The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  “What can Philomela do?” Ovid asks. “Great trouble” inspires resourcefulness, and the Princess of Athens, deprived of a voice, reveals Tereus’s crime by weaving its enactment into a cloth delivered to her sister. “Outwardly silent / yet inwardly ablaze,” Procne, outraged by the revelation of Philomela’s rape in the tapestry, invites Tereus to a feast. There, he “stuffs his gut,” feeding on the flesh and blood of his own child, the boy Itys, whom Procne has slain. “You would have thought / that the Athenians were poised on wings: and so they were!” That sentence introduces a series of Ovidian metamorphoses that put an end to the horrors. Procne is turned into a nightingale, doomed, as the female of the species, never to sing, while Philomela is turned into a swallow. Tereus, a towering figure of sin and depravity, becomes a bird as well, the colorful hoopoe. This is a change that changes nothing, for the conflict ends by returning the protagonists to nature, with no hope of finding justice in the real world. And now the story showcases an instance of such monumental horror that we are led to consider Procne to be as criminally guilty as Tereus.21

  Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Philomela, 1864

  The afterlife of Philomela’s story can be found in a number of works, most notably Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1588–93), a play (fictional rather than historical) in which Lavinia, daughter of the eponymous hero, is raped by men who sever her tongue and cut off her hands to prevent her from speaking, writing, or weaving. Lavinia later places a stick in her mouth to write the names of her attackers down in the dirt, reminding us that new technologies of denunciation emerge over time.

  Many features stand out in Ovid’s account, but Philomela’s rape and the severing of her tongue, along with Procne’s murder of her son Itys and preparation of a ghoulish banquet, arouse dread in powerful ways. The cutting out of tongues has a long and tortured history, as does the mutilation of women’s bodies. The severing of the tongue was a torture favored by those who engaged in religious persecution (in particular, as a form of punishment for blasphemy), and men and women suffered equally the pains of mutilation. In 484 CE, Hunneric, a Vandal conqueror, cut off the tongues and right hands of sixty Mauritanian Christians. Then there is Saint Christina, daughter of a Roman patrician living in the third century CE, who was locked in a tower, beaten, set on fire, and tortured on the wheel. After that, her tongue was cut out, but she continued to speak and was subjected to new forms of torture.

  In the folkloric pantheon there are many examples of women subjected to bodily mutilation, among them the “Girl without Hands,” a figure who must forage for food in the woods. Examples abound in literary works as well. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” a girl’s dancing feet are amputated as punishment for her love of beauty by a man dressed in red. The mutilation of the organ of speech lives on as a form of silencing in its most devastating form in Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” The title figure’s tongue is severed when she trades her voice for a pair of legs that enable her to advance in her mission of attaining not just a prince but also a human soul. In a different literary climate, there is the strange case of Ellen James in John Irving’s 1978 novel The World According to Garp. Her tongue is cut out by rapists, and she becomes the inspiration for the Ellen Jamesians, a misguided cult whose members cut out their tongues as a form of solidarity with the eleven-year-old victim.

  Amputating a tongue ensures, of course, that victims will be unable to declare bodily violations through speech. They are limited to bodily displays, with gestures grotesque in their desperation. In places where illiteracy is the rule, they also cannot identify perpetrators, thus placing them in a special category of the injured. As one cultural historian puts it, the single physical act of cutting out a tongue comes also to stand in for collective violation and voicelessness—a symbolic representation of how women have, through the ages, been silenced. The trope of a mutilated tongue becomes powerful in terms symbolic and real.22

  Silenced women are not without tools, 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. Tapestries, textiles, and embroidery: all can tell stories. Here is how Edith Hamilton describes Philomela’s plight and her resourceful solution: “She was shut up; she could not speak; in those days there was no writing. However, although people then could not write, they could tell a story without speaking because they were marvelous craftsmen. . . . Philomela accordingly turned to her loom. She had a greater motive to make clear the story she wove than any artist ever had.”23 That the language of textile production is closely correlated with the generation of stories and their revelatory power tells us much about women’s silent craft in preliterate cultures.24

  How strange and yet also how logical it is that so many of our metaphors for storytelling are drawn from the discursive field of textile production. We weave plots, spin stories, fabricate tales, or tell yarns—a reminder of how the work of our hands produced social spaces that promoted the exchange of stories, first perhaps in the form of chitchat, gossip, and news, then in the shape of narratives and other dense golden nuggets of entertaining wisdom passed down from one generation to the next. Interestingly, fabrication also implies misrepresentation. Stories may be invented but they may also be true in the form of higher-order wisdom. We have seen how misrepresentations and lies work by indirection in folklore to reveal the horrifying details of violent crimes. Fairy tales like the British “Mr. Fox” stage the possibility of creating fictions about unspeakable harms and injuries, using the supposedly counterfactual to get the facts out.

  Athena Silences Arachne with a Shuttle

  The Greeks gave us many master weavers, most notably Penelope, who, as we saw, set up a great loom in her palace to weave a shroud for Laertes, and on a nightly basis undid her work. There are also the Moirai, or Fates: Clotho, who spins a thread from her spindle; Lachesis, who measures the thread; and Atropos, who cuts it. Hovering over humans, they seem to control their destinies. And then there is Arachne, the inventor of linen cloth whose son Closter introduced the spindle for the manufacture of wool. She challenges Athena (I will use the Greek names even though our authoritative source on the story is Ovid) to a weaving contest—both use skeins of beautiful threads colored like the rainbow and filaments of gold and silver—and the goddess, worshiped as the protector of olive trees, ships, and weaving, does not turn her down. What does Athena depict? Her tapestry shows the gods, seated on high in all their glory, attending a contest in which the goddess herself defeats Poseidon. As a subtle hint to the audacious maiden with whom she is competing, she places in the corners of the tapestry four scenes of mortals punished for daring to challenge the gods.25

  By contrast, Arachne uses the contest as an opportunity to showcase the failings of the gods, weaving scenes of violent sexual assault into her “beautiful” tapestry. There is Zeus, “tricking” Europa by turning himself into a bull and abducting her. Next, we see Asterie, mother of Hecate, pursued by the same god, who has now disguised himself as an eagle. Leda cowers under the wing of a swan. Once again it is Zeus, masquerading as an avian creature. Then we see the god again, impersonating Amphitryon in order to dupe Alcmena, who believes he is her husband. And presto, he moves from that cruel deception to take the form of a golden shower, a flame, a shepherd, a multicolored serpent for successive conquests. Poseidon makes it into this gallery of rogues as well, first as a bull trying to seduce Canace, then as a ram to deceive Theophane, and finally, in additional scenes, as a horse, a bird, a dolphin. It does not stop there. We also see Apollo, going about the work of “seduction” as a shepherd, then outfitted in feathers, and later donning a lion skin. The depiction of these orgies of “celestial misconduct” (that is one translator’s term) enrages Athena, who is also incensed by the skill of the weaver. The goddess tears the woven work apart and hits Arachne over the head with a spindle. A mortified Arachne hangs herself to escape additional beatings and, after her death,
is fittingly turned into a spider, forever spinning webs that soon become new metaphors for storytelling.

  Lest we forget, Athena is the goddess who sprang, full-grown and motherless, clothed in armor, from Zeus’s head. As a favorite of Zeus and a goddess-warrior, she resents Arachne’s challenges to authority, her refusal to embrace humility and obedience. Ripping apart a tapestry that gives voice to violations, turning the shuttle into an instrument of silencing rather than revelation, and driving a woman back to nature: these are all tactics that speak volumes and would seem to win support for Arachne’s cause. Yet translators and educators have, for decades, sided with Athena. Here is Arachne’s story, a representative retelling, as found in Josephine Preston Peabody’s Old Greek Folk Stories. In it, as in many modern versions of the story, Arachne’s vanity and foolishness lead to her downfall. I cite it here in full to capture the horror of Arachne’s punishment and how every retelling of a story is also an interpretation of it.

  René-Antoine Houasse, Minerva and Arachne, 1706

  There was a certain maiden of Lydia, Arachne by name, renowned throughout the country for her skill as a weaver. She was as nimble with her fingers as Calypso, that nymph who kept Odysseus for seven years in her enchanted island. She was as untiring as Penelope, the hero’s wife, who wove day after day while she watched for his return. Day in and day out, Arachne wove too. The very nymphs would gather about her loom, naiads from the water and dryads from the trees.

  “Maiden,” they would say, shaking the leaves or the foam from their hair, in wonder, “Pallas Athena must have taught you!”

  But this did not please Arachne. She would not acknowledge herself a debtor, even to that goddess who protected all household arts, and by whose grace alone one had any skill in them.

  “I learned not of Athena,” she said. “If she can weave better, let her come and try.”

  The nymphs shivered at this, and an aged woman, who was looking on, turned to Arachne.

  “Be more heedful of your words, my daughter,” she said. “The Goddess may pardon you if you ask for forgiveness, but do not strive for honors with the immortals.”

  Arachne broke her thread, and the shuttle stopped humming.

  “Keep your counsel,” she said. “I fear not Athena; no, nor anyone else.”

  As she frowned at the old woman, she was amazed to see her change suddenly into one tall, majestic, beautiful,—a maiden of gray eyes and golden hair, crowned with a golden helmet. It was Athena herself.

  The bystanders shrank in fear and reverence; only Arachne was unawed and held to her foolish boast.

  In silence the two began to weave, and the nymphs stole nearer, coaxed by the sound of the shuttles that seemed to be humming with delight over the two webs—back and forth like bees.

  They gazed upon the loom where the goddess stood plying her task, and they saw shapes and images come to bloom out of the wondrous colors, as sunset clouds grow to be living creatures when we watch them. And they saw that the goddess, still merciful, was spinning, as a warning for Arachne, the pictures of her own triumph over reckless gods and mortals.

  In one corner of the web she made a story of her conquest over the sea-god Poseidon. For the first king of Athens had promised to dedicate the city to that god who should bestow upon it the most useful gift. Poseidon gave the horse. But Athena gave the olive—means of livelihood—symbol of peace and prosperity, and the city was called after her name. Again she pictured a vain woman of Troy, who had been turned into a crane for disputing the palm of beauty with a goddess. Other corners of the web held similar images, and the whole shone like a rainbow.

  Meanwhile, Arachne, whose head was quite turned with vanity, embroidered her web with stories against the gods, making light of Zeus himself and of Apollo, and portraying them as birds and beasts. But she wove with marvelous skill; the creatures seemed to breathe and speak, yet it was all as fine as the gossamer that you find on the grass before rain.

  Athena herself was amazed. Not even her wrath at the girl’s insolence could wholly overcome her wonder. For an instant she stood entranced; then she tore the web across, and three times she touched Arachne’s forehead with her spindle.

  “Live on, Arachne,” she said. “And since it is your glory to weave, you and yours must weave forever.” So saying, she sprinkled upon the maiden a certain magical potion.

  Away went Arachne’s beauty; then her very human form shrank to that of a spider, and so remained. As a spider she spent all her days weaving and weaving; and you may see something like her handiwork any day among the rafters.

  Arachne weaves a web with creatures that come alive, seeming to “breathe and speak.” This creative gift is so powerful that it rivals that of the gods, and the contest between goddess and mortal found in Greek mythology can be found repeated and reconfigured in stories from around the world. The Lenape, or Delaware Indians (an Indigenous tribe originally living in the Northeast regions of the United States and Canada), have a story about “How the Spider Came to Be.” It is said to derive from the tale of Arachne, but more than likely it arose independently as a fable about the rivalry between a “Creator” and a “skilled weaver.” In it, the woman, who turns out to be the “second finest weaver in all of Creation,” is punished for the “pride” she takes in her weaving. The Creator turns her into a spider.26 Women may procreate and create but it is an act of hubris to compete with the powers of divine beings. What we see in the tale of Arachne and in the Lenape fable about the origins of spiders is clear insight into an anxious need to set limits to women’s creativity, for their power to procreate and produce more than the mere semblance of life already places them in competition with supreme (male) deities. As tale-tellers and purveyors of rough truths, female weavers represent powerful threats to the status quo, and shrinking them down to the size of spiders, obliged to weave their webs in dark corners or high up in the rafters, means that their work can be ignored or will go unnoticed.

  There is more to be said about spiderlore, and, given the connections among webs, weaving, spinning, and storytelling, a figure like Anansi of African lore comes to mind. The patron god of language and storytelling, Anansi came to be known in the Caribbean and in the U.S. South as Aunt Nancy or Nancy or Miss Nancy. These spider storytellers can be both sinister and benevolent. Female cousins of Anansi constantly challenge the rules of the social order, and they also reveal the scandals that are part of the status quo. Before considering how women developed new strategies—verbal rather than visual—for exposing misconduct and indicting those who engaged in wrongdoing, let us look at the afterlife of Philomela’s story to see how it still resonates with us today.

  Writing Letters and Sewing Pants: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

  Alice Walker had women’s handiwork on her mind when she reflected on how she wanted “to do something like a crazy quilt” and write a story that can “jump back and forth in time, work on many different levels, and one that can include myth.”27 Walker never explicitly mentions Ovid’s Metamorphoses in connection with her story about how a young Black woman named Celie reclaims agency and constructs her identity by writing letters and sewing garments. But if we recall that Philomela “had a loom to work with, and with purple / On a white background, wove her story in,” it is almost impossible to imagine that Walker was not up to something, connecting a tale set in 1930s rural Georgia to a story from ancient Greece.

  The Color Purple begins with a letter addressed to God. Celie has been silenced, unable to communicate with anyone but a higher being after she is raped by a man she believes to be her father. He has decreed, “You better never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.”28 God the Father remains her interlocutor until she discovers letters from her sister Nettie. That correspondence was hidden from Celie by her husband, Albert, a man with his own ways of silencing women, through brute physical force and stealth. “I don’t write to God no more. I write to you,” Celie declares once she discovers Nettie’s letters.29

/>   How does Walker make the story of Philomela and Procne new, pointing the way to something beyond a cycle that begins with violence and is followed by revenge that repeats and perpetuates the ferocity of the initial act? Celie emerges from the silence imposed on her by double rapes. She struggles to find her voice, tell her story, and create an identity. Her sister Nettie, who narrowly escaped violation at the hands of “Pa” and Celie’s husband, Albert, becomes (like Procne for Philomela) her audience as she moves from an inability to say “I am” to taking ownership of what else but a company for selling things sewn from fabric: “Folkspants. Unlimited.”

  Telling her story in letters is just one strategy used by Celie to reconstitute her identity. Moving from the annihilation of her identity (“You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam . . . you nothing at all,” Albert tells her) to something constructive, Celie turns to sewing pants, an activity that blends the feminine with the masculine by using the handicraft of sewing to create garments traditionally worn by men. An odd choice at first blush, but sewing becomes the activity that reconciles Celie with Albert, enabling her to talk with him in ways that had never seemed imaginable: “Us sew, I say. Make idle conversation.” Celie finds an alternative to the destructive cycle of violence initiated by the rape that silenced her: “Everyday we going to read Nettie’s letters and sew. A needle and not a razor in my hand, I think.”30

  The mythical imagination prides itself on exaggeration and amplification. It gives us the raw rather than the cooked, putting us in touch with the dark side of human nature, with vices so terrible that even philosophers recoil from talking about them, because they are beyond rational thought. Stories in their primal form connect us with the irrational as nothing else does and remind us of our animal nature.31 The tale of Philomela and Tereus is the stuff of myth precisely because it takes us into the proverbial heart of darkness, enacting the unimaginable and challenging us to think and talk about dark emotions that take us out of our comfort zones. When Alice Walker gives us the story of Celie, she is creating a narrative that resonates with rather than reinvents Ovid’s account of Philomela. Celie and Philomela become figures in a crowded literary field rather than fictional reinventions parading in linear fashion through the ages, down from Ovid to us.