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17-08-2015, 00:23

Rewriting Masculinity

It is no surprise that Catullus reflects aspects of the traditional male ideal. As noted by Skinner, his poetry has been remarked upon for its inclusion of political vocabulary (emphasizing the importance of pietas, amicitia, and the like), though often in places where one would not expect to find it (e. g., poems 73, 76, 87). In fact, he notes his own piety and modesty in poem 16 and expresses a longing for the forum and other typical masculine activities in poem 63, showing at the very least that he has learned the diction of Roman virility. It is also obvious that Catullus has successfully internalized cultural values regarding hardness and softness, since these concepts occur as opposites in his verses, much as they do in Cicero’s attack on Antony or Calvus’s jibe at Pompey. Yet, while a matrix of traditional values and behaviors associated with the uir are present in these verses, they are not valorized as in the foundation legends of Livy or anecdotes about Cato. Rather, Catullus uses concepts and language that define the Roman male to redefine masculinity.

The analyses of Catullus’ poetry by Skinner and Wray deftly show two different ways that Catullus can be seen to accomplish this. For Skinner, the poetic register is not merely literary but also political. The anxiety about the stability of a male identity observable in his verses may reflect alienation from the political and social roles that were traditionally available to men. Reading poem 63 (or other verses about male anxiety) should cause us to rethink other poems that seem transparent to us; if Lesbia is not a lover (or not merely a lover), but a sign of a particular kind of power relationship, we need to re-evaluate the way we have read the corpus to date.

Like Skinner, Wray wants us to question the orthodoxy of Catullan scholarship by shifting the focus. If our Catullus is not the sincerely enraptured, emotionally broken lover of Lesbia, what Catullus should take his place? The postmodern Catullus that Wray proposes permits a re-evaluation of the corpus as well, since he introduces a selfconsciously playful and voluble poet who never loses sight of his own performance of manhood. Virility is performed not only in competition between Catullus and his friends and enemies; he seems to delight in trying on other masculine identities or crashing two subjectivities into one another (as in poem 11), as he further destabilizes what masculinity might signify. Wray does not necessarily ask us to abandon our lovesick Catullus, but he does insist that we consider the multiple masculine identities the poet wears simultaneously.15

For all this, the elusiveness of the poet may be what is most appealing about Catullus, and attempts to say something meaningful about his conception of the male subject are greatly restricted by the sliver of poetry he has bequeathed to us. We lack much of the context for his poetry and should bear in mind that the Catullus we read and the performance of virility we witness are in large part ones we have created. Any performance of gender is necessarily colored by one’s knowledge of the culture, the performers themselves, and one’s own vantage point. My seat at the county fair showed me only one brief moment in a performance that those boys will continue to refine and replay throughout their lives. What I did not see that evening - their pallor or delight on the Tilt-o-Whirl, their prowess at winning a stuffed animal at a midway game, whom they kissed in the shadows of the poultry barn - might tell me much more about the effectiveness of their performance, but we can only interpret what we see.



 

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