Complaint

The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

“…That said, I would suggest that scholarship's ongoing fascination with the ways in which "the Heroides' voluble female speakers, stylistic virtuosity, and range of narrative and emotional" registers "offered a site of possibility for women writers" of the early modern era has inadvertently served to limit the parameters of investigations into Whitney's classical intertextuality. 94 An overemphasis on her female voice and attendant Heroideanism has helped to eclipse Whitney's equally potent selfaffiliation with Ovid's Tristian persona-a crucial interauthorial relationship that elucidates the aesthetic deviations between her first and second works. In considering the implications of this point, Spenser provides a useful male foil, for discussions of his classically inflected cursus often invoke Ovid's exilic persona.…”