Happiness and female voices in Ovid's "Heroides"

Abstract

In the last decades, Ovid's Heroides have been studied as écriture féminine, since the heroines re-write in their letters, now from their own perspective, the stories of their lives collected in myths and literature. From this point of view, this paper studies the female voices from the Heroides to reflect the way in which each one of the voices that Ovidio lends to its heroines constructs for itself the concept of 'happiness'. Therefore, in an intratextual study, we will point out the specific variations of the theme of 'happiness' that exist in Ovid's Heroides. These variations sometimes can be found in a positive way, when each writer speaks about their moments of joy, and other times can be defined antithetically from the expression of their suffering, which can be caused by love, marriage, social conventions, betrayal or guilt.