Ovid’s account forces upon us the analogy between weaving or spinning and tale-telling. Classicist Edith Hamilton elaborates upon this connection by noting that “Philomela’s case looked hopeless. 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.… The women … could weave, into the lovely stuffs they made, forms so lifelike anyone could see what tale they illustrated. Philomela accordingly turned to her loom. She had a greater motive to make clear the story she wove than any artist ever had.”6 And when Procne “unrolled the web … with horror she read what had happened, all as plain to her as if in print.” What is notable about Hamilton’s account is the ease with which she elides the acts of weaving or spinning, narrating a tale in pictorial or “graphic” terms, and writing that is to be read and understood by the comprehending audience. But Hamilton’s elisions find their basis in the semiotics of Greek itself, which Ann Bergren brilliantly analyzes in her study “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought.”7 Bergren argues cogently that “the semiotic8 activity peculiar to women throughout Greek tradition is not linguistic. Greek women do not speak, they weave. Semiotic woman is a weaver. Penelope is, of course, the paradigm,” to which we might add, among others, Helen, Circe, the Fates, and Philomela. But the semiotic relationships are far more complicated. For if women weave and use the woven object, be it tapestry or robe, as a medium for narrating the truth, it must also be recalled that Greek culture inherited from Indo-European culture a tradition in which poets metaphorically defined their art as “weaving” or “sewing” words. Having appropriated the terms of what was “originally and literally woman’s work par excellence,” as Bergren illustrates, Greek poets “call their product, in effect, a ‘metaphorical web.’ ” Bergren’s emphasis falls upon the male appropriation of women’s peculiar craft of spinning as a semiotic equivalent for the art of creating Greek poetry itself. For my purposes, the intimate connection, both literal and metaphoric, between weaving and telling a story also establishes the cultural and literary frameworks within which women transmit not only tapestries that tell stories, but also later folklore and fairy tales. In this respect, Bergren’s analysis of Philomela again becomes germane, for she writes: “Philomela, according to Apollodorus (3.14.8), huphēnasa en peplōi grammata ‘wove pictures / writing (grammata can mean either) in a robe’ which she sent to her sister. Philomela’s trick reflects the ‘trickiness’ of weaving, its uncanny ability to make meaning out of inarticulate matter, to make silent material speak. In this way, women’s weaving is, as grammata implies, a ‘writing’ or graphic art, a silent, material representation of audible, immaterial speech.” Similarly, when later women become tale-tellers or sages femmes, their “audible” art is likewise associated with their cultural function as silent spinners or weavers, and they employ the folk or fairy tale as a “speaking” (whether oral or literary) representation of the silent matter of their lives, which is culture itself.
What then are the multiple levels through which Philomela’s tale is told, that is, in which the silent tapestry is made to speak so graphically? First, we might acknowledge the actuality of Tereus’ rape itself, the truth of an act which is re-presented to us in various forms. When Philomela threatens to seek an audience to whom she will tell her story, Tereus belatedly recognizes the terrible power of the woman’s voice to speak, and by a possible psychological displacement, of the fear he harbors that the woman’s body will reveal the foul ravishment by generating illegitimate offspring. This double recognition that both tongue and body may speak of his unspeakable act explains why Tereus must not only sever Philomela’s tongue but imprison her in the woods as well, removed from society and unable to communicate her sorry fate in either way.
Second, Philomela turns in her agony to the mainstay of women’s domestic life, the spinning enjoined upon women both by ancient practice and by the later biblical portrait in Proverbs (31:10–31) of the virtuous woman. She who spins is the model of the good woman and wife and, presumably, in many cultures of the subservient woman who knows her duty—that is, to remain silent and betray no secrets. Philomela, tongueless though she may be, creates a tapestry that becomes her voice. Ironically, Philomela, the innocent woman who spins, becomes the avenging woman who breaks her enforced silence by simply speaking in another mode—through a craft presumed to be harmlessly domestic, as fairy tales would also be regarded in later centuries. What is significant, however, is that Philomela’s tapestry becomes the first “telling,” a grammata (woven picture/writing) that fulfills the verbal threat previously uttered, yet so cruelly foreshortened. It is the first remove from the actual rape as an event, done this time through a medium which “writes” (graphein) that truth in a style governed by the conventions of pictorial narration.
Third, the tapestry, woven strand by strand, becomes itself a metaphor for Ovid’s patiently detailed rendering of the myth in words. Ovid, the skilled craftsman of Roman storytelling, in a sense semiotically resembles Philomela, whose distinctive female craft is weaving. Ovid further stylizes the tale in one further remove from the act when he attaches the transformation or metamorphosis of Philomela into a swallow and Procne into a nightingale. That metamorphosis presents us with another way of envisioning the relationship of Philomela’s story to Ovid’s. We might conclude that Ovid himself has heard the nightingale’s singing (as the emperor would later do in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale”) and has articulated it for us, as part of his sequence of tales which comprise the Metamorphoses. Nonetheless, the event and threatened telling, the tapestry that speaks, and the eternal song of lament that retells all originate with Philomela, though we know them only through the crafted version of Ovid’s poetic art.
The paradigm that I envision is, therefore, twofold. First, Philomela as a woman who weaves tales and sings songs becomes the prototype for the female storytellers of later tradition, those sages femmes whose role is to transmit the secret truths of culture itself. It is critical to note, as I hinted earlier, that the conveyor of the tapestry is herself an old and trusted servant woman, who takes the tapestry through which the voiceless Philomela speaks to the sister, Procne, who reads and understands the depiction. Similarly, I might suggest that in the history of folktale and fairy tale, women as storytellers have woven or spun their yarns, speaking at one level to a total culture, but at another to a sisterhood of readers who will understand the hidden language, the secret revelations of the tale. Second, Ovid, the male poet, by appropriating Philomela’s story as the subject of his myth also metaphorically reinforces the connection between weaving and the art of storytelling. Through his appropriation, he lays claim to or attempts to imitate the semiotic activity of woman par excellence—weaving, by making his linguistic recounting an equivalent, or perhaps implicitly superior version of the original graphic tapestry. Like Zeus, as Ann Bergren details, who incorporates his wife, Metis, and gives birth to the virgin Athena, so too Ovid seeks to control the female power of transformative intelligence, that power which enabled Metis to shift and change shapes. Despite its primacy as a literary text, Ovid’s account is nonetheless a retold version, having already been truthfully represented through the peculiarly female medium of weaving, and only imitatively represented to us through the creative, transformative power of poetic art—the weaving of a tale in a second sense. In Ovid’s tale itself, Tereus more brutally attempts to usurp speech, not only by cutting out the female tongue with which Philomela threatens to “speak” of his crimes, but also by contriving a false story of her death in a duplicitous and ultimately fatal misrepresentation of reality. To appropriate the tongue/text and the fictive-making function, for both Tereus and Ovid, is fraught with triumph and terror, for both only approximate the truth and can do no more than render a twice-old tale.
When the French scholar Antoine Galland first translated The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night f
rom Arabic into French (1704–17), he retitled them Arabian Nights Entertainments, no doubt heightening the appeal to the French court’s sophisticated taste for exotic delights.9 When we conjure up The Arabian Nights, we are also likely to think first of discrete tales, primarily masculine adventures (“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp,” or “Sinbad”), recalling neither the narrative framework nor the stated function which is not only to entertain but also to instruct. But who tells the tales? And for what reason? The frame story identifies Scheherazade as the tale-spinner and the purpose as a double deliverance, of virgins from slaughter and of an aggrieved king from his mania.
The frame plot of The Arabian Nights may thus seem straightforward. King Shahryar of India surprises his adulterous wife as she torridly copulates with a blackamoor slave. He executes his wife and swears “himself by a binding oath that whatever wife he married he would abate her maidenhead at night and slay her next morning to make sure of his honour; ‘For,’ said he, ‘there never was nor is there one chaste woman upon the face of the earth’ ” (p. 14). Scheherazade, the “wise and witty” daughter of the King’s Wazir, steps in to break this cycle of silent sacrifice by offering herself as a “ransom for the virgin daughters of Moslems [sic] and the cause of their deliverance” (p. 15). Her counterplot requires, however, the complicity of her sister. Admitted to the bedchamber, Dunyazad, foreshadowing each evening’s formulaic plea, appeals, “Allah upon thee, O my sister, recite to us some new story, delightsome and delectable, wherewith to while away the waking hours of our latter night,” so that Scheherazade in turn might “ ‘tell thee a tale which shall be our deliverance, if so Allah please, and which shall turn the King from his blood-thirsty custom’ ” (p. 24). Tale after tale, Scheherazade ceases just before “the dawn of day … to say her permitted say,” thereby cannily suspending each tale mid-way and luring the King into a three-year reprieve—or a thousand and one Arabian nights (p. 29).
Historia interrupta may be sufficient to stave off execution, but it is clearly not to be recommended as a contraceptive, for within three years’ time Scheherazade has “borne the King three boy children” (p. 508). Craving release “from the doom of death, as a dole to these infants,” Scheherazade elicits repentant tears from the king, who readily responds: “I had pardoned thee before the coming of these children, for that I found thee chaste, pure, ingenuous and pious!” (p. 508). Sexuality and marital fidelity are here intimately linked with the act of tale-telling, strikingly resembling the same motifs in the story of Procne and Philomela. Whereas in Ovid’s myth, the tapestry becomes a medium for communicating Tereus’ adulterous rape and instigating a proper vengeance, in The Arabian Nights the two sisters conspire together to cure King Shahryar by telling admonitory stories of past times and by demonstrating Scheherazade’s chaste fidelity. Scheherazade’s purity, signified by the legitimate product of her womb, converts the king from his “blood-thirsty custom.” But it is likewise Scheherazade’s wise telling of tales that instructs the king in precisely how to interpret his good fortune: “ ‘Thou marvelledst at that which befell thee on the part of women,’ ” Scheherazade allows, “ ‘and indeed I have set forth unto thee that which happened to Caliphs and Kings and others with their women … and in this is all-sufficient warning for the man of wits and admonishment for the wise’ ” (pp. 508–9). Like an analyst upon whom the patient projects his murderous jealousy, so Scheherazade’s stories function for King Shahryar, who with reasoning powers restored and heart cleansed returns from mania to sanity.
Scheherazade’s power to instruct derives from three kinds of special knowledge attributed to women: the knowledge of sexual passion, the knowledge of healing, and the wisdom to spin tales. More a model of the intellectual and literate storyteller than, like Philomela, of the domestic spinner and singer, Scheherazade, it is written, “had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by-gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred” (p. 15). The description might apply as well to those later “learned Ladies” of the French court, Madame d’Aulnoy and Mlle. L’Héritier, or to well-bred English governesses (Madame de Beaumont, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre).10 And one stands amazed at the immense repertoire of Scheherazade’s stories, sufficient we might imagine for another one thousand and one nights of delectation and delight. Scheherazade paradigmatically reinforces our concept of female storytellers as transmitters of ancient tales, told and remolded in such a way as to meet the special needs of the listener—in this case, King Shahryar and all men who harbor deep fears of the sexual woman and the dual power of her body and voice. As readers of The Arabian Nights, we participate as eavesdroppers in the bedchamber, together with the King and Dunyazad, whom Scheherazade initiates into the mysterious truths of sexuality and folklore. Similar to Procne, who unrolled the tapestry and understood its grammata, Dunyazad comes to signify the community of all women to whom the female narrator tells tales.
The voice to tell “marvellous stories and wondrous histories,” the wisdom to shape them rightly, the procreative and imaginative generativity belong to Scheherazade. But in The Arabian Nights we find another instance of male appropriation (p. 515). No doubt a remarkably quick student, King Shahryar retells “what he had heard from” Scheherazade during three years’ time to his brother Shah Zaman, who is afflicted with the same jealous mania (p. 510). He is also miraculously redeemed and conveniently wed to Dunyazad. Having usurped the storytelling and curative power originally possessed by Scheherazade, the King further summons “chroniclers and copyists and bade them write all that had betided him with his wife, first and last; so they wrote this and named it ‘The Stories of the Thousand Nights and a Night’ ” (p. 515). A succeeding, equally “wise ruler,” who “keen-witted and accomplished … loved tales and legends, especially those which chronicle the doings of Sovrans and Sultans,” promptly “bade the folk copy them and dispread them over all lands and climes; wherefore their report was bruited abroad” (pp. 515–16). As the basis for a theory of the origin and dissemination of The Arabian Nights, this account may be as fictional as the frame story of Scheherazade; nevertheless, it usefully suggests the manner in which tales told by a woman found their way into royal circles, then were dispersed to the “folk,” where presumably oral recountings insured their descent to the present day. Even the narrator hesitates to push this theory too hard, disclaiming that “this is all that hath come down to us of the origin of this book, and Allah is All-knowing” (p. 516).
Beyond this intratextual story that establishes Scheherazade as the frame tale-teller, the question of authorial identity becomes yet murkier. Scholars have suggested that Scheherazade’s story appeared in the tenth-century Hezar Afsane, attributed to the Persian Princess Homai, daughter of Artaxerxes I, whose female authorship I would like to believe. But the alternative of a fifteenth-century Arabian collection, compiled by a professional storyteller in Cairo, sex unspecified, leaves us with no firm indication. We do know that in later centuries The Arabian Nights have come down to us (the folk) through French and English translations by savants, such as Galland, Henry Torrens (1838), E. W. Lane, John Payne (1882–84), and Richard Burton (1885–88), whose sixteen-volume English edition has been praised for its “exceptional accuracy, masculine vitality, and literary discernment” (emphasis added). Reinforcing the paradigm set by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scheherazade’s story and The Arabian Nights exemplify further the appropriation of text by a double narration in which a presumably male author or collector attributes to a female the original power of articulating silent matter. But having attributed this transformative artistic intelligence and voice to a woman, the narrator then reclaims for himsel
f (much as Tereus and the King assert dominion over body and voice within the tales) the controlling power of retelling, of literary recasting, and of dissemination to the folk—a folk that includes the female community of tale-tellers from which the stories would seem to have originated.
Subsequent European collections of folk and fairy tales often assert a similarly double control over voice and text, whether as a mere literary convention or as a reflection of the actual informants and contexts of tale-telling. The Book of the Seven Wise Masters, or Seven Sages, probably of ninth-century Persian origin, but known in Europe, practically inverts the frame story of The Arabian Nights Entertainments.11 Not a wazir’s daughter, but instead a king’s son, under notice of death, is saved from execution by the tales of seven philosophers, who tell stories of female deceptions, while a woman vehemently defends her sex from these slanders. Gianfrancesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557), in his sixteenth-century Italian collection, Le piacevoli Notti or The Delightful Nights (1550–53), excuses the crude jests and earthy telling of tales by claiming (perhaps falsely?) to have heard them “from the lips of ten young girls.” And Giambattista Basile’s (1575–1632) famous Lo Cunto de li Cunti12 (1634–36) or the Pentamerone (1674) contains a frame story attributing the fifty tales to common townswomen. Charles Perrault, borrowing perhaps from les contes de vieilles told by his son’s nurse or repeated by his son Pierre, creates in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé: Avec des Moralitez (1697) the style of restrained simplicity that set the literary standard for subsequent fairy tale collections and Kunstmärchen.13
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