In 2015, four Columbia University undergraduates published an op-ed in their student paper petitioning English professors to affix trigger warnings to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poem’s “vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault,” they wrote, were distressing to survivors, one of whom “was essentially dismissed . . . her concerns ignored” when she approached a lecturer after class to complain. The opinion piece sparked a predictable imbroglio. Less sophisticated critics decried Columbia’s “self-centered Care Bears”; sharper observers objected to how the trigger-warning conversation disguised the larger preoccupations of the text, veiling ethical questions of force and consent in the language of personal harm. What was clear, even then, was that Ovid had the power to illuminate disturbing aspects of our contemporary culture. Students sensed something volatile and dangerous in the poem—something close to home.
Ovid feels strangely present these days, as if the country is reckoning under his riotous star. “Daphne,” the début novel from Will Boast, aims to recast the myth of Daphne and Apollo, told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from Daphne’s point of view—a project for the #MeToo era if there ever were one. In the original poem, Daphne, a water nymph, resolves to stay a virgin; she runs from the lustful god, he chases, he grabs and clasps; she pleads to her father, a river deity, for help. At this point, Ovid writes (in R. Mongan’s translation), “A heavy numbness seizes her limbs, / her soft breasts are girded by thin bark, / her hair grows into foliage, her arms into branches, / her foot, just now so swift, clings by sluggish roots.” Daphne becomes a laurel tree, and Apollo still can’t take a hint. “He gives the wood kisses,” Ovid recounts, drily, “and the wood shrinks from the kisses. / The god said to her, ‘Since you can’t be my bride, at least / you will certainly be my tree!’ ”
In this post-Weinstein moment, we are hungry for female-centric narratives of abuse and resilience, especially ones that flip an existing script. Oddly, though, Boast’s “Daphne” does not dramatize the source text’s elements of violence and coercion. This update interprets Daphne’s transformation as a triumph, her immobility as a kind of post-coital swoon, conjuring the masochistic surrenders of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Daphne suffers from a rare condition, cataplexy, that paralyzes her body whenever she experiences intense emotion. Here is a Daphne who is ravished by her own feelings, who directs her potent responses to the world inward—against herself. Until, that is, she meets the right guy, an emo type named Ollie. Boast’s novel is an amiable exploration of how humans might come to manage their raucous hearts; nothing about the book, apart from the characters’ names, feels especially Ovidian. It’s ironic that “Daphne” is better without the Metamorphoses—a dilatory whiff of sexual assault would not serve Daphne and Ollie’s relationship—because the #MeToo epoch is the perfect time to reread the poet. However indirectly, Boast deserves our gratitude for sending us back to him now.
Before he wrote the Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote a three-book opus called “Ars Amatoria,” or the “Art of Love”: its first two sections instruct the modern Roman man in the subtleties of seduction, while its third winkingly advises the modern Roman woman how to resist the smooth advances of the modern Roman man. In 8 A.D., six years after “Ars” was published, Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis, on a remote shore of the Black Sea, for mysterious reasons; Ovid described his offense as “carmen et error”—“a song and a mistake.” (It’s impossible to read about Aziz Ansari, who, with “Modern Romance,” fashioned himself the scribe of woke courtship and was then banished from our good graces for sins we can’t quite agree upon, without thinking of his first-century counterpart.)
In the same year that he was exiled, Ovid began the Metamorphoses, whose teeming chaos evokes the uncertain, shape-shifting mood of a country—a world—that is reimagining its sexual mores. Ovid’s subject matter throughout the poem is a seemingly endless stream of rapes and sexual crimes. Hades abducts Persephone; Zeus impregnates Leda; Apollo pursues Daphne; Zeus violates Europa. The effect of all these attacks feels totalizing, as if women exist to be abused. But Ovid’s epic positions female pain as the beginning or the hinge of the story, not the end; victims are transfigured, their suffering made new and strange. Daphne becomes a tree. Leda hatches two eggs. Persephone’s lingering in the underworld gives rise to undreamed-of seasons. That violence against women might lead to unexpected outcomes—to a legal-defense fund for sexual-assault survivors, backed by the most glittering red-carpet walkers; to the resignations and downfalls of many powerful men; to the unthinkably moving public recital of more than forty victim-impact statements in a single courtroom—has been one energizing lesson of the past five months.
Consider the myth of Procne and Philomela, from Book 6 of the Metamorphoses. A king, Tereus, conceives a passion for his wife’s sister, Philomela, whom he has agreed to escort from her kingdom to his. Tereus rapes the maiden on the journey and cuts out her tongue so that she cannot report his crimes. Philomela weaves her anguish into a tapestry that her sister, Procne, knows how to decode. Procne takes revenge by killing the son whom she has with Tereus and serving him to his father for dinner. It is hard to read this ancient tale without running into a web of #MeToo-era tropes and preoccupations: how men silence the women they violate; how women are made to feel complicit in their own violations and those of their sisters; how female rage can overflow the banks of just retribution, sweeping patriarchal taboos aside. (This last anxiety has been fretted about more than realized in our current moment.) By the end of the story, the voiceless Philomela has become the most expressive creature of all: a nightingale.
출처 https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/reading-ovid-in-the-age-of-metoo
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