Lavinia, the silent epic character originally in Virgil’s Aeneid is given a voice and transformed into a heroine in Ursula Le Guin’s novel, Lavinia. Roula-Maria Dib’s article explores how, in the novel version, Lavinia is not only a heroine, but she is re-written into freedom, animated and individuated within the space of fiction and language. The freedom given to the female protagonist within this new dimension is the product of vivid active imagination, textual individuation, and the realm of possibilities rendered by the combination of reality, surreality, and possibilities within the novel’s quantum-like structure. According to Susan Rowland, ‘active imagination is a way of improving and enhancing individuation’, which is what the novel does with Lavinia; myth-like in its archetypal manifestations, with its plot and characters, it is in an active dialogue and relationship with The Aeneid, performing a living conversation between Lavinia and Virgil. The protagonist is aware of her (textual) existence, which is an individuating re-telling of the myth through her own voice. Within this unique dimension of possibilities offered by Le Guin’s writing, is a non-conventional form of fiction resembling the laws of quantum mechanics, bringing life and liberation to Lavinia through the novel’s alternative forms of reality.
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