Reading Aeneas and Dido: suggestion and inference in Aeneid 1-4
2013-02
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Reading Aeneas and Dido: suggestion and inference in Aeneid 1-4
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2013-02
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This study takes an audience-oriented approach to the first four books of Vergil's Aeneid, attempting to consider interpretive issues in the text in terms of the mechanics of the reading process. My interest is in structures of suggestion and prompts to inference (the way that Vergil "says much in little, and often in silence," as Dryden put it), and in particular how Vergil's indirect methods of exposition invite the reader to construct character motivations that help them both to notice and to fill in "gaps" in the plot. Adapting concepts from Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading, I explore the views that the text offers the reader as he or she moves sequentially through it (the "wandering viewpoint"), and how contradictions, suggestive juxtapositions, and puzzling silences present "gaps" that challenge the reader's synthesis of information into coherent configurations of meaning, and so encourage him or her to establish consistency by drawing inferences based on the "horizon" or background formed by the series of previous views offered by the text. In each chapter of this study I focus on one key gap in the first four books of the poem and then show how a linear, "first" reading of the previous relevant views that form the "horizon" behind it allows a meaningful inference to be drawn that closes the gap. This hermeneutic method, with attention to the process of the development of meaning, tries to correct for the effect that purely formalist approaches can have of leading interpreters to "rewrite the history of [their] experience of a text teleologically," as Niall Slater (1990: 21) puts it. I argue that the outcome of the Dido and Aeneas episode, in which Aeneas ultimately affirms his commitment to his mission and leaves Carthage, has caused a critical tendency to efface, retrospectively, the provisional pictures in Book 1 suggesting that he did not originally intend to do so, and so to flatten out the path leading to the story's conclusion.
A chapter-length introduction discusses these methodological considerations, and includes a discussion of reading cultures and practices in first century BCE Rome. The focus of the first chapter is Aeneas in Book 1. My discussion starts by establishing a gap in the plot relating to Aeneas' motivation, namely his ambiguously positive response Dido's offer of a permanent home in Carthage (1.595-610) and his tacit acquiescence to the implications of her statement that like him she was brought by fortuna to settle in Carthage (her implication, I argue, at 1.629). Having identified this gap, I then attempt to establish the horizon available to the reader trying to making sense of it. To do so, I turn back to the beginning of the poem and work forward through each view of Aeneas, arguing against the common opinion that the hero simply appears "despondent" about the difficulty of his mission, and arguing instead that a consistent program of suggestive strategies, both rhetorical and intertextual, encourage reader to infer that Aeneas believes himself to have been betrayed by the gods (including his unreliable mother, Venus) and has lost faith in the very legitimacy of his prophesied fate. When Aeneas sees Carthage, he marvels enviously, and I argue that the simile comparing Dido's political activity to Diana leading a chorus of nymphs, which is focalized, as Pöschl recognized, through Aeneas, suggests both his erotic excitement, as I argue with reference to the delight that "overcomes" him pertemptat, 1.502), and his unconscious attempt to accommodate his perception of the scene in front of him to the new, erotically-charged optimism that it inspires in him. The gender dynamic of the scene is troublingly inverted, but Aeneas processes the scene in a way that "fixes" it, that de-politicizes and re-feminizes Dido's anomalously masculine role. This horizon of perspectives provides the reader with a way to fill in the gap of Aeneas' ambiguous response to Dido's offer of a permanent home by constructing a plausible motivation from it--namely, that he does not decline Dido's offer, because he would like to accept it.
In Chapter Two I explore how the reader is invited to construct Dido's own perceptions and motivations in Book 1. I begin by establishing a gap in the plot that relates to Dido's motivation, namely why it is that when Mercury has simply made the Carthaginians "friendly" toward the Trojans (1.298ff.), Dido takes the extraordinary step of offering them settlement in her kingdom--the kingdom itself, as she initially phrases it urbem quam statuo, vestra est, "the city I am building, it is yours," 1.573). Contrary to the general opinion that Dido is simply an exceptionally generous person, I argue that when we follow references to her in sequence through Book 1, she appears not only intelligent and brave, as critics have traditionally observed, but also deceptive and self-interested, an effect that is brought about through sustained intertextual parallels to the Circe episode in Odyssey10 and Hypsipyle's deceptive welcome of Jason in Argonautica 1, as well as through allusions in Venus' narration of Dido's personal history to the literary tradition about her pre-dating Vergil's account (evidenced in Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus), in which she is intricately deceptive in escaping her evil brother, as well as in acquiring supporters and furthering the interests of her exiled followers. Having been allusively reminded that Dido has the quick reflexes of a practiced (albeit justified) liar, the reader has material with which to fill the gap opened up by Dido's generosity, which far exceeds the expectation set by Mercury's intervention: namely, that Dido is trying to exploit the convenient coincidence that a band of homeless Trojan warriors showed up on the doorstep of her fledgling state, which happens to be greatly in need of an army.
Chapter Three examines Aeneas' inset narration of his wandering in Books 2 and 3. Scholars often wonder how Dido could think that Aeneas could and would stay in Carthage, given his narration of the oracles and prophecies directing him to Italy. As Ralph Hexter (1999: 67) articulates the general consensus, "The words of the text notwithstanding, Dido exercises her freedom, a terrible freedom, to make false inferences: that having been dissatisfied to date, Aeneas might stay with her, rather than move on, defying or ignoring oracular and prophetic pronouncements." I suggest that to a first reader, this "false" inference of Dido's appears in fact a logical way to bridge the gap opened up the conclusion of his narration, where, after a bitter exclamation about the uselessness of prophecy when it really matters (3.710-14), he ambiguously implies that in Carthage he has reached the end of his wandering (3.714-15). The reader's horizon for interpreting the significance of this remark includes not only the previous suggestions of Aeneas' disillusionment in Book 1, as discussed in my first chapter, but also his pessimistic narration throughout Books 2 and 3, which is replete with suggestions of Aeneas' frustration with the ambiguities and unreliability of prophecy. Failing to distinguish between story and discourse, between the events that are recounted and the way that they are recounted, scholars often take the mere fact that Aeneas tells Dido of the prophecies that he has been following as evidence that he expresses to her his continued commitment to his mission. When, however, one takes into account the rhetoric of Aeneas' presentation of these experiences, treating them as they are narrated, holistically, in context, they point to a very different conclusion. The reader may, therefore, bridge the gap opened by the pessimistic conclusion of Aeneas' narration of the prophecies that have thus far failed to bring him to Italy with the inference that he no longer considers them trustworthy, and may attribute the same conclusion to Dido.
In the fourth and final chapter I look at the gap opened up by Dido's claim in her quarrel with Aeneas as he prepares to obey Mercury and resume his mission, that "now" Apollo's prophecies matter (4.376-78) and consider how the implication that he previously suggested otherwise accords with the readings advanced in my previous chapters, as well the horizon developed in Book 4. Taken together, I hope my chapters show the dynamic tension that runs through the whole of Aeneid 1-4 when we appreciate Aeneas' untenable desire from the very first to make Carthage his home.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. disssertation. Major:Classical and Near Eastern Studies. Advisor: Christopher Nappa. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 330 pages.
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Marquis, Mary Christine. (2013). Reading Aeneas and Dido: suggestion and inference in Aeneid 1-4. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/147078.
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