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Through the motifs of "joining" and uniting "right hands" this transfer of Philomela from Pandion to Tereus is virtually a reenactment of Pandion's marrying of Procne to Tereus at the beginning. The exchange is completed by the sacred gesture of dextrarum iunctio between the father and the son-in-law, so that Pandion seems to be marrying Philomela to Tereus and not just entrusting her to his safekeeping.10 |
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Tereus' "tyrannical" assertion of male domination over the female body culminates, of course, in the rape and mutilation. But it is enacted symbolically through the aggressive penetration of the male gaze, which here combines fetishistic scopophilia and sadism. I borrow these terms from the celebrated essay of Laura Mulvey: |
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Fetishistic scopophilia . . . builds up the physical beauty of the object [hence Tereus' wild overvaluation of Philomela's beauty, which we view through his eyes], transforming it into something satisfying in itself . . . Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occuring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.11 |
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One could scarcely find a better account of the dynamics of the first stage of Ovid's narrative. The sight of Philomela makes Tereus "blaze up" with desire (exarsit conspecta virgine, 455). As he gazes on her, his very look is an anticipatory rape. He violates her with his eyes and commits incest with her, as it were, by lustfully watching her in her father's embrace (47882, especially spectat eam Tereus praecontrectatque videndo, 478, "Tereus watches her and by seeing her handles her in advance").12 |
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Tereus' external gaze of desire soon becomes the inner gaze of licentious imagination as the look fuses with the appetitive "reaching for" or "seeking" (repetens) the physical form (49093): |
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at rex Odrysius quamvis secessit, in illa
aestuat et repetens faciem motusque manusque
qualia vult, fingit, quae nondum vidit, et ignes
ipse suos nutrit cura removente soporem. |
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10 Cf. 6.506f.: dextras utriusque poposcit / inter seque datas iunxit natamque nepotemque . . . rogat. Note the previous uses of iungere of the marriage of Procne: conubio Procnes iunxit, 428; coniuncti, 433; dexterae dextra / iungitur, 447f.). The placement of the conjunctive phrase natamque nepotemque directly after iunxit in 507 subtly reinforces the association with marriage. |
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11 Mulvey (1988) 64. I take Mulvey's terminology and descriptions as phenomenological rather than psychological; their value as descriptive analyses is independent of the Lacanian and Freudian frame in which they are embedded. |
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12 The eroticization of the male gaze also inheres in Ovid's hint, conscious or not, of the father's incestuous desire for his daughter, treated more explicitly, for instance, in the Myrrha episode (10.43741, 46268). |
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