The Daughter’s Text and the Thread of Lineage in the Old French Philomena

Abstract

The Philomela-Procne myth persists through the Western tradition as a disturbing narrative in which sexual violence and revenge intermingle with aesthetic self-consciousness. In Ovid’s treatment the myth takes on a specifically self-conscious literary quality. Philomela’s tapestry functions in the Metamorphoses as the symbol for art’s resistance to a barbaric and destructive world that would dismember and silence the self. More recently, feminist interpretations view the myth as an emblem of women’s victimization and resistance within literary history. 1 Perhaps more than any other Western myth, Philomela’s story articulates the link between sexual violence, the silencing of women’s voices, and the alternative discourse women fashion in weaving and embroidery. 2 Western literary aesthetics have also privileged the arts of weaving and embroidery as emblems for narrative art and textuality itself. This essay traces the uneasy merger of these themes in a twelfth-century French adaptation of Ovid known as the Philomena . 3 Since 1884, when Gaston Paris discovered it embedded within the Ovide Moralisé , the debate over the Philomena ’s authorship has obscured the intrinsic interest of the text itself. Paris and later scholars identified the 1,468-line verse adaptation as none other than the early work mentioned by Chrétien de Troyes in the prologue to Cligés under the title of La Muance de la hupe et de l’aronde et del rossignol . 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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