Mismarked Flesh: The Interpretability of the Male Body in Julio-Claudian Literature

This dissertation studies the increasing failure of the elite Roman male body to serve, as it had done for centuries, as an easily interpretable sign of social identity. The socio-political shift from Republic to Empire led to general disorientation and a crisis of male elite identity that found expression through depictions of the male body. Through Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petronius’ Satyrica, and Senecan drama, I study this preoccupation in light of the Roman socio-historical context and modern theories of bodily identity found in Kristeva, Spillers, and Scarry, among others. I argue that we can trace the frequent scenes of misrecognition and confusion and the preponderance of wounded, marked, and dismembered non-slave bodies to this identity crisis. The mutilated male body in Julio-Claudian literature becomes a nodal point for multiple intersecting anxieties about gender, class, and status in an uncertain world. Chapter One reviews the socio-political context of the early empire and contemporary theories of embodied identity, and surveys the scholarship on embodied masculinity in early imperial literature. Chapter Two shines light on the confusion of bodily signifiers in the disorienting worlds of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and of Augustan Rome, showing through such stories as Actaeon and Pyramus that failure to interpret signs or to act as an interpretable signifier can be disastrous. Chapter Three examines the new vulnerability of elite men in Augustus’ Rome through the mutilated and dehumanized male bodies of the Metamorphoses, including Marsyas and Hippolytus. Chapter Four connects the confusion of bodily signifiers with a larger failure of the body in Petronius’ Satyrica and in Neronian Rome: whether they do not display legible social identities, fail to perform sexually, or are assaulted, bodies in Petronius’ novel are problems. Chapter Five connects the abject bodies of Seneca’s Oedipus, Thyestes, and Phaedra to the violence of Nero’s reign, reading them as broken signifiers whose misinterpretation spells disaster for their onlookers. Chapter Six offers concluding thoughts, as well as case studies of Pompey’s head in Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Hercules’ suffering in the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus.Doctor of Philosoph