Ovidian tradition challenges existing reception traditions based upon male practitioners alone, and reawakens the political and aesthetic critique at the heart of Ovid’s poetry