Female Voices East and West: A Comparison between Heroides 7 of Ovid and Changmen Fu of Sima Xiangru

Ovid and Sima Xiangru are two roughly contemporary literary giants of the Early Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China. Incidentally, both wrote on the subject of abandoned women: Ovid composed the Heroides in the epistolary... [ view full abstract ]

Ovid and Sima Xiangru are two roughly contemporary literary giants of the Early Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China. Incidentally, both wrote on the subject of abandoned women: Ovid composed the Heroides in the epistolary form, whereas Sima produced the Changmen Fu in his favorite “fu” (rhapsody) genre. In Ovid’s Heroides 7, the author imagines a letter sent to the hero Aeneas from the Carthaginian queen Dido. By drawing inspiration from its epic sources such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid combines love elegy and an exercise of rhetoric, especially legal and public discourse. On the contrary, the Changmen Fu was supposedly written for the Emperor of China; it was traditionally believed to serve a much more pragmatic and political purpose. By contrasting Ovid with Sima, I would like to argue that Ovid’s poem, although highly theatrical and full of confrontations, is marked by a concern for objectivity, whereas the seemingly self-less work of Sima is a veritable feat of subjectivity that invites the reader to immerse into his poetic world.