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- Title
Moral Judgement in Historical Perspective: The Experience of the Roman Love Elegy.
- Authors
Hajdu, Péter
- Abstract
Roman love elegies tend to represent a single life situation from a love relationship. The representation happens in a first person singular monologue of a male protagonist, for whom modern readers, having internalised the ethos of Romantic love, usually feel sympathy, resulting in a moral judgement against the woman. The represented lifestyle of the man in love implies the rejection of the official value system and the patterns of expected male behaviour, which modem (western) readers may regard as a kind of subversion they are happy to endorse. A historical reading, however, may identify the connection of the love elegy to comic or satirical genres. For the reader of the time, the protagonist was rather probably a ridiculous figure inviting moral judgement exactly because of his rejection of the official values. This paper argues that a moral evaluation so different from ours can be nonetheless be perceived in the reading process. Firstly, a close reading that focuses on the humorous and playful elements may disclose the self-revealing gestures of the persona in love, and break the readers5 sympathising impulses. Secondly, a reader trained in post-structuralist theory may recognise the lover's power discourse, which may result in sympathising with the socially vulnerable woman rather than the man controlling the discourse. The latter strategy is not actually historicising,since its interest lies not in reconstructing the contemporary moral judgement but criticising it. The paper analyses Propertius 1.6 and Tibullus 1.3 to demonstrate the complex and contradictory representations of values in the Roman love elegy.
- Subjects
ROMANTIC love in literature; GENDER role; ETHICS; MONOLOGUE
- Publication
Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, 2020, Vol 4, Issue 4, p1
- ISSN
2520-4920
- Publication type
Article