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us to rethink some basic interpretive categories like textuality, allusion, and aesthetic pleasure. |
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This tale's self-conscious allusiveness (particularly in its echoes of Greek tragedy and Virgil) marks its literariness and thereby takes us back to the problem of literary pleasure, the problematical pleasure of the text in this most unpleasant tale. These armed women on the mountainside, with the irresistible strength of maenads that we know from Euripides' Bacchae, show us an image of the female body very different from that desired (and violated) by Tereus. It is not the passive object of uncontrollable, lawless male pleasure, but is full of strange power and quite capable of murder. The Greek tragedies with similar endings Euripides' Medea, Hecuba, Bacchae, and perhaps Sophocles' lost Tereus do not opt for the facile solution of metamorphosis, but leave us in shocked contemplation of this enormity of female hatred and vengeful force. The Hecuba and Bacchae do contain metamorphoses at the end, but these serve to intensify rather than to mitigate the tragic suffering. In the case of Ovid our aesthetic pleasure might be less, but our moral pleasure might be deeper if that shock-effect were less tamed by the pseudo-resolution of metamorphosis to which the poem is committed. |
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There are, then, two elements in the tale that are difficult for Ovid to control within the aesthetic and moral framework of his poem: these are the shift to an implicit female reader and the problem of combining justice and metamorphosis. If these elements destabilize the narrative, Ovid restabilizes his poem and achieves closure in the book by reasserting the authority of the patriarchal order. The next episode, the last one in book 6, is the myth of Boreas and Oreithyia. It is virtually a comic mirror-image of the story of Tereus and Philomela.36 The raped victim now ends up as bride and as the mother of Boreas' two sons, who, at the end, go off on an all-male quest, with brilliant prospects, thanks to the special attribute of wings that they inherit from their father. |
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The justice that is never mentioned in the case of the Procne and Philomela has a prominent place at the beginning of the Boreas story. Ovid introduces Pandion's successor in Athens, Erechtheus, as both strong and just (677f.): |
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sceptra loci rerumque capit moderamen Erectheus,
iustitia dubium validisne potentior armis. |
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Erechtheus it is unclear whether he is more powerful in justice or in mighty arms takes the kingdom's scepter and the control of affairs. |
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36 For some of the parallels between the two tales, see Albrecht (1968) 432 and Anderson (1972) 237 and ad 6.71718. |
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