Reading Ovid through the 'Virgin Suicides'

Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules and practices, culture is “made body,” as Pierre Bourdieu puts it – converted into automatic, habitual activity. As such it is put beyond the grasp of consciousness... [untouchable] by voluntary, deliberate transformations. (Susan Bordo)

 There is a section in Ovid's Ars Amatoria which is discussed by Eric Downing in his article 'Anti-Pygmalion: The Praeceptor in Ars Amatoria, Book 3'. This section offers didactic advice to women on the subject of making themselves attractive to men. The main thrust of Downing's article is that Ovid in the role of praeceptor or teacher offers very different advice to men than he does to women. He suggests that whereas men are encouraged to refine their inner lives and pay little heed to their appearance, women are to pay no attention at all to their interior lives but are expected to transform themselves aesthetically.

The idea of the anti-Pygamalion comes in through comparison with the mythical story of Pygmalion and Galatea, a story which Ovid was aware of and which he used in his longer poem Metamorphoses, a poem which was probably composed at the same time as the Ars Amatoria.

Pygmalion was a sculptor, who having shunned the contact of women became infatuated with a statue he had created, his work of art he had created began to stand in for a perfect woman, a woman who was simply an extension of himself. Having fallen in love with his work of art, Pygmalion becomes less hostile to the notion of a real love with a real woman and asks Venus to bring his statue to life.

Ars Amatoria  3.196-236: The Cosmetic Process

The interest Ovid has in the external appearance of women is slightly creepy. Ovid shows a preoccupation with make-up: ‘you don’t shrink from lining your eyes with dark mascara or a touch of Cilician saffron (3.203ff.). This interest would have been seen as deeply transgressive during Ovid’s time, as cosmetics were frowned upon as ruinous to natural beauty. Ovid seems to revel in the artificiality of the made-up face and there seems to be something deeper than beauty advice running through this passage.

Ovid as the praeceptor becomes technical in terms of telling women how to manage their cosmetic processes. This detailed instruction allows Ovid to manage all aspects of the intended reader’s daily routine: ‘Don’t let your lover find all those jars and bottles On your dressing table: the best make-up remains unobtrusive’ (3.209ff.). There is something disturbing about this level of interest in the women’s bodies. As Susan Bordo says: The body – what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body – is a medium of culture. This coupled with the sense that Ovid wants the artificial to appear natural, that the make-up should not announce itself as visible, goes toward a sense of loss of individuality which is replaced by a uniformity which is alarmingly oppressive.

Ovid reveals his distaste, even disgust for the cosmetic processes he advocates. He talks about ‘goo from unwashed fleeces’, ‘sweaty neck’, ‘repulsion’, ‘pimples’ (3.212ff.). His final comment on the matter is that though the result is attractive, ‘the process is sickening’ (3.218). This disgust which Ovid shows has led to Eric Downing in his article on the ‘anti-Pygmalion’ to say this:

He first focuses on oozing, dripping faex, pungent oils extracted from a sheep’s unwashed fleece, and the mashed marrow of hind (211ff.), as if the ingredients and processes that bring about that transformation were the particular objects of his disgust. It soon becomes clear, however, that it is the ‘natural’ woman herself  which disgusts him 

Ovid as the praeceptor is clearly interested in the blank and uniform work of art that he can create from the living, animate woman. According to Downing’s argument: ‘Men mechanize (and replace) their inner lives; women mechanize (and replace) their superficial, surface appearance. Men remain outwardly the same, but are changed radically within; women remain internally the same, but are completely changed “on the face of it”.’ (cf. 3.507-08). By focussing on the mechanization of the exterior and ignoring the interior lives of the women he addresses, the praeceptor attempts to create a work of art, a sculpture of the living woman. By putting his words in her mouth, he closes the circle and turns her wholly into his work of art. This is the opposite route to the one which Pygmalion takes of surrendering his work of art in exchange for a flesh and blood woman.

[the praeceptor] regards [women] as inherently savage and violent (3.239ff., 373ff.), unpleasant and offensive (229, 501ff.)and, equally damaging, as by nature unattractive and physically flawed. But the praeceptor does not then withdraw completely from the real world into a separate world of art and there create an unnatural and perfect ivory artefact of a woman. Instead, he attempts something even more radical: to combine the two worlds and to turn real women themselves into living statues, into animate artefacts.’

The Virgin Suicides and the Making of Artefacts

He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.

In the Virgin Suicides, both Jeffrey Eugenides 1993 novel and Sofia Coppola's 1999 film adaptation, the voice of the praeceptor is at work through the narrator. The narration takes the form of the first person plural, with the narratorial voice belonging to the group of boys who are looking back to their adolescent obsession with the Lisbon girls; the eponymous virgin suicides. The narrators of this story have similar interests to Ovid, that is the externality of the girls. They create a kind of museum of artefacts which relate to and stand in for the dead girls whom they never had a chance to understand or engage with. Right from the start we are told of the impossibility of the girls' existence, that they were almost too ephemeral to be part of the real world which the narrators occupied: No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, could produce such beautiful creatures.

The boys, however, are very interested in the process by which the girls become the beautiful objects they seem. When Peter Sissen, a boy in Mr. Lisbon's class, goes for dinner, he comes back with stories of how he found a used tampax in the girls' bathroom: In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it like a modern painting or something... Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on. This revelation about the human-ness and carnality of the girls seems at odds with their ethereal presence. This commonplace event takes on a ritualistic significance to the boys who see the very femaleness of the girls as exotic and intoxicating.

Bleeding and leaking is used as a motif throughout the novel as a means of connection between the girls and the outside world. Though they occupy the sealed space of their house, they make attempts to break out into the world. Lux has sex with strangers on the roof and uses vinegar, oil and a filthy rag as contraception. The lipstick which one of the girls uses is discovered by Peter Sissen during his visit, the boys see her wearing it later and this gives them a sense of intimacy with her. Cecelia's first suicide attempt is in the bath, the leaking of the taps and the blood from her wrist signifying her death. For the rest of the story Cecelia is seen with bandages round her wrists, inexpertly covered with plastic bracelets. This does not hide, but rather draws attention to her injuries. Perhaps the most vivid example of this motif is found when Cecelia makes her second, successful suicide attempt:

The spike had gone through so fast there was no blood on it. It was perfectly clean and Cecelia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a gymnast . The wedding dress added to the circus effect.

The girls are leaking, bleeding, using depilatories and make-up. This cosmetic process is closed off from the boys and unlike Ovid who is sickened by the idea of it, they crave intimate knowledge. the boys do not want the finished artefact, but rather they want to know how it is created.

Both the novelist and the narrators are interested in the paradigmatic, static quality of the girls, whose personalities are never fully realized. Their voices are not often heard in the text and the most meaningful interaction they have with the narrators is through playing records to each other down the telephone. They can speak only through art created by others; they remain the sum of the parts accorded them by their narrator/ curators. Even when Cecelia is allowed to speak in her own voice, to a neighbour, she seems inextricably bound up with her own death and that of her sisters. Talking about the mayflies she says: “They’re dead,” she said. “They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don’t even get to eat.” And with that she stuck her hand in the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials. C. L. Though she tries to break away from the process allotted to her in the text, that is the process of dying and remaining in stasis, she simply writes her initials in the dead bugs and aligns herself to them. The voice of the praeceptor here, as in Ovid, can be clearly heard.