SOURCE: Tiefenbrun, Susan. “Blood and Water in Horace: A Feminist Reading.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 10, no. 19 (1983): 617-34.

In the following essay, Tiefenbrun investigates the function of the blood and water motif in Horace.

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy                     passions matched with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and                     as water unto wine. 

—(Alfred Lord Tennyson)

She was as false as water. 

(Othello, V, 2, 132)

The analysis of two scenes from Horace, Act iii, 1 and Act iv, 5, which were carefully selected for their representational value, will, in the hands of a text-oriented reader, reveal the stylistic function of formality¹ and the geometric symmetry of French classical tragedy. When the grid of a particular metaphoric system is placed like a filter over these same passages, a kind of reading results which corroborates the first, substantiates the expansive power of literary language, and extends the function of...