When I began to study Latin in my freshman year in high school, one of the first texts we were asked to translate concerned the “rape” of the Sabine women. Even though the Latin text used a word that looked and sounded like it should be translated as “rape,” we were told that the Romans “abducted” the Sabine women and that the word should be translated as “seized.” Not long afterward, we read a story from Ovid in which a nymph named Daphne was turned into a tree in order to escape being raped by a God. I found both of these stories puzzling.
I had not heard the term “rape culture” which was coined much later, but the fact that I can still visualize the words “virgines” and “raptae sunt,” as well as the pictures that accompanied both stories, suggests that I was aware that something was wrong in these texts and in the way they were being taught.
When, as part of my first full-time teaching job, I was asked to teach the Iliad as the foundational text in the required Humanities course at Columbia University, I was able to find words to criticize it. I understood that even if Homer mourned the “tragedy” of war, he also celebrated it, and seemed to view war as an inevitable part of “heroic” culture.
I was also able to see that the central human drama of the epic, Achilles’s “metaphysical dilemma “ of whether to choose to stay and fight in a war in which he would be killed yet immortalized in memory, or to choose to return home and live a long, yet uneventful life, was set in the context of his quarrel with Agamemnon over a woman my colleagues referred to as a “spear captive.” In fact, Briseis, like the Sabine women, was a “spoil” of war, a captured and captive woman, who might more accurately have been called a “raped captive.”
When I tried to discuss the moral failings of a work that celebrated rape and war in the seminar for teachers of the course, I was told that I had missed the point of a beautiful and complex text that was at the heart of “civilization.”
This spring at Columbia University, student members of the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board posted an op-ed titled “Our Identities Matter in Core Classrooms” in the campus newspaper Columbia Spectator stating that: Continue reading “Texts of Terror in the Humanities Curriculum by Carol P. Christ”
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