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Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker's Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple
MELUS, Fall-Winter, 2000 by Martha J. Cutter
The ancient story of Philomela has resonated in the imaginations of women writers for several thousand years. The presence of this myth in contemporary texts by African American women writers marks the persistence of a powerful archetypal narrative explicitly connecting rape (a violent inscription of the female body), silencing, and the complete erasure of feminine subjectivity.(1) For in most versions of this myth Philomela is not only raped--she is also silenced. In Ovid's recounting, for example, Philomela is raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus, who then tears out her tongue. Philomela is finally transformed into a nightingale, doomed to chirp out the name of her rapist for eternity: tereu, tereu. The mythic narrative of Philomela therefore explicitly intertwines rape, silencing, and the destruction of feminine subjectivity.
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Contemporary African American women's fiction contains allusions to this archetypal rape narrative. In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, for example, Pecola Breedlove's rape by her father Cholly causes a fragmentation of her psyche. Pecola's attempts to tell of her rape are nullified by her disbelieving mother, and by the novel's conclusion her voice is only exercised in internal colloquies with an imaginary friend. She flutters along the edges of society, a "winged but grounded bird" (158). Similarly, in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, after Lorraine is gagged and brutally gang raped, she becomes both insane and unable to speak of her rape. Finally, she is left with only one word, a word that echoes back to Philomela's "tereu, tereu," the word she attempted to use to stop her attackers: "Please. Please" (173).(2) Rape is thus a central trope in these texts for the mechanisms whereby a patriarchal society writes oppressive dictates on women's bodies and minds, destroying both subjectivity and voice. Or, as Madonne Miner puts it, "Men, potential rapists, assume presence, language, and reason as their particular province. Women, potential victims, fall prey to absence, silence, and madness" (181).
For writers such as Naylor and Morrison, the myth of Philomela graphically illustrates the way a patriarchal society censors and erases women's voices. More damaging, perhaps, Philomela's story also indicates that if women find other methods of communicating, these alternatives lead only to more violence and an even deeper silence. After her rape Philomela is imprisoned in a tower of stone, but she manages to weave a tapestry (or in some accounts a robe) depicting Tereus's actions. She sends this artwork to her sister Procne, who "reads" this text and understands its import. Buried within this myth of patriarchal subjugation, then, there is a subtext that focuses on how women can "speak" across and against the limits of patriarchal discourse. However, the myth's final message seems to be that women's alternative texts fail to transform in any lasting way the social or linguistic forces of patriarchal domination. Procne's response to her sister is to first consider killing Tereus, whom she calls, as translated by Humphries, "the author of our evils" (149, emphasis added). Instead she kills her young son Itys, roasts and grills Itys's flesh, and serves this "feast" to her husband. When Tereus apprehends what has happened, he attempts to destroy both Philomela and Procne, but the gods intervene, transforming all three characters into birds.
The structural pattern of the myth (and its warning to women) seems clear; as Patricia Joplin explains, the myth fixes "in eternity the pattern of violation-revenge-violation.... The women, in yielding to violence, become just like the men.... The sacrifice of the innocent victim, Itys, continues, without altering it, the motion of reciprocal violence" (48-49). More importantly, the myth also instantiates an endless cycle of linguistic violence against women: violence (i.e., rape) leads to silence (the tongue is torn out); attempts to break this silence through assertions of an alternative feminine voice (the tapestry) lead only to more violence (the killing of Itys), and finally, to a more complete and final silence (the death of the characters and the loss of their human voices). The myth suggests that an assertion of alternative feminine voice merely imprisons women all the more exhaustively in pejorative mastertexts that make men, as Procne says, the "author of our evils."
Like the novels of Morrison and Naylor, Alice Walker's The Color Purple invokes this archetypal rape narrative, but Walker is most interested in re-envisioning this myth through an alternative methodology of language. As Linda Abbandonato argues in her reading of the The Color Purple, it is important to consider how a woman can "define herself differently, disengage her self from the cultural scripts of sexuality and gender that produce her as feminine subject" (1107). Abbandonato argues that The Color Purple rewrites canonical male texts, but she does not discuss Walker's rewriting of the story of Philomela. Similarly, although critics such as Trudier Harris, Keith Byerman, Wendy Wall, Mae Henderson, and King-Kok Cheung have discussed Celie's acquisition of private and public languages, none of these critics has examined Walker's reconfiguration of linguistic elements of the myth of Philomela. Unlike the original mythic text, as well as the novels of Morrison and Naylor, Walker's text gives Philomela a voice that successfully resists the violent patriarchal inscription of male will onto a silent female body.
