The Silencing of Ovid
Ovid's Metamorphoses and Columbia University’s Fraught Relationship with its Core Curriculum
During the fall of my freshman year at Columbia University, the Committee for the Core Curriculum announced that it would be lifting Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the syllabus of its famous Literature Humanities course, a required course for all Columbia College freshmen that surveys literature from Homer to the present day. The Metamorphoses, arguably the most important early piece of writing for Western literature for the next two millennia, was removed after a group of students complained in a Columbia Spectator Op-Ed that the text was detrimental to rape survivors forced to relive their personal assaults through the work’s “graphic” descriptions of rape. The students circulated a petition demanding that The Metamorphoses be removed from the syllabus, and after a few months, the Committee for the Core succumbed to popular demand. Ovid was sent on a three-year furlough, returning to the syllabus briefly in 2018 before being nixed entirely. Now that the Metamorphoses is gone for good, we must ask whether its dismissal was really warranted.
In place of the Metamorphoses, the 2015 Literature Humanities—or “Lit Hum” as it is known colloquially to students—syllabus featured Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of fifteen epistolary poems each written from the perspective of a woman addressing a lover who has neglected or abandoned her. Although these poems are beautiful in Latin, the work’s importance as a historical and literary text rises nowhere near the level of the Metamorphoses, suggesting that the motive behind the Committee for the Core’s decision was more to give voice to supposedly silenced female voices than to provide students with adequate context on the development of the Western literary tradition.
I do not mean to suggest that the Heroides is not an important piece of literature. There is incredible value, both thematic and literary, in Briseis’ grievances towards Achilles or Penelope’s cries to Odysseus. But for the purposes of a survey class—and one that has just spent a month with the Iliad and the Odyssey—to read yet another exposition about the same characters in a watered-down translation is not only redundant yet also puzzling. Students will leave a survey class dedicated to classical literature without the least bit of exposure to some of the myths that have laid the foundations for the next two thousand years of Western art, literature, music, and philosophy.
Indeed, the Metamorphoses’ most unique quality may be its pioneering of a technique that resurfaces in later Lit Hum texts: the collection of an array of seemingly unrelated stories into one greater work. We see this most famously in Dante’s Inferno, which introduces disparate narratives from hell’s various inhabitants as Dante and Vergil journey through the circles of hell. Several hundred years later, Boccaccio and Chaucer borrowed this structure, and The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales were born.
But the structure of the Metamorphoses is only one piece of the puzzle. The value of the work lies also in its monumental stories that have proven so influential to the tradition of Western literature. The narrative of Apollo and Daphne, for instance, resurfaces in Art Humanities during a unit on Bernini, and the story of Orpheus and Euridice appears in Monteverdi’s famous opera L’Orfeo that students study in Music Humanities. Similarly, students studying Shakespeare in Lit Hum’s second semester see stories from the Metamorphoses repurposed in plays such as Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and A Winter’s Tale. A basic familiarity with the tales that Ovid collects in his Metamorphoses thus allows students to gain a fuller Core Curriculum experience and a better understanding of the development of Western culture as a whole.
So why precisely was the Metamorphoses removed from the Lit Hum syllabus? For one, students who complained about the graphic rape scenes in the work emphasized the absence of “trigger warnings” in their Lit Hum classes, claiming that without these disclosures in place, the course puts their safety at risk and “marginalizes student identities in the classroom.” The several Lit Hum instructors that I interviewed seem to hold a similar different opinion. As one instructor reported, “I wanted to make sure that my students are aware that just because the Metamorphoses is on the Lit Hum syllabus does not mean that it is necessarily a valuable piece of literature.”
But isn’t it?
One might suppose that core lecturers have also been misled. Lit Hum instructors, for instance, attend workshops that train them to teach the texts on the syllabus in a very specific way. In these workshops—and especially in the one held in 2018 when the Metamorphoses made its brief comeback—-they learn that the Metamorphoses is a problematic text that requires trigger warnings to allow students to feel safe in the classroom. Classroom discussions then veer towards the topic of rape rather than encompassing a more holistic discussion of the importance of the work as a piece of literature. That is not to say that these rape scenes do not exist, but if instructors preface their discussions of the Metamorphoses with a warning about Zeus’s womanizing tendencies, students will erroneously believe that the work is about rape when the reality is that these scenes encompass only a minuscule fraction of the text’s many stories. Furthermore, these stories are in no way graphic and should not create a great deal of disturbance if students are able to contextualize the work within its appropriate historical timeframe, understanding that Ovid is not glorifying rape but condemning it. Allowing students to pass over the work or teaching students that the Metamorphoses is problematic because of its transient rape scenes deemphasizes the work’s literary and historical importance and creates a framework for evaluating literary quality that is largely informed by contemporary political standards rather than the greater literary tradition.
The problem with Lit Hum, and perhaps the study of literature in the broader academic sphere, is that we have become so focused on these “themes” and how they relate to contemporary culture that we have forgotten that literature is, first and foremost, a form of art. As we learn in Lit Hum, literature began in the West as an oral tradition and was virtually indistinguishable from early forms of music. If Homer’s Iliad were just a story about war heroes running around Troy, it would have been forgotten long ago. What makes the Iliad s masterpiece is that it sounds beautiful when read aloud. When studying texts such as the Metamorphoses, we must therefore remember that Ovid was a master of the Latin poetic form more than he was an original storyteller, and therein lies his most important contribution to the literary tradition.
I invite you to read the opening lines of the Metamorphoses in Latin out loud even if you have never studied a word of it. You may not understand a thing, but you will hear something special that will make all trigger warnings worth forgetting. We call it beauty.
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
No one gave me a trigger warning for 9-11 or October 7. Or my cancer (long dead> 10 years). Or that one of my children is handicapped. Or a million other things. No triggers--just the bullets. Every little bullet hole in me has paled to life worth living, pitfalls and all. And sensibilities, which make me human. I'm not saying that suffering is good. But I do feel living, come what may, is.
Herewith begins my (as usual too long) comment:
It is very hard to disagree with Liza’s assessment of the situation. Ovid, specifically the Metamorphoses, is both beautiful and important. I do not read Latin, so I can’t throw much weight behind the “beautiful” assertion, but “important” should not be in question.
Besides the fact that Metamorphoses is necessary context for much other literature from the Renaissance onward, it is also crucial for an understanding of the Classical world. Its breadth is much greater than one would think at first, since it appears to focus on one particular aspect of myth, the transformation. But so much of classical mythology is cast in this form that to say “myth of metamorphosis” is nearly the same as to say simply “myth.” To the Classical imagination, every constellation, every flower, every tree, every river was suffused with transformation myth.
This of course assumes that one wants to understand the Classical mind. Such an understanding may have a rather low priority for people engaged in “deconstructing the canon” and “decolonizing literature.” So let’s look at privileged voices in literature for a moment. Literature is inherently a product of privilege, simply because so very few people throughout history had the leisure to write. Leisure was an upper class privilege mostly enjoyed by men. The inequity stems from the social conditions under which most of our literature was written, rather than from literature itself. Silencing the voices of those who had the leisure to write will not bring back the voices of those silenced by circumstance. Thomas Grey, in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” lamented these irrecoverable losses, but he did not therefore decide that he himself should not write. (Grey was offered the Poet Laureate position in England, with its lifetime stipend, but declined because he felt the position would obligate him to celebrate every little thing the monarch did, and he did not want to be a royal propagandist. I can respect that.)
In China, poetry was written by the scholarly class, in India by the Brahmin caste, in the new world by the priests (although we have few records in this case, primarily the translation of the Popol Vuh by Catholic missionaries, which I believe to be a rather biased document, more of a Papal Vuh). Historically, the number of people with talent to write far exceeded the number of those with leisure to do so, which was a tragedy; currently, the number of people with leisure to write far exceeds the number of those with the talent to do so, which is a waste of everyone’s time. But I am wandering off topic.
Requiring trigger warnings for certain pieces of literature is not inherently a bad thing, I suppose, but I do not think it is needed nearly so much as it is required. A personal history of trauma does not automatically make a person susceptible to these triggers. My wife was abused as a child by her father, and as a young adult she was raped on a trip to Tokyo. She did not become delicate as a result; she became fierce. There is something else going on when people are easily triggered, something besides their personal history. It seems to be a societal expectation that everyone will become as sensitive as a mimosa plant and wilt at a touch, and therefore preemptive coddling is necessary. This is not to say that no one has PTSD, but those who do generally already know what their triggers are.
Perhaps there should just be some general warnings:
Literature trigger warning: People tell stories about appalling things. Expect it.
History trigger warning: People have done appalling things. Expect it.
Biology trigger warning: Plants and animals do appalling things. Expect it.
Etc.
There are entirely too many babies being thrown out with the bathwater. I hope they bring back Ovid's Metamorphoses, because I'll get all triggered if I hear they won't.