Philomela’s Cloth: Reading Authority Back into a Survivor’s Account

The presence of the cloth in the Philomela narrative offers the opportunity to restore Philomela’s authority along with her voice, stripped away from her by Tereus. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its many medieval reception texts, the account authored by Philomela is simultaneously inaccessible to the reader and authoritative within the narrative: its presence emphasizes the potential appropriation of her voice, just as it undermines the framing narrator’s authority in retelling her story. In reading authority back into the character, the reader resists their own complicity in her silencing.