|
Teachers' Resource Web Procne Lecture Jennifer Thompson, UCI Opening of Tale: Tereus (descended from Mars) was the ruler of Thrace--sent army to lift seige on Athens, so Pandion, King of Athens, married him to Procne. So: the marriage was patrilocal, and the events stem from war, and explain eventual political struggle between Thrace and Athens. This aspect of the story is not emphasized. Figuration of the Rape Itself, and of "love": Note that the series of events leading up to rape is a familiar one: A. He sees her, and takes fire--eye to innards, body. His passion is "unbridled", i.e., not subject to will: pp. 144-6. Stores his image in his heart, dwells upon it and embroiders it (imagines what he hasn't seen). This image prompts him to action. B. She is described as his prey--eagle/prey; lamb/wolf; dove/talon--which is typical even in reciprocated love in Ovid. Both men and women are figured as hunters, wolves, etc. There are hints that Tereus' "love" is perverse, however: C. His desire twice figured as incestuous: p. 144 and 145. Demonstrates both its perversity and the confusion of family loyalties that will result from its consummation. D. His passion results partly from his nationality, 144; she calls him "Barbarian, savage!" Family loyalties: A. Philomela lists the reasons why his crime is wrong--146--never mentions a sense of violation, precisely. The shame she mentions attaches to her lost virginity and confused family tree, not to loss of personal integrity or sense of violation. B. Procne, too, faces conflict among family loyalties: her primary social responsibility is to her "keeper," her husband; then to her father. She has no clearly defined moral/social tie to her sister. However, she sides with her sister immediately against her husband, and decides to murder her son. 1. Aside from psychology--mother love, or jealousy--why? 2. And why is this the perfect revenge? C. On 150, briefly reviews her responsibilities. Seem to be two sets of opposed obligations to be considered: 1. Son vs. sister: "Since he calls me mother/Why does she not say Sister?" 2. Husband vs. father: "Whose wife are you/Daughter of Pandion? Will you disgrace him,/Your husband, Tereus? But devotion to him/is a worse crime." Rather than whose wife is she, who is his wife now? Remember, too, that Tereus has betrayed her father as well as the sisters. D. Finally chooses "disgracing" her husband over the "worse crime" of loyalty to him. 1. Chooses her own father's blood and honor over the marriage contract. 2. In Greek (and Roman) law, a son is considered his father's property, not hers; his blood, not hers and Pandion's. As Tereus' heir, he is the future head of his house and king of Thrace. How like his father he is! Points not just at legal inheritance, but at family resemblance, blood and seed. 3. Procne chooses her own blood, violates a contract made in her name;she also sides with a woman over men. E. Tereus' punishment is particularly appropriate because they make him "the tomb of Itys," his own seed, flesh, and blood, pp. 150-1. Undo the rupture in their line by forcing the house of Tereus to double back on itself, consume itself. Ovidian dramatic irony: A. Philomela starts out as Tereus' victim--eagle/prey, wolf/lamb, talons/dove--and Itys becomes Procne's prey-- tigress/fawn. Typical of Ovidian love stories. B. Tereus muddles Procne and Philomela's loyalties; they make him the tomb of his own seed and flesh. The story should not be taken to point back to a prehistorical steely feminine nature. Instead, raises the ever-present possibility of violent female retribution, of failure (as in Clytemnestra) to maintain proper gender loyalties. Rather than temporalized (old roles v. new), part of each social system through time. Bacchus and Bacchic worship. The trappings of the tale suggest insane, grotesque feminine violence. A. Interestingly, Bacchus is intertwined with a "history" that was thought to preceed the fall of Troy--excellent example of myth and reality woven together. Associated with Amazons, ferocious female warriors from Greek "prehistory" which probably never happened, but was a frequent subject of art and drama. B. Bacchus is also associated with grotesque, mad murder among family members. For example, when Pentheus refused to worship the new god, his own mother and aunt went mad, mistook him for a boar, and tore him limb from limb. D. Around 500 B.C., the cult of Bacchus was uniquely female, days of license--see pp. 323-4 of Oxford Hist. During the classical age, however, worship of Dionysius became part of state theater festivals. Tragedy, however, retained idea that Maenadism (ME-nad-ism) caused women to eat raw flesh of animals and men. Intertexts/Other versions: I. Oresteia: As Cassandra predicts Agamemnon's death and prepares for her own, she begins to sing a "song of sorrow," a "wild lyric": Cassandra: Alas, alas for the wretchedness of my ill-starred life. This pain flooding the song of sorrow is mine alone. Why have you brought me here in all unhappiness? Why, why? Except to die with him? What else could be? Chorus: You are possessed of God, mazed at heart to sing your own death song, the wild lyric as in clamor for Itys, Itys over and over again her long life of tears weeping forever grieves the brown nightingale. Cassandra: Oh for the nightingale's pure song and a fate like hers. With fashion of beating wings the gods clothed her about and a sweet life gave her without lamentation. But mine is the sheer edge of the tearing iron (Agamemnon 1136-49). The chorus sees Procne's cries as mourning for her dead son; Cassandra immediately reinterprets it as a "pure song," and envies Procne's fate. Saved from death by transformation, of course--but also no grief, power to kill rather than to be killed. II. Dido, too, has a little Procne moment. As she hesitates between murder and suicide, she both invokes and is haunted by the Furies. After she sees Aeneas leave, before she curses him, she contemplates (and rejects) violent vengeance: ...And could I not have dragged his body off, and scattered him piecemeal upon the waters, limb by limb? Or butchered all his comrades, even served Ascanius himself as a banquet dish upon his father's table? (Book IV 826-31) She chooses her own "noble" death over killing someone who has betrayed her. III. Even Penelope, through a tangle of obscure myths, refers to
the possibility of slaughtering her son to avenge her wrongs. Again,
she rejects it. p. 295, Book XIX lines 518-25).
|