“How Strangely Chang’d”: The Re-creation of Ovid by African American Women Poets

Abstract

This project examines the re-creation of Ovid by African American women poets. Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved Black woman writing in colonial America, engages with Ovid’s account of Niobe in her epyllion “Niobe in Distress.” Henrietta Cordelia Ray, who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, picks up where Wheatley left off in a sonnet called “Niobe.” Elsewhere, in “Echo’s Complaint,” Ray also imagines what Echo might say to Narcissus if she had full control over her words—an imaginative exercise that has resonances with Ovid’s Heroides. Finally, in her 1995 book Mother Love, the contemporary poet Rita Dove re-examines the tale of Demeter and Persephone from a number of different angles. In reworking the Metamorphoses, all three poets paint vivid images of vulnerable girls and bereft mothers. Moreover, Wheatley, Ray, and Dove play with Ovidian elements to explore themes of repetition, voice, motherhood, and power dynamics.