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bureaucracy,5 there remains the problem of how we as readers respond to such violence. |
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In Metamorphoses 6.424674 Ovid tells how Tereus rapes Philomela, cuts out her tongue, and then locks her up in a forest prison. Ovid makes the mutilation of Philomela part of Tereus' raping her; and, so far as we can tell, he has the dubious distinction of being the first to combine the mutilation with the repeated sexual violation. Is this episode, then, sadistic pornography adorned with epic dignity, pandering to the degenerate tastes of an audience that liked violence and liked it even more if it were spiced with some sex? Or, on the other hand, does Ovid know that the pleasures of this text are dangerous pleasures, appealing to base instincts for cruelty, sexual domination, and inflicting pain?6 If so, does he show that he knows so that his reader can know it too? Where in his text is such an awareness located? Perhaps most important, who exactly is his reader and what kind of reader does he imply? |
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In trying to answer these questions I draw on an eclectic mix of readerresponse, feminist, intertextual, deconstructionist, and even psychoanalytic approaches. I prefer eclecticism because no single method can adequately interpret the range of meanings of a complex literary work and therefore the critic should be free to choose any method or combination of methods that seem most helpful. It is better for the text to direct the critic to the most useful method(s) than to have the critic force the text into his or her Procrustean bed. This means, in practice, that the interpreter should be willing to adapt the method to the different levels and kinds of meaning in the work. In the text that I am considering here, the area of meaning with which I am most concerned centers on the problem of violence and the reader's response to a narrative of violence. As the violence in question is initially against women and as the reader envisaged by one account of the violence is female, reader-response and feminist criticism come together. My reading follows the order of Ovid's narrative in so far as this is possible; but a certain amount of back and forward movement is necessary in order to point parallels, symmetries, and contrasts. |
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Rape and the Gaze of Tereus |
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As I have suggested elsewhere, Ovid does not always resolve the moral problems that his narratives raise, particularly when, as in this case, there is |
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5 See Williams (1978) 153ff.; 169ff.; Segal (1986) 31536, especially 316f., 333ff.; also Most (1992) 4028. |
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6 Some of these problems are raised in an interesting way by Richlin (1992a) 158ff., with a useful bibliography of feminist scholarship, pp. 160f., 17379. Unfortunately this work appeared only after my own essay was substantially complete, and I could not use it as fully as I should have liked. |
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