The self-sufficient manhood of the epic hero, notes Christine Di Stefano, is ‘one of the most distinctive psychological features of masculinity. To the extent that modern masculine identity is bound up with the repudiation of the (m)other, vigorous self-sufficiency emerges as a kind of defensive reaction formation against memories of dependence and the early symbiotic relation.’

Such memories of the past are erased from the newly found consciousness of the Eroica, as it projects an autonomy that deliberately excludes all traces of natural dependence. With the Eroica, instrumental music finally breaks the boundaries of the private sphere to which it had belonged with women and forces its way into the public domain of the male hero, whose death-defying antics are the very embodiment of secular self-creation. But to embody its own genesis, the male form had to enter a new phase of control; it had to deny itself through an internal rationalisation of its emotions. The heroic body, according to Dorinda Outram, was paradoxically a non-body, a form which was distanced from its own experience, like the new aesthetic of ‘disinterested contemplation’. The Eroica chose to internalise this particular historical construction of male power. It was a strategic move, designed to change the face of music, calling upon another autonomous sign to validate its own.