Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides

In the ""Heroides"" the Roman poet Ovid wittily plucks 15 abandoned heriones from ancient myth and literature and creates the fiction that each woman writes a letter to the hero who left her behind. But in giving voice to these heroines, is Ovid writing like a woman, or writing ""Woman"" like a man? Using feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to examine the ""female voice"" in the ""Heroides"", Sara H. Lindheim closely reads these fictive letters. She points out that in Ovid's verse epistles all the women represent themselves in a strikingly similar and disjointed fashion. Lindheim turns to Lacanian theory of desire to explain these curious and hauntingly repetitive representations of the heroines in the ""female voice"". Lindheim's approach illuminates what these poems reveal about both masculine and feminine constructions of the feminine.