Why do I always feel so frustrated, angry, and resentful when I am beginning to write?

Here is what I want to say:

Hello, people!

OBVIOUSLY. Lucretia is traumatized. Hello. She is raped. Moreover, her sense of identity is so deeply violated that she commits suicide. However you want to define trauma--an encounter with death? (Lifton, I think you are too narrow. I think death is not *actually* the worst loss a person can suffer)--Lucretia has faced it. Can we talk about the loss of the self versus loss of life? I think we can. (Where was that anyway?) So Lucretia's sense of self has been completely compromised. Maybe or maybe not, she feels obligated to kill herself. Also, I think that we are somehow meant to see her suicide as an extension of her chastity.

Also. Peter Sacks, you are a genius. You are also a very kind man. I love your book The English Elegy, and I think it is far, far better than anything I have written or have ever hoped to write. At the same time. I think you only show us half of the truth about Ovid and all of his many, many, many rapes.

I think it's a little bit misleading for you to contrast Lucretia and Daphne in the way you do in your book. After all, your reading of Daphne is not actually a reading of Daphne, is it? No, it's a reading of Apollo, of his state of mind. It's important for you--in terms of how you use your reading of Freud--to create this contrast, and I think it works, if we are just contrasting the episodes. But the consolation found in the Daphne story is probably no consolation for Daphne. No; like Lavinia, Daphne cannot speak, Daphne loses her hands. The consolation in the Daphne story is a consolation for Apollo, it makes him less sad; and subsequently he is also to undergo a meaningful process of figuration that restores his narcissism (in a non-pathological way, as you suggest). Again, I have no real problem with this. And again, you are a genius to have drawn all these through-lines in the first place.

But I think it's important we see two experiences in the Daphne story--that of Apollo, which you already identified and traced so successfully; and that of Daphne, which you don't talk about at all (except--through analogy--by discussing Lucretia). After all, it's a little bit of a technicality in the Metamorphoses who gets raped and who doesn't, isn't it? They all end up undergoing the same process of transmutation--and while that transmutation may be the origin of figuration (and thus elegy, and in a valuable sense speech) for Apollo, it is the source of speech.less.ness for Daphne. Hello.

On my third beer, and in my current irritated state, I am a little bit irritated with everybody for not figuring this out. It seems like a lazy failure to confront misogyny. I think this is the beer.

Also, while I am bitching unreasonably about people who are actually very talented, very dedicated scholars and teachers--because I am angry about not getting my own thoughts into words--I am a little bit annoyed at the *choice* of clinical theory in this course. Why not Bowlby? Why this pseudo-clinical stuff? Why Caruth?

Caruth, I think you are really off-base. I think you need to spend more time in a clinical setting with people who are actually trauma survivors. I think your reading of trauma is overly literary, not to say fictionalized.