Rudis Locutor: Speech and Self-Fashioning in Apuleius' Metamorphoses.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, gesture, and text, is a primary tool for the negotiation of social and power relations in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. I begin by conceptualizing the dynamics of identity construction and status negotiation in the speech of elite and non-elite characters. Chapter One discusses the distinctive uses of language by non-elite, alternative communities in the novel. Chapter Two documents successes and failures in the public speech of elite characters. Through these episodes, Apuleius establishes a dissonance between the intended production and actual reception of characters’ discourse, challenging the relationship between internal identity and external appearance and destabilizing speech as a marker of status and truth. With this framework in place, I turn to the problematic characterization of the protagonist Lucius. Chapter Three examines how Lucius undermines his own elite self-fashioning through words and actions. Chapter Four focuses on mystical silence versus garrulous curiosity and Lucius’ attempts to gain power and control through access to supernatural knowledge. Finally, Chapter Five discusses the novel itself as a discursive negotiation between the narrator Lucius and his characterized fictive reader. These misrepresentations, miscommunications, and misinterpretations prepare the reader for the final revelation of the narrator’s - and the author’s - identity in last book of the novel. In contrast with previous work that has emphasized the influence of single languages or genres on Apuleius, I interpret the Metamorphoses through the range of frameworks available to ancient readers, including allusions to Greek and Latin literature, mime, moral and philosophical discourses, rhetoric, and Roman law. I draw on ancient rhetorical treatises, modern discourse analysis, and sociological studies of language and power to analyze how social identities and relationships are negotiated via speech in the novel. I trace Apuleius’ contributions to contemporary debates about elite masculinity, the utility of a traditional rhetorical education, and the relationship between discourse, knowledge, truth, and power. This study thus argues for the centrality of Apuleius and the Metamorphoses within the social, cultural, and literary trends of the Second Sophistic and the second century C.E. Roman Empire.