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and it comes in the form of a mutilated head that avenges the crime, as Tereus "calls again" for his son (quaerenti iterumque vocanti, 656; cf. 555). |
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Admittedly, these features of the narrative might be read as happening despite Ovid, as if we are reading against the grain of his intentions. Ovid, as we shall see, cannot be entirely exonerated of complicity in the exploitive lubricity of his narrative material. Yet there are ways in which Ovid indicates his distance and disapproval. He shows the victim's emotional as well as physical trauma: her shame and confusion of identity and her feelings of being cut off from her past life, including her ties to her sister (53141, 601609).14 Her first impulse is rage and the demand for vengeance and the criminal's punishment, but her prayers to unheeding gods only exasperate her isolation and helplessness (54248). She can break through her year-long silence, itself the direct result of the traumas of mutilation and imprisonment, only by the inspiration that comes from great suffering as she finally contrives a way of telling her story (574f.). This gradual escape from her isolation and enclosure in pain enacts in mythical terms the struggle that the victims of rape and incest experience in reporting the crimes against them; and her persistence and ingenuity in accusing her rapist correspond to the emotional effort and courage that such victims often acquire only slowly and gradually. |
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Point of View and Modes of Narration |
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Context is an important clue to Ovid's mood and meaning. Here he tells the story of Philomela and Tereus, appropriately, amid other tales of cruelty, torture, and murder, especially within the family. Shortly before come the gods' killing of Niobe's children, the flaying of Marsyas, and Tantalus' alleged cannibalistic slaughter of his son (6.218ff., 385ff., 407ff.). Pelias' death at the hands of his daughters and Medea's killing of her children follow shortly after (7.297ff., 394ff.). Even among these stories, the tale of Philomela stands out for its sexual violence, including the scene that one critic has called "probably the most repellant passage in all of Ovid" (Curran, 1978, 219). At this point Ovid even intrudes his narrative presence, in the first person, to distance himself from the ugliest detail by a statement of disbelief (561, vix ausim credere). |
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What follows this incredulity is a refocusing of the story on belief and evidence. The excision of Philomela's tongue is paradoxically both the culmination of the savagery and a way of repressing the story into silence. This silencing of the protagonist raises the question of how the story will get itself told and what can be its proper mode of utterance: quid faciat |
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14 For good observations on the emotional aspects of Philomela's suffering see Curran (1978) 223ff., 229; also Pavlock (1991) 38f. |
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