To Ovid, violence is brute, natural, indifferent; it wells up in men’s blood, a moral emptiness that obeys no rules because it understands none. In The Metamorphoses, the truth of violence is that it might erupt at any time: the void always threatens to yawn before us, and we struggle to assemble words that will explain it. Only language, which orders time and gives experience shape and meaning, might control how violence is experienced. It gives back agency. “There was no time ever / when she would rather have had the use of her tongue, / the power to speak, to express her full rejoicing,” Ovid writes, after Philomela throws Itys’s bloody head at Tereus’s feet. Language is made to contain our awareness of, even our celebration in, suffering. The pain attending our pleasure. The pleasure we take in another’s pain.

The Metamorphoses, 6.460–462, 659–661

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Here are the words describing Philomela’s cut tongue: immurmurat (murmurs), palpitat (quivers), quaerit (strives). Like a lover, the tongue murmurs, it quivers, it strives for its mistress.

The Metamorphoses, 6.562–564

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Positioning an implicitly male audience in the consciousness of a raving, raped woman tilts the myth from one of identification to one of rejection. To portray Philomela’s calls for justice within the frame of madness reduces her moral justification for Tereus’s punishment. It focuses the reader’s gaze back upon her mutilated body, her tortured mind, turning our regard from one of empathy to spectacle.

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Keats, in his copy of Titus Andronicus, a play that rewrites the myth of Philomela, struck out with his pen several of the taunting lines spoken by Demetrius and Chiron after they’ve raped Lavinia, sliced out her tongue, and cut off her hands. He drew his pen vigorously over their dialogue, mutilating their speech: violence overwriting violence.

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MARCUS

Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands

Have lopp’d and hew’d and made thy body bare

Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments—

In Julie Taymor’s Titus, Lavinia wears branches for hands, recalling Shakespeare’s recurring metaphor: Lavinia’s hands “tremble, like aspenleaves, upon a lute”; Chiron, sneering, suggests her “stumps will let [her] play the scribe.” Wood as scene of violation, wood as body, body as failed writing instrument. Lavinia’s changes, too, are metonymic. The girls run as if they are flying. They are flying!

Titus Andronicus, II, iv

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Branch: ME and F branche, a tree limb or stem, a child; also fig. a division, to strike out on a new path, to divide.

Hew: OE heawan, to strike forcefully, to cut, to shape, to slaughter.

Limb: OT limo-, organ or part of the body; limb (L, limbus), an edge or boundary of a surface.

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