Philomela and Her Descendents: Re-membering Traumatized Women in Literature
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela is devoted sister, is victim of a brutal rape and mutilation, is weaver, is revenger, is nightingale. The specter of Philomela haunts the western canon, where she is a shorthand for rape, where the song of the nightingale is shorthand for suffering. Where Philomela is invoked, the ingenious weaver of the Metamorphoses is newly silenced by threadbare retellings. In Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Philomela is severed from both revenge and transformation; as Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, she is severed from the consolation and commiseration of other women; and in Eliot’s The Wasteland, her “inviolable voice” is severed from her violated body, laments to the crude unhearing.