Vincent and the Nightingale
Vincent and the Nightingale; or How Ovid Helped Me Mythologize My Trauma
By Regina Nagan
Trigger/Content Warnings: Emotional manipulation, gaslighting, mentions of abuse, rape, pregnancy, abortion, disordered eating, hints of self-harm, emetophobia, physical violence
PART ONE
Sometimes it feels like this is the only story I can tell. It’s like if I don’t make it into something profound and important, all the suffering was for nothing. But to do that it can’t just be my story—it has to be Philomela’s as well. So let me tell hers, and then I’ll tell mine.
***
Ovid tells the story of Procne and Philomela in Book VI of his Metamorphoses.
The narrative begins with the triumphs of King Tereus of Thrace, who had aided Athens in defending itself from a barbarian attack. King Pandion of Athens promises Tereus his daughter, Procne, in exchange for his help. Procne and Tereus are wedded under wicked omens and produce a son: Itys.
Five years pass. Procne wishes to visit her sister, Philomela, in Athens. She and Tereus sail back home to see her family. In a harsh twist of fate, Tereus desires Philomela the moment he sees her and devises a plan to sleep with her. The royal couple spends a few days in Athens together—all the while, Tereus is fantasizing about having Philomela.
Once their trip is concluded, Procne begs her husband to allow Philomela to return to Thrace with them. Her husband is all too willing to comply with her and convinces Philomela’s father to entrust his other daughter to his care.
Philomela travels to Thrace along with Procne and Tereus. The moment the boat reaches the shore, Tereus captures Philomela and drags her to a hut nestled in the woods. According to Ovid, before he rapes her, Tereus openly admits to her that this had been his plan all along.
Philomela curses him. She berates him and throws every insult and injury she can think of onto him. She swears to him that she will let everyone know about the horrible thing he’s done, and how he’s betrayed the trust of her, her sister, and her entire family.Tereus reaches for his sword and Philomela gives him her neck. She tells him she’d rather die than live with the shame of what occurred. Instead of cutting her throat, Tereus cuts out her tongue. He steals her innocence and her words and then leaves her to rot.
She gets her revenge, but that’s later. I’ll return to Philomela and Procne in a bit.
***
Late last year, I arrived home from work to find that my long-term boyfriend, Vincent, had moved out. The breakup was sudden and unexpected—although in hindsight, I can’t say there weren’t any signs.
I was burnt out and exhausted from working two jobs with little free time to myself, doing what I could to support Vincent’s graduate work. There were days when the littlest thing would cause me to break down in tears and frustration: if the dishes weren’t clean, if I lost my wallet, and so on. While I look back on myself with clemency, knowing what I know now, I can’t exactly fault Vincent for being unhappy and trapped.
After the breakup, Vincent refused to speak to me. Not a month earlier, he had promised that he was going to marry me, and now he was treating me like I was a stranger.
“Vincent thinks I’m a monster.” I was lying in bed, my phone on the pillow beside me. It was somewhere between a few days and a week after Vincent left; it all sort of seemed the same, “He thinks I’m terrible. He won’t even talk to me.”
“You’re not a monster.” Ben is my closest friend, the person I call with every crisis, including this one, “Did you ever think it was weird that Vincent never even told you specifically why he left? I mean, from what it sounded like, you guys were just butting heads.”
“He said enough.” I hadn’t left my bed that day, or the day before. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. Everything that I tried to eat I would throw up. “He said I deserved all the bad things that were happening to me. He told me he wanted me to hurt on purpose.”
“Have you eaten today?” Ben asked, “Can you promise me you’ll get out of bed?”
I felt guilty.
Philomela is full of guilt too, after what happens with Tereus. His treacherous act has ruined not only her life but her sister’s marriage as well. “I have been made a rival of my sister,” she cries. She begs Tereus to take her life. She thinks not of herself, but about how she has now hurt her sister. For her, the release of death would be better than hurting the ones around her. She blames Tereus, but blames herself at the same time.
***
The reception I received from my friends, whom Vincent and I shared, was chilly, to say the least. They certainly knew the breakup had happened, as our community was much too small to not. But none of them seemed to be concerned about my disappearance or how I was feeling. I felt like I was screaming into a void, but nobody was listening. I needed help, I wanted to shriek. I need comfort, I need someone to come and take care of me. I tried to make posts on social media, vague enough that I wouldn’t upset Vincent, but sincere enough that people would know that I was hurting. Sincere enough that they’d ask. But they never did.
On occasion I imagine how Philomela must have felt locked away in her prison, guarded by soldiers and high walls. How hopeless it must have been for her, how she must have thought about death every day. She could slam her fists on the walls until she bled, but nobody could ever hear her cries. Did she wonder why Procne didn’t look for her? Or why her father wasn’t concerned about her disappearance? Did she think she was forgotten?
***
It wasn’t until Vincent had left and I missed my period again in November that I took a test. Suddenly everything fell into place. I remember looking at the first test sitting on the bathroom sink and thinking: Oh, so that’s what the fucking problem was.
I told Ben before anyone else. We had been talking on Discord when I dropped the news.
“So, I might be pregnant.”
“Might?”
“I took some tests. But they might not be accurate. I haven’t gotten full confirmation from a doctor yet.”
“Have you told Vincent yet? You understand this is absolutely something you need to communicate with Vincent.”
“Look, I know.” I stopped typing for a minute. “I don’t want to say anything until I am sure. I don’t want him thinking I am doing this as, like, a crazy revenge thing; Or that I am trying to baby-trap him.”
“I understand this,” he responded. “But it’s his baby too. He deserves to know.”
“I know that. But I also don’t want to tie a guy to me that I made miserable just because I’m pregnant with his kid. That’s not fair.”
I had told Ben over and over how badly I felt about the breakup, how I had felt like I deserved what occurred. I had lamented constantly over my behavior, internalizing Vincent’s words about my monstrosity. He had heard it again and again, and at this point seemed tired of it.
***
At Ben’s urging, I told Vincent about the baby over text the next day. At first, he was shocked, then incredulous. I expected this, so I offered him proof. Positive pregnancy tests weren’t enough, he said. I could fake those. Neither were medical records since those could be faked too. Even speaking to a doctor seemed out of the question, because I could get someone to lie about that.
He told me I could go through the abortion by myself. He saw no reason for us to communicate about it; in his mind, it wasn’t his problem. I had hurt him so badly that I didn’t even deserve to communicate with him about something as life-changing as this.
“Okay,” I told him, over text. He still had not granted me the privilege of calling him on the phone. “If that’s how you want it to be, it’s fine. I need you to understand that there are two options here. Either you agree to be part of the conversation, or you don’t. You can come to the doctor’s visits, be privy to the medical information, and help me decide whether or not to keep the baby. Or—and it seems like you’ve decided on this—you can be cut out of the picture entirely. Am I understanding that this is what you want?”
That was the moment he changed his tune from cold and distant to desperate.
“I didn’t even realize you were thinking about keeping the baby,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time breathing right now.” I started to get concerned. His messages became frantic. The icy tone he had used to communicate with me for the past few weeks melted away. He became more sincere than I had seen him be in a long time.
“Rory, please please please please.” The messages were coming faster than I could reply to them. “Don’t turn me into my father. Don’t bring a child into this world with half a dad. You will destroy me if you have this baby.”
If I were a poet, I could more eloquently phrase just how tragic and ironic that phrasing was, how nearly Shakespearean. Vincent was begging me not to turn him into the father who left while he was making me into my birth mother, the pregnant woman abandoned.
“You’re concerning me, Vincent. Are you okay?” I didn’t address any of his comments about the baby, only about his health at that moment. He kept going, ignoring my concerns.
He threw promises at my feet: he’d support me if I had an abortion, we could be friends again, and we could talk however much I wanted to. He told me he would be there for me emotionally, that he would be that support I needed during this whole process and afterward. He told me how much the breakup had hurt him too, how much he missed me, and how bad his life had become without me.
He told me he might hurt himself if I didn’t terminate the pregnancy.
How could I say no to this? I still loved this man with all my heart, and I couldn’t stand hurting him. I promised him that it would be okay, that we could solve it together. He made me promise I’d have an abortion, that I’d get the pills as soon as I could and deal with it as fast as possible. He was going back home for Thanksgiving; it should be done before then.
Vincent came over to be with me while I took the pills. Then he left.
That night, he ordered me McDonald’s. I called him after I finished it and cried—we had called each other pretty much every night before the abortion. He had promised to be there for me, after all. I told him how much I regretted what I did, how sad and helpless and alone I felt. He told me everything was alright and promised to call me tomorrow before his flight back home.
When I woke up the next day, Vincent had blocked me.
PART TWO
This seems like a good time to return to Philomela’s story. When we left off, Tereus had left her imprisoned in a hut far away from the castle, her tongue cut out. Tereus returned to his wife as though nothing untoward had occurred. Procne asked him what happened to her sister, and the king burst into tears. He constructed a story about how Philomela had died, which Procne believed. Procne falls into a deep depression mourning her lost sister.
A year passes, and Philomela is trapped in her hut. Tereus sent a guard to prevent her from leaving and built up a wall surrounding her. All she can do is sit in silence. She can’t even beg for help.
However, Philomela gets an idea. She does the only task allowed to her: weaving. She creates a tapestry that depicts the horrors she’s gone through, a horrifying art piece soaked in proverbial blood. Although she cannot speak, she gets her story out. She gives it to one of the guards to deliver to her sister.
When Procne opens it, she temporarily loses her tongue too. “Her grief restrains her speech,” Ovid writes. “Her questing tongue cannot produce the words.” She quickly understands what has occurred and is gripped by grief and anger.
Under the auspices of the rites of Bacchus, Procne and her attendants break down the door of Philomela’s hut. They disguise her as one of the queen’s attendants, all dressed in Bacchante costumes. With Philomela in tow, they all return to the castle.
Procne is furious about what has happened to her sister, and she and Philomela devise a plan of revenge against Tereus. Procne notes how much her son, Itys, resembles his father and falls into a rage. “How can it be that this one calls me mother, while this one cannot call me sister? Look! Your husband is the answer to this riddle, unworthy daughter of royal Pandion!”
The sisters then carry the boy off. Philomela severs the boy’s windpipe with a sword, so he cannot speak. They then proceed to dismember Itysand feed him to his father. Procne has convinced Tereus to dine alone, telling him that he is taking part in an Athenian rite.
When Tereus asks where his son is, Procne joyfully replies, “The one you are seeking is within!”
The king realizes what has taken place and attempts to take revenge on the sisters. After pleading to the gods to save them from his wit, all three of them are granted their prayers and transformed into birds; Philomela into a nightingale, Procne into a swallow (on occasion, the two birds are switched), and Tereus into a hoopoe.
All three of them are changed by the nightmare that they went through.
***
It’s December and things have started to change. My abortion failed, confirmed by a visit to the doctor. I spent a week in Florida with my friend Angela and her husband Cole, trying to process what had gone wrong. When I got back, I felt lighter and happier. I was able to get out of bed. I made myself a meal for the first time in months. I started therapy again. I was coming out of the spiral.
One evening, I’m sitting in a big comfy armchair, across the room from my friend Hank and their spouse Mario. They invited me to their house to talk.
“I’m saying this because I think it’s important you know—he did call you abusive,” Hank recalled.
I learned that the couple had been housing Vincent since he left me. When he flew home for Thanksgiving the day after my attempted abortion, he made the decision not to return to Massachusetts.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that his ghost still lingered there, though. Like he had just stepped out and could return at any moment. His clothes were still hung up in his closet, his PlayStation was still plugged into the television in his makeshift room, and his soda bottles and candy wrappers still littered the floor. He had returned home with only a suitcase.
“It didn’t start out that way, just so you know. At first, it was just a ‘bad situation.’ But the bad situation became a ‘toxic relationship,’ which eventually deteriorated into you being abusive.”
They were also the ones who had helped Vincent move his stuff out of our house that afternoon in October. According to Hank, they received word from Vincent after I had left for work. “Rory has kicked me out,” he said. “We’re not together anymore. She’s given me until she gets back from work to have my stuff out of the house.” Hearing that nearly knocked the wind out of my chest.
“But that’s not true at all.” At this point, I could barely stop myself from crying. “He sent me a text message when I was at work. He didn’t even tell me he was leaving in person. I came home and all his stuff was gone.”
I took a deep breath and kept going. There were some points when I almost felt like it was better not to know.
“So, the reason that nobody reached out to me was because you all thought I was abusive?” The pieces were all starting to fall into place. The overwhelming silence. How nobody seemed concerned about my disappearance.
“We believed him because in the beginning, he was always very vague about what the abuse was,” Mario continued. “And we didn’t see any reason for him to lie about it. Later, when he did describe it, though, it…sounded bad, but it wasn’t abuse.”
“After living with Vincent for six weeks, though, I can understand how frustrating it must have been to live with him while pregnant and working seven days a week,” Hank added. “We know the abuse was a lie, but I’ll be honest; at this point, it sort of sounds like your behavior was justified.”
Every new piece of information that I learned from them was a blow to the chest. There were moments when my mind couldn’t even comprehend that we were discussing the same relationship, the same Vincent and Rory.The Rory that Vincent described was a freeloader, someone who refused to get a real job and stayed at home all day. She’d bully Vincent into doing all the chores, explode over the littlest thing and refuse to apologize. Vincent had been planning on leaving her for months, but just never dared to. She manipulated him into the relationship in the first place. He wasn’t happy at the end, and it seemed unclear if he ever was happy to begin with.
Until I got too depressed and sick, I had been working two jobs, seven days a week. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I’d wake up at 5am to catch two trains to my job in Salem. I usually wouldn’t return until 8:00 pm. The rest of the week my commute was closer, but I was still standing all day. Some nights I could barely walk after being on my feet for hours. There were times my legs would nearly buckle if I tried to get up and walk to the bathroom. All of this while I was pregnant.
And we weren’t unhappy. We were happy, at least I thought it that way. He told me he was going to propose in January. He had pursued me in the beginning, not the other way around. There had always been love there.
“After you guys had broken up, he told us that you would constantly reach out to him to bother him about things, none of which he thought mattered. He made it sound like you wouldn’t leave him alone, but he refused to block you.”
The message Vincent sent on the day he left told me that I was welcome to reach out to him for emergencies and that I should reconnect with him in a month.
“And what about the baby?” I finally asked. This was the part I had been most worried about. “You guys knew about the pregnancy all along, didn’t you?”
“Of course we did. He told us a day or two after he found out.” Hank confirmed my suspicion. Vincent had insisted that nobody except his family knew about the baby or the attempted abortion. “But he had us all convinced you were lying about it. He mentioned that you were on birth control. There was a broken condom once, but apparently the dates didn’t match up with your period. He also said you were dodgy about information, and you refused to show him any proof.”
I couldn’t even chalk this up to miscommunication anymore. “We didn’t use condoms. And I was never on birth control. I also offered to show him pregnancy tests, on multiple occasions.”
Hank nodded. “And I’m sure if we had spoken to you before this, we probably would have known that. And Vincent knew that too, hence why he made sure we didn’t.”
Mario agreed with this. “I think it’s pretty obvious that he did everything in his power so that we didn’t hear your side, because if we had it would have made him look really bad.”
I was still having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that this was the same Vincent who walked me through my attempted abortion.
Vincent had agreed to come to the house and be with me when I took the pills. It was the first time he had been back since he moved out. He brought me a plug-in heating pad from Walgreens in my favorite color and we sat and watched Better Call Saul, catching up from where we left off before the split. He bought the episodes from Amazon. We laughed and joked like no time had passed, as if nothing had happened.
Before he left, I asked him if we could be friends again, if we could talk about what had happened. He looked pained and it took him a long time to answer.
“We can,” he said. “But you’re going to have to give me time for it to be back the way it was.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Can you please just promise you won’t leave me again?”
“I won’t. I need you to understand that we aren’t going to be together again, but I promise I won’t abandon you.”
That was enough for me.
I told Hank and Mario this. Then told them how I woke up the next morning to find that he blocked me.
“Oh no, that makes perfect sense,” Mario said. “He told us he was always planning to cut you off after the abortion. He never wanted to fix things, even from the start.”
Hearing that gave me two very different realizations. There was nothing I could have done, and it broke me in ways I can’t describe. But also, there was nothing I could have done, and that freed me.
One of the essential aspects of a tragic story is that characters often fight too hard against their fates, even when they are decided from the start. Maybe that means I would be a bad tragic character.
At that moment there was something so liberating about abandoning the fight against the tide of fate, letting it sweep me up and take me where I was meant to go. To forgive myself for my past mistakes, because it was out of my control. When you know there’s even a small chance you could prevent something from happening, you hate yourself for not fighting even a little harder. But I couldn’t. Vincent had already made up his mind, from the beginning. And I didn’t have to fight anymore.
***
When I got home from Hank and Mario’s that day, I immediately called Ben. He sat and listened to me recall everything I had learned, stopping me only to ask a few clarifying questions. After I had finished, he was quiet for a moment.
“Can I say it?” he said finally. I knew exactly what was coming. I had known it from the moment I had heard everything from Hank—there was a little voice in my head that whispered, Ben is going to love hearing this.
“Go ahead.” I was humoring him a bit.
“I was right!” The triumph in his voice was palpable. “For months I was telling you that this wasn’t your fault and that there was something else going on behind the scenes, and you didn’t listen!”
“I know.”
“How many times did I try and tell you that you weren’t a monster? How many times did I say that Vincent was manipulating you? And I was right! This man was such an unbelievable dick, and you took the fall for it. But you refused to believe me when I said you didn’t do anything wrong! Because you didn’t. You weren’t at fault.”
Ben had nursed me back from the brink on multiple occasions simply because he cared, so I let him have this victory—even if I still had a hard time believing it was true.
“You’re right.”
“Rory, I want to remind you that you were going to marry this guy!”
I laughed, but it was half-hearted.
***
There’s a touching scene between Philomela and Procne that occurs after the queen rescues her sister from her prison. They return to the palace, where Philomela is understandably shaken to be “inside his unspeakable abode.” Procne seems to recognize her sister’s worry and brings her to a hiding place, out of Tereus’ gaze. Procne then holds her sister in her arms.
Philomela cannot bear to look at her sister. In her view, she has shamed Procne’s marriage by sleeping with her brother-in-law, however unwillingly. She cannot speak, but Ovid writes that she yearns to tell Procne that “her disgrace was brought about by force.” Procne wipes her tears aside and tells her that there should be “…no weeping now—it is the time for swords.” In doing so, she tells Philomela that she believes her, and she isn’t to blame for Tereus’ shameful actions. She tells her that she is willing to stand by her to get revenge for the trauma Philomela underwent.
Unlike in classical myth, we don’t often get that grand gesture of justice that we crave. Sometimes you are Clytemnestra with the axe, or Medea flying away on her chariot—but more often, you are yourself, forced to sit with what happened.
But sometimes it’s enough to know that you have people on your side. It’s enough to have someone tell you, “I see you. I believe you. It isn’t your fault.” Procne is as important to this story as Philomela is. What would have become of Philomela if her sister hadn’t been there to help her? She would have wasted away in her prison, alone. She wouldn’t have anyone to tell her story to.
***
Hank and others did their part to help slow some of the rumors that had circulated. The story had reached even further than my friends—by Vincent’s actions, it had been absorbed by faculty and staff at my school, and former co-workers. Some relationships were, unfortunately, unsalvageable. In a little over a month, Vincent had nearly destroyed my reputation with just about every person I knew locally.
Ovid’s description of Tereus shows him as being likewise devious and manipulative, a trait that aided him in his deception of Procne and others on multiple occasions.When Tereus first gazes upon Philomela and desires her, he concieves various tactics on how he plans on sleeping with her: “Bribe her attendants? Seduce the girl with rare and precious gifts?”
He then begs King Pandion to agree to send Philomela to Thrace, ostensibly by the wishes of his wife. “Love let him eloquence,” said Ovid, “When he seemed to go beyond the mandate he’d been given, he said that this was merely Procne’s wish, and added tears, as though they too were part of his commission.”
After Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue and leaves her in her prison, he returns to Procne who immediately asks about her sister. Tereus tells his wife “a convincing tale of how she died,” peppering his story with “practiced sobs… [which made his story] altogether credible.” This is the second time in the narrative we see Tereus crying to make his lies more credible, and the second time we see Ovid drawing specific attention to his practiced deceptiveness.
The juxtaposition of Tereus’ manipulative words against Philomela’s speechlessness is jarring. Without Philomela’s silence, Tereus’ deceptions wouldn’t work. They make a tragic pair: a man who says a lot, but none of it is true, and a woman who can’t speak a word but longs to tell the truth.
The villains in Ovid’s stories—at least that of Philomela—are, at first glance, much clearer cut than those in real life. What excuse is there for Tereus, for what he did? In the Metamorphoses, the justifications are vague. “Her beauty surely justified such passion,” says Ovid. “…a bent that Thracians have for lechery…he burned with his and with his nation heat.” In my copy of the translated work, there’s a footnote where the editor comments: “[This is] an inadequate explanation for the horrors to come, but Ovid might be saying that Tereus simply does not reflect on his motives.”
But the way Ovid describes him, there are moments when you don’t see him as being just a stock character, a villain in the story. After all, Tereus is changed by what occurs, too, the same way that Philomena and Procne are. Of course, that is no excuse for the inhumane way he treated Philomela. But Tereus is a man who loses his innocent child in the most gruesome way possible; he becomes “his own son’s tomb.” And once he discovers what happens, he weeps. Not the fake tears which he used to manipulate Procne and her father—he shows real, actual grief and rage at Itys’ death; he is even willing to cut his stomach open if it meant saving his child. I couldn’t help but feel pity for him at that moment. The story would have been easier to stomach if we didn’t know how Tereus mourned.
I can ruminate over and over (and I have) about why Vincent did what he did. He was sad and hurt because I had done hurtful things. He needed a way out. He needed that validation and sympathy from our friends so that they might give him a roof over his head and a shoulder to cry on. A story about escaping abuse would garner more sympathy than him leaving his bad relationship. He was exhausted having to carry the weight of my emotions, the brunt of my frustrations. He had entered fight-or-flight mode and was making decisions based on survival, not thinking about how he was affecting others. He needed someone to take care of him more than I could. Part of it was likely good old-fashioned misogyny, what with bites at my jobs, my independence. And he probably wanted to hurt me, even a little bit. The more I think, discuss, and consider, the less I can hate him. He was human, after all.
I am not naïve enough to completely absolve Vincent of misdeeds for the sake of empathetic reasoning—he knew what he was doing. He was strategic in who he told, what he told them, and how he cut them off from me. He would only use the word “abuse” to those who might not know better. He meant to cut me off from others, for the very purpose that I wouldn’t be allowed to tell my side of the story. He counted on my silence, on my disconnection from our support system. It was only after I was able to speak that things started to fall apart.
When Philomela exclaims to Tereus that she would tell others of his misdeeds, Ovid notes that her words “provoke[d] the savage tyrant’s wrath and fear in equal measure.” Tereus’ choice to cut out her tongue stemmed partly from his anger and pride, but also because he knew what she was capable of. This is another instance where Ovid shows Tereus acting in a tragically human way: he was scared of Philomela. He knew exactly what would happen if she were allowed to speak. He knew what the consequences would be for him, as did Vincent.
The consequences, in Vincent’s case, were rather minor. He moved home and lost the respect of some of his friends. But our university couldn’t do much about his behavior, even though I had once vied for his demise, because I wasn’t a student anymore and his actions on paper weren’t particularly heinous.
As I said, we don’t always get that grand gesture. Sometimes we just have to live with what we get.
Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to compare Philomela’s story of rape and abuse with what I went through. However, I think it’s true that these stories don’t need to be one-to-one comparisons for us to find comfort in them, to find relatability in them. Ovid very well may have used them that way, as metaphors to highlight what he had gone through under Augustan’s administration. I may not have gone through exactly what Philomela did, but that doesn’t mean her story can’t be mine.
I think there is something about visualizing your trauma against the backdrop of myth that makes it more meaningful, somehow. Like, I’m suffering, but there’s a reason behind it. It makes it more profound. It’s a way of taking back what happened to you and viewing it on your own terms. It wasn’t all for nothing, then, even if I don’t get the justice you craved. I think that can be better than just sitting with it.
It’s like a shared comradery with these figures from myth—I’m right by Clytemnestra’s side as she mourns her child and her marriage, or on the beach with Ariadne as the man she loves leaves her behind. We are no longer traumatized humans in the real world, but figures of myth and legend. We’re the ones the playwrights wrote tragedies about, and the artists painted on the side of their kraters. Doesn’t that make your hurt easier?
