“From Myth to #MeToo” is the subtitle of one of her chapters. (This stone really does understand hearing Nourie’s story, it swells with pity.) Dimensions converge in Tatar’s book: deep, shimmering, archetypal time and the urgency of the present moment. “Silenced women are not without tools,” Tatar writes in her new book, The Heroine With 1001 Faces, “and Philomela reminds us that so-called women’s work-weaving, sewing, and working with coverings-provides an opportunity not just to create but also to communicate.” Female telling, however hopeless or subterranean, is a fairy-tale motif, as Tatar shows us: There’s the Goose Girl in the Brothers Grimm, who opens her heart to an iron stove, and the Armenian tale of Nourie Hadig, mistreated and betrayed, who confides in the sympathetic Stone of Patience. The germ of hope in the tale is that Philomela is not silenced still trapped by her abductor, the speechless princess secretly weaves her denunciation of Tereus into the imagery of a tapestry, which she then sends to her sister.įor the distinguished folklorist Maria Tatar, Philomela’s resourcefulness-literally, her craftiness-places her in a secret lineage of truth-telling women. A sexual assault, a silencing, a mutilated testimony-there is nothing supernatural about any of this. It barely qualifies as mythic, the story of Philomela. From Ted Hughes’s Tales From Ovid(1997): “The tongue squirmed in the dust, babbling on-Shaping words that were now soundless.” From Nina MacLaughlin’s Wake, Siren(2019): “Please imagine how it continues to wriggle, how it twitches and moves on the dirt floor.” More modern retellers of The Metamorphoses have been similarly transfixed. Ovid, characteristically, zooms in: The wound pours the severed tongue bounces and mutely spasms-“as an adder’s tail cut off doth skip a while,” in Golding’s version. Philomela, towering in eloquence, vows to tell the world what Tereus has done her raised voice, she promises him in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation, will “make the stones to understand.” So Tereus cuts her tongue out. King Tereus of Thrace, having lusted after his sister-in-law, Philomela, inveigles her away from her father’s protection, takes her to a forest dungeon, and rapes her. It’s one of the darkest and bloodiest episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This article was published online on August 4, 2021.
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