Edited by: Oishiki Ganguly
Trigger warning: repeated mentions and implications of sexual harassment and trauma.
The manipulation of language, through tone, construction or even the lack of it, is central to our being. And this is why I hope you will endure through till the end of this article whether you’re a literature enthusiast or not. Despite having a complicated but undying passion for literature I only actively began to read ancient literature in university, and I’m glad I did. But one thing that took me time to adapt to was the facile portrayals of sexual harassment in these texts. This was particularly disturbing as desensitisation and appropriation in modern writing were concepts that I’d made sure to learn and unlearn as a feminist. Now you may ask, is this something one should adapt to in the first place? Shouldn’t one immediately refrain from engaging with such texts? Before I elaborate on why I have wrapped my head around this, allow me to take a few examples from Ovid, Shakespeare, One Thousand and One Nights and Sufi poetry. These extracts may be too graphic to some, so feel free to skip to the next heading if you must.
- In Metamorphoses, Ovid is unapologetic in his writing of incidents in Greek and Roman mythology that coincide with acts one would almost immediately rebuke as unacceptable today. In the story of Salmacis and Hermophridites, the former craves after the young son of Hermes and Aphrodite, and overcome with passion, she jumps into the pool the naked boy stood in and proceeds to fondle him.
Pressing her suit
she winds her limbs around him and exclaims,
“You shall not scape me, struggle as you will,
perverse and obstinate! Hear me, ye Gods!
Let never time release the youth from me;
time never let me from the youth release!”
(“Salmacis and Hermaphroditus”, Book IV, Metamorphoses)
- Similarly, Shakespeare’s retelling of Venus and Adonis depicts Venus’ unnerving attempts to make love to the boy, wherein she repeatedly forces herself onto him, demands that he have sex with her, and finally manipulates him into kissing her.
Forced to content, but never to obey,
Panting he lies and breatheth in her face.
(62-63, “Venus and Adonis”)
- The stories in A Thousand and One Nights explicitly depict tones of non-consensual attempts at sex. To give one example, the story of Princess Budur and Prince Qamar trivialises the former’s attempt to ‘jokingly’ rape Qamar while she was disguised as a man.
- In line with the Sufi concept of love being the ultimate exchange of knowledge, many Sufi poems revolve around a grown man’s pursuit of young boys. Mir especially, blatantly talks of his love for “newly bearded schoolboys”. Interestingly, Plato gives voice to Ancient Greece’s similar take on the superiority of sexual relationships between a man and a boy, as opposed to heterosexual relationships (Symposium).
This undisguised and seemingly insensitive depiction of harassment may be unsettling to read. However, as one of my professor’s pointed out, it was important to question the very reason for our discomfort. What did sexual harassment mean in the times of Ovid, Mir or Persian storytellers?
Literature’s Begging of The Paradox of Past and Present
Ideas change. They evolve, hide, reemerge or die. The greatest testimony to this is the conspicuous prevalence and even endorsement of (male) homosexuality in ancient India and Greece. I don’t have to go into detail about the irony that fact holds in today’s political ether. Having established that, it is now possible to imagine that what we consider to be sexual harassment today was not a concern that existed in the times of such literature. Terms like sexual harassment, rape or paedophilia are fairly modern. Language has been a mode of policing sexuality and desire for centuries (as is most starkly seen in legislation). But does that make violation of one’s body acceptable? Of course not. However, what’s important is that we are able to acknowledge the multiplicity in the sociological structure that existed around these writers.
Let’s say you still wish to directly compare the past with the present. If so, ask yourself the following: does the Sufi conception of love stray far from the inherent patriarchal need to find brides younger than the groom? Or the marrying off of little girls, customary even today in many parts of the world? Or the inability of Indian legislation to criminalise marital rape?
In the first case, we would find that the modern understanding of morality is far from what it was centuries ago. With the latter, we’d be stuck with the reality that we’re not doing so much better now compared to this period we claim to have supposedly progressed from. If anything we have managed to deflect all that’s wrong with the status quo onto a period with distinct interpretations of sexuality and morality.
What you choose to focus on could simply then be a test of optimism.
Questioning Morality, Sexuality and Literature as we Know it Today
The biggest injustice one could do as students or readers of literature is failing to see the challenge ancient literature poses to our contemporary understanding of sexuality. We are, undoubtedly, victims of biblical and Victorian fabrications of these concepts. The reading of ancient literature therefore would urge us to view the multiplicity that existed in these disputed ideas. Not doing so would only be robbing us of our potential to think beyond our own bubble of the present.
Even as I wrote the disclaimer for this piece I was pushed to wonder the very grounds of it. Clinical Psychological Science explored a 2020 study that indicates that trigger warnings may not be useful, and might in fact, in a few cases, be harmful to those suffering from PTSD. While this particular study did not consist of survivors of sexual harassment, the argument posed is that the response need not be drastically different in survivors of other sorts of trauma.
What I conceive of Sufi poetry, trigger warnings or ancient writing is of little significance. I am in no way condoning harassment, non-consensual sex or the violation of personal boundaries. My only hope is to urge the questioning of contemporary understandings of morality and sexuality and consider its susceptibility to change yet again in the future. Because without raising such questions the very essence of these texts would be lost in our indiscriminate fight to censor.
(A big thank you to my fellow first-year students who helped diversify the sources I touched upon above!)