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The women appear not just as agents of justice but are demonized as Furies (591, 595, 657, 662). As we view the narrative as a whole, we see them descending to increasingly subhuman forms, from maenad to Fury to wild creature. Ovid is still working in a tradition in which the violence of women is perceived as monstrous. We may recall the first stasimon of Aeschylus' Libation Bearers (585651).35 |
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The sudden shift, at the peripety, from forest to mountain to interior of the domus (cf. 601, ut sensit tetigisse domum Philomela nefandam) also destabilizes the image of woman as a helpless victim. Rape is answered by maenadic furor; violation of the ties between husband and wife and between sister and sister is answered by the violation of the bonds between mother and son and between father and son. Incest is answered by filicide and cannibalism. |
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As Bacchants, the women become embodiments of irrationality rather than representatives of a retributive moral order. Put another way, the shading of maenadism into subterranean furor reduces the sacrality of Procne's Dionysiac procession to pure violence. Instead of constituting a breakthrough to a new order from the disintegration of the old in an irruption of a fresh and different form of human energy, the maenadic is demonized as an eruption from the underworld. When Philomela completes the vengeance by throwing Itys' head at his father, she is not only bespattered with a Fury's gore (657) but is the target of Tereus' evocation of the "viper-covered sisters" from Hades (vipereasque ciet Stygia de valle sorores, 662). |
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Procne might have carried Philomela away to a Bacchantic community of "sisters" very different from those hellish "sisters" of Hades. This could be a paradisiacal world of women outside of male culture and free of male control, like the maenads in happy fusion with nature on Mt. Cithaeron in the Bacchae (680713). Ovid precludes that possibility by anticipating the Fury-laden savagery in the midst of the maenadic rescue. Even as Procne leads her band of maenads, she is "fearful and driven on by the furies of her grief" (terribilis Procne furiisque agitata doloris, 595). Her Dionysiac implements are furialia arma (591), and she only "feigns" (simulat, 596) bacchantic ecstasy. As Joplin remarks, "The end of the tale represents an attempt to forestall or foreclose a moment of radical transition when dominance and hierarchy might have begun to change or to give way'' (1991, p. 49). |
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Viewed in this way Ovid's combination of the Dionysiac pattern with the chthonic imagery, like the three-way bestial metamorphosis that follows it, evokes the deep ambiguities that this culture feels toward female emotion (especially violent and aggressive emotion). Procne put on the sacred garb of the god Dionysus to rescue Philomela from her forest prison (591600). |
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35 On the microcosmic level of diction, for example, Procne's anticipated revenge consists in crudelia gaudia (653), whereas Tereus' anticipated rape consists only in sua gaudia (514). |
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