Joseph Campbell’s Woman Problem

This article was published online on August 4, 2021.

darkest and bloodiest episodes in Ovid’s . King Tereus of Thrace, having lusted after his sister-in-law, Philomela, inveigles her away from her father’s protection, takes her to a forest dungeon, and rapes her. Philomela, towering in eloquence, vows to tell the world what Tereus has done; her raised voice, she promises him in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation, will “make the stones to understand.” So Tereus cuts her tongue out. Ovid, characteristically, zooms in: The wound pours; the severed tongue bounces and mutely spasms—“as an adder’s tail cut off doth skip a while,” in Golding’s version. More modern retellers of have been similarly transfixed. From Ted Hughes’s(1997): “The tongue squirmed in the dust, babbling on—Shaping words that were(2019): “Please imagine how it continues to wriggle, how it twitches and moves on the dirt floor.”