Rape Culture and Ovid's Metamorphoses

A couple of weekends ago, my son graduated from Pomona College and I attended the commencement exercises. One of the speakers was Andrew Hoyem, a Pomona alum who was receiving a PhD honoris causa for his work as the Director of Arion Press, the San Francisco-based printer of fine, limited edition books. On its website, Arion describes itself as "[devoted] to excellence in the crafts of bookmaking and to the imaginative presentation of worthy literary texts and visual art." And so, Mr Hoyem told the assembled graduates, "instead of giving you a bunch of advice you don't want," he was going to read to them a passage from one of his favorite books, Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, more commonly known as Golding's Ovid. The passage he chose to read to the students was highly relevant to the occasion: it was the tale of the wood nymph Pomona, the college's namesake.

In a former life in the late 70's and early 80's, I was an ABD in Classics at UC Berkeley. I have kept up my languages over the years, and recently was rereading the Metamorphoses in Latin, with Golding's translation at my side (all available through that wonderful digital resource, Perseus). I happen to think that Ovid is one of the greatest poets in the Western canon. And, as Mr Hoyem intimated in his speech, Golding's Ovid is not merely a translation of the Metamorphoses, but a work of art in its own right. Consequently, I very much enjoyed Mr Hoyem's reading of the tale of Pomona and Vertumnus. Here is the opening of the passage in Golding's stately, yet spry heptameters:

The rule of nation Palatine at length to Proca came.
In this Kings reigne Pomona livd. There was not to bee found
Among the woodnymphes any one in all the Latian ground
That was so conning for to keepe an Ortyard [orchard] as was shee,
Nor none so paynefull to preserve the frute of every tree.
And theruppon shee had her name. ...
(Ovid implies here that the name "Pomona" derives from the Latin word for fruit, pomum)

While Mr Hoyem was reading, however, I could not help but feel a sense of trepidation. It's fortunate, I kept thinking, that Pomona students these days don't seem to understand very much Elizabethan English; for, if only they understood clearly what was going on in this tale -- god lusts after wood nymph and disguises himself as an old crone to deceive the young girl; when persuasion fails, he reveals himself in all his glory and prepares to take her by force (vim parat), only to find that violence is not necessary after all (sed vi non est opus) because she has suddenly been wounded by reciprocal feelings of affection for the god revealed (nymphe mutua vulnera sensit) -- students in the audience would no doubt be "triggered" at the suggestion of sexual violence and jump to their feet and shout Mr Hoyem off the stage. One of the female graduates, it turned out, when she later came up to receive her diploma, paused to complain to President Oxtoby of the College because she felt the College had not taken her charges of sexual assault against a male student seriously enough. The juxtapostion of this young woman's protest with Pomona's tale was most striking and the potential for an unseemly explosion was high. I did not know whether Mr Hoyem was aware that he was skating on thin ice, or was consciously challenging the students.

And then I read Peggy Noonan's column last week in the Wall Street Journal. in which she writes about political correctness and repression of free speech on college campuses today and "microagressions" and "triggering." Noonan describes an article that recently appeared in the Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University:

The authors describe a student in a class discussion of Ovid’s epic poem “Metamorphoses.” The class read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, which, as parts of a narrative that stretches from the dawn of time to the Rome of Caesar, include depictions of violence, chaos, sexual assault and rape. The student, the authors reported, is herself “a survivor of sexual assault” and said she was “triggered.” She complained the professor focused “on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text.” He did not apparently notice her feelings, or their urgency. As a result, “the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class.”

I don't know where our society is headed. It is no doubt true that Ovid's Metamorphoses can be read as nothing more than a series of rape stories, one after another. On the other hand, as I have already pointed out, Ovid is generally held to be one of the greatest poets in the Western canon and his Metamorphoses are a treasure trove of Greek and Latin mythological tales. Proof of Ovid's influence can be found in the fact that many of the greatest works of Western art have been inspired by the Metamorphoses. For example, two of the greatest works of the sculptor's craft, Lorenzo Bernini's Daphne and Apollo and his Rape of Proserpine (or Persephone) stand in the Villa Borghese in Rome. These sculptural groupings are based on the very same tales from the Metamorphoses that were read by the students at Columbia. The first grouping portrays the exact moment when Apollo is about to seize Daphne and have his way with her. The girl prays to the gods to save her and they oblige by transforming (metamorphosizing) her into a tree, the laurel tree (daphne is the Greek work for laurel). This is an example of an aetiological tale, that is, a tale that describes how something -- in this case, laurel trees -- came into being; Ovid's Metamorphoses are filled with such tales. The manner in which the sculpture shows Daphne's fingers being transformed into leafy branches, her feet taking root in the ground, and bark beginning to encase her skin, is pure artistic magic. The second grouping portrays the exact moment when Pluto seizes Proserpine and carries her off to the Underworld. For centuries, viewers of Bernini's sculpture have marveled at the way in which the artist could portray so realistically Pluto's hands pressing against the soft flesh of Proserpine's side and thigh.

So, what are we to do? Like fanatical members of some post-Modern Taliban, are we to tear up every copy of Ovid and smash these great works of Bernini to pieces out of some misguided sense of puritanical zeal?

It can plausibly be argued that the post-Modern era traces its origin to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the early 1960's. The purpose of that movement was to protest the University of California's restrictions on the freedom of expression. One of the manifestations of that movement was that students began to lace their speech with offensive obscenities to show that no form of expression was off limits. And yet now, the post-Modern movement has come full circle. The movement that started off defending the right of students to discuss any subject without limitation has devolved into a movement that itself seeks to place all kinds of restrictions on what may be discussed in our universities. Post-Modernism has now become the kind of puritanical oppressor from which the early Hippies in the days of free speech and free love sought to liberate themselves. Yes, we must vigorously prosecute the rapists, be sensitive to the experiences and feelings of rape victims, and teach Ovid's Metamorphoses with appropriate caveats ("trigger warnings," if you will), but we also must not allow misguided puritanical zeal to cause us to throw overboard the cultural and artistic heritage that has been accumulated over two thousands years of Western Civilization.