Is This Therapy?: Literary Self-Reflection and Women’s Voices in Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid

Abstract

This study considers the intersection of women’s voices and literary self-reflection in the works of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid. My chosen textual range includes both authentic and manufactured female voices to interrogate the gendered implications of publishing intimate poetry. Much of this project involves turning assumptions on their heads: I broaden our expectations of personal voice and its aesthetics, contribute to our understanding of Sappho’s stylistic influences on later poets, and suggest an alternative way of reading epistolary literature as inherently self-reflective. Elements of repetition and vision collide to create and dwell upon literary memories within the Sapphic verse that is at times emulated and at times ignored by her Roman imitators, who find in the lyric poet an opportunity for vulnerability. The gendered dynamics of literary self-reflection emerge as equally illuminating of both women’s and men’s voices. While founded in the texts of antiquity, this study engages with personal voice as a timeless element of human expression.