“…the Heroides define women very specifically in relation to lack…fo
“…the Heroides define women very specifically in relation to lack…for they are heroines insofar as they have been left, cut off from the men whose loss or departure is their sole function to bemoan. Moreover, this desertion is represented as an absolute condition: there is no question, for example, of these women looking about pragmatically for a replacement, nor of there being any recuperation, rescue or redress. The women’s state is one of utter dereliction (which is why it lends itself so often to the metaphor of the city ruined and sacked)…The Heroides, in other words, rather insistently define the female condition as privatory: all the complaints are presented as women who have lost - and lost for good - something that, in the form a suitor, lover, husband, or beloved, they once possessed, and that loss is the definition of their femininity.” - Bates, “Feminine identifications in A Lover’s Complaint.” Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric. -- source link
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