Rape. It’s a word that we flinch from – in conversation, in public discourse, and in Classics classrooms. And perhaps we flinch doubly when a privileged white man like me, who is not a victim, seeks to contribute their tuppence-worth. Why? Because the vast majority of sexual violence is committed by men against women and because the likelihood of being raped correlates with socio-economic status. The statistics are alarming, of course, and the #metoo movement has blown open the misconception that affluent white women are spared coercion and violence. Look at the case recently of Sally Challen, described in the media as an archetypal ‘Surrey housewife’, who murdered her husband after years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
Last weekend, the poet Fiona Benson won the country’s highest-profile poetry competition for Vertigo & Ghost. The first half of the collection concerns the actions and aftershocks of Zeus as he bullies and abuses his wife and other mythological figures. They are, as one poem puts it, ‘songs/ that find a name for you at last…you animal, you rapist’.
The second person address in confronting Zeus evokes the astonishing courage we have seen recently from real-life victims, or survivors ( I appreciate that both terms are contentious). You may remember the trial of Larry Nassar, former doctor of the USA Gymnastics team. You may remember last month’s statement by Virginia Giuffre in respect to Prince Andrew: “He denies that it ever happened and he’s going to keep denying it ever happened, but he knows the truth and I know the truth.” And just this week two female comedians who confronted Harvey Weinstein in their routine and in person were quickly ‘herded’ out the building by his bodyguards. Two articulate women expressing important female rage, soon silenced.
Fiona Benson voices this rage unflinchingly. After reading the first forty pages of Vertigo & Ghost, I don’t think I’ll be able to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the same light again. Benson pinpoints the tense dynamics of knife-edge moments, the dangerous glances and unnerving gestures. The fears, the self-doubting, the shame, blame and the transformation of trauma. Benson’s poems are not easy reading but then, perhaps it is time we took a less indulgent and good-humoured attitude towards Zeus. Ovid’s Met contains fifty-odd instances of forcible rape, attempted rape or coercive behaviour. We read these with pupils and discuss the implications, perhaps, but is there enough rage in our response? Read the commentaries: do their authors seem to prefer ‘love-struck’, ‘lustful’, ‘infatuated’ more than ‘intimidating’, ‘controlling’ or ‘habitually violent’?
One problem reading Ovid, which Benson does address, is the problem of humour. Ovid specialises in irony and likes his work to resist simplistic interpretation. He relishes the ambiguous, the half-felt, the suggested, the euphemised. His impulse is to destabilise, and humour is a key tool in undercutting what is established at the surface.
Benson’s third Zeus poem does allow some humour, too. Presented from ‘[the archives]’, we hear Zeus getting off with a light sentence: ‘The judge delivers/ that he is an exemplary member of the swimming squad’. Humanising and trivialising – and funny – details such as these can produce more playful readings of sex and gender in Ovid’s Met.
But as Benson inserts modern details into familiar mythological scenarios, the tone darkens and her voice becomes more fierce. Take, for instance, Athena punishing Medusa for being raped by Poseidon: ‘I came to understand/ rape is cultural/ pervasive;/ that in this world/ the woman is blamed.’ This stanza ends the first of three ‘not-Zeus’ poems, in which the Gorgons are re-figured as ‘Shunned girls sent/ to the Magdalene laundries’ and as daughters set on fire by their male relatives in a ritual honour killing:
It is hard to feel anything other than disgust and rage here.
Zeus himself speaks in capitals because he’s boastful and brash and when he speaks he expects to be heard, as if every utterance is to be inscribed on bronze in the forum. He certainly has no interest in listening to others. In her Danae poem, Benson turns Zeus’ eye to Donald Trump and, rejecting the obvious play on golden showers, she expresses the experience of Melania, a Hera-figure given status and influence which is pathetically circumscribed:
The tone of Zeus, of Hera, and of the anonymous ‘I’ who lets us into her experiences are all so well-observed that the reader is forced, however uncomfortable, to bear witness. Benson’s Zeus poems do not flinch and they root us to the spot. Young girls are stalked by grey-haired gods, who fantasise about humiliating their wives and ‘the involuntary noises humans make’. Rape is the word, and rapists are the ones responsible. I was stunned reading these poems, by the language, the intimacy and the rawness. Petrified would be a better word, because Medusa’s head has long stood as a feminist symbol of female rage and to read Vertigo & Ghost is to meet the Gorgons’ gaze. It is is blistering and brutal.
