Voices within Ovid's House of Fama

Ovid's depiction of the House of Fama, the goddess of Rumour, in Book XII of the Metamorphoses illustrates a complex relationship between voice, identity and text. This paper will argue that Ovid, through the House of Fama, reveals how the impossibility of maintaining the integrity of corporeality is related to the implausibility of claiming authority over any literary text. Ovid uses the concept of the rumour to inscribe the breakdown of the boundaries of the body and identity, in the context of the breakdown of the unity of the literary text, revealing how the voice we call our own, that is central to our sense of the singularity of the self, is made up of the voices of other people, and how the literary text is understood to be an unstable amalgamation of the voices of other authors.