Ovid's Art of Love, book three

Art of Love

Ovid's Art of Love: The Anti-Misogynistic Turn

Ovid's Art of Love was received with a great deal of controversy in his own day, and this controversy has hardly dies down in the millennia since it was written. Ovid himself has been both denigrated as a witty fool and praised as one of Western civilization's greatest poets and social and political commentators. In many ways, the Art of Love is emblematic of these oppositional receptions of Ovid's works. It can be read as a frivolous, lewd, and misogynistic text meant either as a humorous but earnest instruction manual for seducing women, or as a satirical comment on gender roles and relationships that existed in Ovid's Rome.

The text's surface is certainly misogynistic in the first two books within the Art of Love. Whether Ovid meant this misogyny in earnest or as a satirical comment on the unfairness of gender divisions and perceptions is certainly debatable, but the language itself implies certain attitudes towards women that are not burdened with any sense of respect. These first two books deal with the seduction of women, and it makes some sense (though can still reasonably seen as in poor taste, if not worse) that women would be dealt with in a somewhat derogatory manner as objects rather than subjective individuals. In Book III, however, Ovid turns to giving advice to women, and clearly signals that his earlier tone was satirical.

This does not mean that the sense of satire disappears from the Art of Love in Book III. But the change in the type of advice given, and the object of that advice -- i.e. how to handle men -- shows that Ovid perceives men as being at least as ridiculous as women, and probably more so. Furthermore, the comments he makes to and about women in this book reveal much deeper consideration about the issue of gender and the roles and identities of women than those that appear in the first book. In short, Ovid's attitudes towards women and men in Book II reverse the misogynistic tone of the first two books.

One of the most profound examples of the shift in Ovid's mentality towards women in Book III of the Art of Love is also one of the earliest, and one of the most subtle. Just ten lines into the book, Ovid admonishes his male readers (and perhaps his female readers that had bought into the misogyny of their culture) to "Beware of loading the crime of the many onto the few: / let the merits of each separate girl be seen" (Ovid 40). This might not seem like a major shift, especially given his immediately previous references to women as "venomous snakes" and "rabid she-wolves" (Ovid 40). But the emphasis on the individuality of women is a major departure from his treatment of the "fairer sex" in the first two books of the Art of Love. When the subject is the seduction of women, Ovid makes a few vague class divisions to differentiate certain types of women, but he does not view them individually. Instead, even the differentiations he makes are generalized and show a view of women as malleable and generally similar.

In Book III, in contrast, the individuality of women -- not as typified or generalized into certain classes, but as truly independent women -- is the opening and over-arching focus. This is not just seen in the lines quoted above, although these do serve as arguably the most important lines in setting this tone for the rest of the book. This is reflected to some degree in Ovid's discussion of beauty in Part II of Book III. He acknowledges that most women are not born beautiful, and even admits that this was not necessarily a bad thing when society was rude and ill-formed anyway. Now, however, he tells women that they should care for their appearance in the same way that men have improved in their own. He seems to be suggesting that women reflect the society they live in, and therefore the women of Rome should make themselves as beautiful as possible.