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"What Nature Allows the Jealous Laws Forbid": The Cases of Myrrha and Ennis del Mar

2006; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1057-896X

Mary Aswell Doll,

Educational Philosophies and Pedagogies

Long before Freud formulated a basic distinction between civilization and its discontents (1930/1961), Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses as a protest against the state and its social laws. Published in the eighth year of the Common Era (8 C.E.), The Metamorphoses proved Ovid a man before his time, perhaps the most postmodern male writer of the ancient classics. Although apprenticed to the law, Ovid was not interested in codices but in questioning the way law interferes with, even ruins, lives. The function of law, especially Roman law, is to make clear, to categorize, and to separate. But Ovid, being no lawmaker, was a poet. He wrote as any postmodern would understand by contextualizing, juxtaposing, repeating, prefiguring, varying, digressing, contrasting, interrupting, and flashbacking. He disturbed order. I would like to nominate Ovid as the new darling of curriculum theorists because of his understanding that real understanding is currere (flux), not outcomes. He wrote against the current of his time, preferring instead of epics about men and conquest and adventure, tales about love and about how love transforms. He wrote against macho epics like the The Odyssey and The Aeneid that refuse censure when men seduce women young enough to be their daughters or delay supper for ten years. Upturning the Roman applecart, he forefronted women, desire, and interiority to the extent that, as one commentator remarked, reading his tales may seem more like reading a modern psychologized novel (Miller, F. J. , 2005, xxi). The voice that speaks in these tales as often sings and the characters don't stay still. Rather, they transform, or metamorphose. It is as if the poet is pulling the rug out from under the podium, so that rather than entering its world in a No Child Left Behind stance, we enter surprised, shocked, upset, puzzled, even flat on our faces. A constancy of change in our emotional barometer propels us, often against our will, into seeing the changing nature of things and selves, change being the order of the day. A very different tale is that told by Annie Proulx, whose Brokeback Mountain (1997) was made into a 2006 Oscar-nominated film. This is the story of desire and duty and place. But to suggest that the place of the mountain was where Ennis del Mar received courage and wisdom would be tragically wrong, because the social laws restricting Ennis held such a stranglehold on his consciousness that no movement or transformation could occur. My intention in comparing Ovid with Proulx is to suggest that civilization and its discontents are main concerns for both, despite their separation by millennia and their very different endings. Importantly, both writers use images of nature to uncover similar understandings of what is natural when it comes to defining who and how one should love. In Ovid's work no love is taboo unless it arises out of a need for power and control. A widespread instance of the latter during the Roman Empire was the practice by the elite to take nubile young girls as lovers or mistresses, girls who could be as young as daughters. Such a practice was considered normal, natural. Enter Ovid. Twisting the genders, Ovid writes the tale of Myrrha and her father Cinyras, whom Myrrha loves but not as a daughter should love--knowing nonetheless that a love such as hers is unnatural. Bemoaning her plight, Myrrha rationalizes the occurrence of unnatural love in nature: Other animals mate as they will nor is it thought base for a heifer to endure her sire, nor for his own offspring to be a horse's mate; the goat goes in among the flocks which he has fathered, and the very birds conceive from those from whom they were conceived. Happy they who have such privilege! Human civilization has made spiteful laws, and what nature allows, the jealous laws forbid. (Miller, F. J., 194-5) Myrrha here is merely (myrrhra-ly) saying long ago what Donna Haraway (1989) has been saying more recently: Nature follows no laws. …