Throughout its version of the Judgement of Paris from the perspective of the titular speaker of the poem, Tennyson’s “Oenome” emphasizes the sensory experience of sight. After all, the central driving conflict of the poem is Paris’s choice to award “‘a fruit of pure Hesperian gold’” to either Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite (65), based on his eyes’s personal aesthetic taste of who is“‘the most fair’” among the three gorgeous goddesses (Tennyson 71). Similarly, Oenome, in quoting Paris’s instructions to her to hide “‘within the cave’” (85) where she “‘Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard / Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods’” suggests her own self awareness of her status as a bystander also dependent on the visual experience of her own eyes (Tennyson 87-88). Nonetheless, despite the heavy dependence of Tennyson’s poem on the sensory experience of sight, “Oenome” places pressure on this model of judgment based on visuality – the fallibility of sight culminates in Paris’s final betrayal of the innocent, bystanding Oenome, although the cracks in this practice of leaving everything bare and naked to eyes do reveal themselves earlier on in “Oenome” prior to Paris’s ultimate choice of Aphrodite as fairest.
In her emphasis on the sensory experience of the eyes throughout Oenome, the titular speaker implies a system of justice based on visuality – sight becomes incorporated into a system of trial and justice as represented by Paris’s Judgement of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. There is an intentional performativity in the initial entrance of the goddesses, how “‘Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower’” to stand before Paris (93), how at the very moment they step into the opening, the surrounding flowers and vegetation “‘in many a wild festoon / Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs / With bunch and berry and flower through and through’” (Tennyson 98-100). Oenome’s mention of the goddess’s “‘[nakedness]’” suggests a gesture towards objectivity: the goddesses leave everything open to the eyes, hinting at an attempt to leave the truth completely unhidden and unconcealed. In addition, the intense visuality of the blooming “‘bunch and berry and flower’” only serves to further highlight the dependence on the sensory experience of sight in Paris’s trial. But even in these early moments of his trail, this overbursting imagery of a beautiful and fertile natural world (the surrounding “‘Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, / Lotos and lilies’” are in full and resplendent bloom (Tennyson 95-96)) troubles the objectivity ostensibly associated with “‘[nakedness].’” Though the blooming imagery is not overtly deceptive and does not obviously violate the doctrine of bearing all to the senses, in the openness and intentionality of the imagery’s flattering framing of the goddesses, it already suggests how, ironically, clear sightedness can still bypass purely intellectual, fair judgment, and absolute truth to influence a viewer’s much more subjective experience of aesthetics and sensuality.
Also worth noting about this troubled system of visual judgment is that it, in fact, depends on aesthetics as much as laying everything bear is that final arbitration lies at the whims of a single mortal man: Paris. As such, this model of judgment based on the experience of the eyes is autocratic rather than democratic, depending, potentially, on the whims of one rather than the many. Accompanying this form of judgment then, is also an inherent sense of exclusion. The masculine figure of the judge, here Paris, allows Oenome, a feminized figure, nominal participation in this model of visuality – Oenome quotes Paris instructing her that “‘‘Thou, within the cave / Behind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, / Mayst well behold them [the goddess]’’” (Tennyson 85-87). But Oenome’s position of “‘‘[beholder]’’” is still lacking in the type of masculine agency exhibited by Paris. She may “‘‘see thy Paris judge of Gods’’” (88), but this “‘‘[seeing],’’” this use of the eyes is conditional on her silence, voicelessness and minimal presence: Oenome is to relegated to being “‘‘unbeheld, unheard’’” (87), only given the pithy consolation of being allowed to “‘‘Hear all’’” (Tennyson 89). If Paris is an actor on center stage exhibiting the masculine hubris of declaring himself, a mere mortal, the “‘judge of Gods,’” then Oenome has essentially been forced off the stage into the role of a bystander in this method of judgment based on nakedness. Though both Oenome and Paris are nominally afforded the equal exercise of sight, Paris has greater agency in using this sight to influence the ordering of the goddess’s “‘[fairness].’”
That Paris’s Judgment of “‘[fairness]’” based on the sensory experience of sight is easily corrupted by the purposeful manipulation of the senses is perhaps most extremely illustrated in his response to Aphrodite. The effectiveness lies not with in Aphrodite’s choice words in and of themselves, which are relatively short and unspecial when considered alone, but in the seductive image it creates before Paris’s eyes: “‘‘I promise thee / The fairest and most loving wife in Greece’’” (Tennyson 182-183). Note the irony of Aprodite’s use of “‘fairest,’” which has been a central preoccupation throughout the poem – allegedly, fairness is in conjunction with nakedness, the sense that everything has been put before the eyes for a truthful, fair, and objective judgment. But in this moment, the promise of what is fair ends up twisting the sensory experience of sight and preventing the accomplishment of what is fair in a more legalistic and justice oriented sense of the word – justice turns out to blind, not out of a sense of objectivity but due to the callous oversight of abuses occurring right before it. In fact, this failure of clearsightedness as a means for judgement is perhaps also emphasized in Oenome’s instinctive and momentary turn away from Paris awarding the fruit to Aphrodite, in which Oenome averts her own gaze, literally canceling out her ability to see: “‘I shut my sight for fear’” (Tennyson 184).
Even in the case of Athena, the goddess meant as the embodiment of the ideal of intelligence and unbiased judgment in moments of trial, the doctrine of nakedness falls short. Oenome acknowledges Athena as the goddess that comes closest to fair-sightedness and objectivity as she cries out to Paris, “‘‘Give it [the fruit] to Pallas!,’’” yet the irony of this frantic endorsement of Athena is that it is founded on Athena’s vocalized self acknowledgement of the fragility of visuality in making just judgments (Tennyson 166). Admittedly, Athena makes a gesture towards an unadulterated experience of nakedness, claiming to Paris,
‘I woo thee not with gifts.
Sequel of guerdon could not alter me
To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am,
so shalt thou find me fairest (Tennyson 150-153).
But Athena quickly recants her reliance on the sensory experience of the eyes, their ability to simply “‘‘Judge thou me by what I am.’’” She, too, recognizes the fallibility of sight, the unfortunate reality that “‘Thy [Paris’s] mortal eyes are frail to judge of fair, / Unbiased by self-profit’” (Tennyson 155-156). As a result, Athena fails to live up to the ideal clear-sighted fairness that she is meant to ultimately symbolize and ends up also embroiled in an exploitative model of nakedness, of baring all and subjecting herself to a flawed, “mortal,” and masculine gaze. She, like Aphrodite, even engages in the trickery of creating sensuous imagery to sway what appears as fair before Paris’s eyes – betraying even one of the core facets of her immortal status, that she is the virgin goddess, she tempts Paris with the seductive image of “‘‘my vigour, wedded to thy blood’’” (158) that will “‘’push thee forward through a life of shocks, / Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow / Sinewed with action’’” (Tennyson 160-162).
In the face of this abject betrayal, then, Oenome herself attempts to turns alternative modes of visuality that are different from the exploitative and hypocritical masculine of model of judgment presented by Paris. Though Paris, in enacting his judgment based on the fragility of his own oversight, pushes Oenome into a space of relative invisibility, “‘‘the cave’’” (85), so that she may remain, in his own words, “‘‘unbeheld’’” and “‘‘unheard,’’” Oenome does not passively resign herself entirely to this subjection in the faces of the goddess’s nakedness (Tennyson 87). Instead, Oenome notably carves out and creates her own space of visibility through the form of the poem, that recenters herself and what she herself sees and feels during Paris’s Judgment from her own first person perspective – essentially, she reclaims some semblance of a lyrical “I” for herself, for example, through the repeated first person refrain of “‘O mother Ida, hearken ere I die’” at the beginning of nearly every stanza in the entire poem. In the very visual appearance of the form of Tennyson’s poem, this first-person “I” perspective does a great deal of heavy lifting, taking up a great amount of space for nearly a total of three hundred, and even explodes in Oenome taking back the process of evaluating fairness based on the sensory experience of sight for herself. She supplants Paris’s judgment of Aphrodite as fairest, instead only accepting the judgment she makes about herself with her own eyes: rhetorically, she inquires with heavy use of the first person perspective, “‘Fairest—why fairest wife? am I not fair?’” (192) and ultimately, in a move of self determination that embraces her own clearsightedness, upholds her own observation of the world, declaring “‘Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday … a wild and wanton pard … crouched fawning in the weed’” (Tennyson 194-197). Oenome seems to suggest that she, like Paris, can practice the same procedure of judging by eyesight to make the final determination of “‘fair’” – implicit is the rhetorical question that if they are both subjected to the power and limitations of depending on their eyesight to form judgements, why should the results of Oenome’s gaze be any less legitimate than those of Paris?
Much of the power of Tennyson’s poem comes from how it attempts to redeem to experience of visuality through exploring it from a collectivized, more empathetic, and feminized perspective in lieu of the voyeuristic practice of nakedness, practiced not only mythically, in tales like the Judgement of Paris, but also in the lived reality of systems of court, justice, and trial. As part of her quest to redeem the efficacy of feminine gaze, Oenome, rather than dictatorially depending on the vulnerable nakedness of her own eyes, also seeks out a sisterly community of women, whose insights have similarly been shunned and cast aside. Significantly, in the final stanza of “Oenome,” the titular speaker makes clear her plan to “Talk with the wild Cassandra” (259). While in the mythical vernacular, Cassandra, in refusing Apollo’s rapacious advances, is cursed by him to not have any of her predictions be believed by those around her, Oenome specifically seeks out her outcasted, prophetic gaze. Towards Cassandra, Oenome ostensibly expresses a solidarity – they are both women who must seek out alternative ways of seeing for themselves because they have been somehow alienated by the male gaze and masculine systems of visual experience based on unfairly exploiting nakedness.
Also worth registering is how, in actively consulting Cassandra, Oenome also lends a credence and visibility to the female rage that has been cast away or erased in traditional stories of events of the Trojan War. Not succumbing to the general aura of distrust surrounding Cassandra, Oenome believes in her enough to quote her – according to Oenome “‘[Cassandra] says / A fire dances before her,’” a strikingly fiery image of the world, to which Oenome herself personally relates (Tennyson 259-260). Similarly, in the face of Paris’s betrayal, what dances before Oenome’s eyes, in her only sensory experience of the world based on sight, is “‘only burning fire’” (Tennyson 264). This visually striking, fiery relationality between Cassandra and the titular Oenome recenters the infamous events of Troy from a more collectivized feminine perspective of shared sisterly visual experience – Tennyson suggests that as important as the anger of men like Achilles or Hector on the battlefield is also the fierce rage of female characters who, in a massive oversight are frequently sidelined in narratives of the war. From the fragility and objectivity of masculine sight in the face of the manipulability of nakedness rises a confidence in collectivized, more rounded, and perhaps fairer stories and testimony from women based on their own alternative ways of looking at the world.
Works Cited
Tennyson, Alfred. “Oenome.” Tennyson: Selected Poetry: a Broadview Anthology of British Literature, edited by Erik Gray, et al., Broadview Press, 2014, pp. 32-40.
Isabella Zhou 
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