4. the Female Gaze in Flavian Epic: Looking out from the Walls in Valerius Flaccus and Statius

4. THE FEMALE GAZE IN FLAVIAN EPIC: LOOKING OUT FROM THE WALLS IN VALERIUS FLACCUS AND STATIUS

Helen Lovatt

In Mulvey’s classic 1975 article, the gaze is a male preserve: men sit in a darkened cinema, following the view of the camera, also con- trolled by a man, actively and powerfully looking at women who are displayed on the screen as passive objects, powerless and there to be looked at.1 Since then, there has been much debate about whether the gaze must inevitably be male, whether there can be such a thing as a female gaze.2 If a woman watches a film, is she inevitably taking on a masculine role, becoming the temporary wielder of the male gaze? Looking and being looked at were highly sensitive matters in the ancient world.3 Catherine Edwards has described the perils of going on stage which could ultimately lead to the loss of your voice as a citi- zen.4 But this was equally true for men as well as women. Can the theory of the gaze be usefully applied to the ancient world? What can we learn from thinking about vision, power and gender together in ancient literature? These are some of the questions addressed in my current project on the epic gaze. This paper focuses on teichoscopy and asks whether these episodes of watching from the walls are the site of a truly female gaze within epic. Teichoscopy begins in Iliad 3, where Priam calls on Helen to point out the Greek heroes to him as they watch from the walls of Troy. Already there we have a transgressive woman acting as narrator within this most masculine of genres. Teichoscopy is not a purely epic phenomenon, although it is marked as an epic intervention: Antigone

1 Mulvey 1975, with Mulvey 1988. 2 For a good summary of the issues around spectatorship see Mayne 1998; spe- cifically on the female gaze see: Doane 1982 and Doane 1988, both reprinted in Do- ane 1991; de Lauretis 1984; Modleski 1988, 5–9; essays by Crowie and Bergstrom in Penley 1988; essays by Gamman (Gamman 1988) and Moore (Moore 1988) in Gam- man and Marshment 1988; Pribram 1988; Stacey 1994, 19–48; Polk 1997. 3 Work on issues of gaze and spectatorship within classics includes: Fredrick 2002; Davidson 1991; Feldherr 1998; Bergman and Kondoleon 1999. 4 Edwards 1997. 60 HELEN LOVATT watches from the walls at the beginning of Euripides’ Phoenissae;5 Tarpeia in Propertius 4.4 falls in love with Tatius, the Etruscan com- mander, while she watches from the walls of Rome, and Scylla with Minos in Ovid Metamorphoses 8. In Flavian epic there are two episodes of teichoscopy: Statius Thebaid 7 and Valerius Flaccus Argo- nautica 6. While Statius puts Antigone back on the walls and follows a Homeric model of teichoscopy as exposition,6 Valerius reworks the look of love and radically alters the teichoscopy by interspersing the episodes of looking with episodes of epic battle narrative.7 This paper investigates the two episodes of teichoscopy. How do Antigone and Medea view the battles and what does this tell us about the model reader of epic? Do they buy into the masculine values of the epic narrator? Or are they representatives of a truly female gaze within epic?

Antigone on the walls

Let us first look at Antigone in Statius and see how she interacts with the narrative. Statius’ teichoscopy is in many ways much more tradi- tional than Valerius’. It is a way of including a catalogue of Theban forces while the army is massing for battle, before the Argives arrive in Thebaid 7. Antigone, in contrast to Valerius’ Medea, is a passive audience, whose reactions are mostly hidden from us; her guide and narrator is much more in the centre of our gaze, treating her like a na- ïve pupil and telling us about his own emotions. Yet later, in Book 11, she returns to the walls and, in a subtly different way from Medea, becomes part of the action. Eteocles hears about the imminent arrival of the Argive army and summons his allies. The troops are on display before their enemy ar- rives (Stat. Theb. 7.237–42) and an audience of Andromaches teaches a collection of Ascaniuses the glory of war, but madness and panic look ahead to the grisly realities of Statian battle. This audience is al-

5 E. Ph. 88–201. 6 See Smolenaars 1994, 119–23; Statius is clearly playing with Euripides here, by making Antigone watch her own Theban troops rather than the invading army, which we have already met in the catalogue of Book 4. 7 On Valerius in general: Davis 1990; Korn and Tschiedel 1991; Malamud and McGuire 1993; Taylor 1994; Eigler and Lefèvre 1998; Hershkowitz 1998. On Book 6 there are three commentaries: Baier 2001, Wijsman 2000 and the excellent Fucecchi 1997.