Tongue: OE tunge and Latin lingua, an organ of speech, a figure or representation of this organ; the faculty of speech. A voice, a vote, suffrage. To assail with words; to cut a tongue; to slit or shape a tongue in a plant for grafting. Giving great tongue: a cry made by hounds when they scent a fox.

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“Will not my tongue be mute?” Tarquin wonders, at the thought of raping Lucretia. The momentary horror he experiences believing that the rape must mark him as well: a blot upon his face as well as language, violence carving its sin upon his own self. If she cannot go unmarked, he cannot either; the body giving tongue to its distress.

Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, 227

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It is not rape, and yet. Sexual violence has been historically difficult to articulate. Chaucer devoted much of the fifth book of The Legend of Good Women, in which he retells the myth of Philomela, to creating subcategories of words akin to rape: ravine, a rape linked with abduction; robberie, a rape occurring in the woods; stelthe, an attack cloaked in secrecy. We would not care to make such distinctions, but Chaucer’s characters do. When Amans (Latin: “Loving”) is asked whether he has committed the sin of ravine, he denies it, admitting only to the possibility of stelthe. It is important, he demands, to be specific. What happened to me feels like something that exists between words, a subcategory of expression for which there is no one easy expression.

Ravine: OF raviner and L. rapinare, to pillage, sweep down, to violently sweep away.

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Raving: MF resver, to wander, to be delirious. “Raving” is applied to the Bacchantes or Maenads, whose name means “raving ones.” Procne first appears in Ovid’s tale dressed as the Bacchantes’ queen, “in all the dress / of frenzy,” spear over her shoulder, draped in vines and deer hide. Philomela, voiceless suffering, is visited by her sister, rage. A raping. A raving.

The Metamorphoses, 6.589–590

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“Raving”: at the heart of the story is madness, a word sonically, if not etymologically, attached to the word for rape. Raving is a contagion that spreads through imagination and desire. To the ancient writers, only raving breeds and explains female aggression. Agave, driven mad by Dionysus for her “unbridled tongue,” doesn’t know her son, Pentheus, spikes his head on a stake. Medea, to punish an unfaithful Jason, dismembers their children. To wound one is to wound the other, bodies linked by sperm and milk and blood. Don’t infect me with your madness.

Euripides, The Bacchae, 1.438

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