Silenced Muse: Gender, Voice, and Control in Ovid’s Amores

Abstract

This paper examines the staging and control of the puella’s voice in Ovid’s Amores, analysing how the poet withholds, mediates, or selectively quotes her speech. Although cast as the domina with significant influence over the poet’s life and art, the puella’s voice is rarely heard directly. Through close readings of key elegies, this study identifies three principal strategies through which Ovid frames the puella’s voice: (1) its absence in otherwise dialogic situations, (2) its mediation through reporting, projection, or scripting, and (3) its occasional appearance in carefully controlled instances of direct quotation. The article argues that Ovid’s control over the puella’s voice functions as a poetic device that aligns with a wider elegiac discourse of gender, power, and authorship, in which the puella becomes a scripta puella, a textual construct shaped by the representational structures of elegiac discourse. The manipulation of the female voice in the Amores is also shown to engage with broader Roman discourses concerning gender, speech, and authority.