This chapter confronts the fundamental problem of representing female desire, according to the hermeneutic theories I discuss in the introduction to this book. How can we speak of that which has no definition without reference to an originating masculine desire, unless we speak of it in relation to that masculine desire? At its most brutal, the paradigm we are looking at is Jerome's analogy of rape to textual interpretation, which proposes female desire as an irrelevance to the masculine making of meaning. It is this act of rape, and the silencing that results from it, that lie at the centre of Chaucer's ‘Legend of Philomela’, a text that seeks to explore how female desire might be given space to speak within a context in which it is almost automatically silenced. Raped and mutilated, Philomela weaves her story in tapestry, after her rapist cuts out her tongue. Taking up her narrative from a host of Classical and medieval sources, Chaucer enacts a parallel mutilation. Slashing through the familiar plot, he replicates the damage done to Philomela's body by cutting out the traditional conclusion to her story, leaving only an inarticulate ‘remenaunt’ (line 2383) to which he refuses to give voice. This much-remarked disruption is one of many disjunctive moments within the expected sequence of the narrative, and it serves to conflate two mutilated bodies: the textual corpus of the Philomela myth, and the tongueless, violated woman. As such, the ‘Legend of Philomela’ pointedly recalls Jerome's hermeneutic, and invites readers to reflect upon that traditional conflation of female body with feminised text, to try to understand what is missing, or inarticulate, within the traditional hermeneutic paradigm with which we are presented. Yet as the ‘Legend’ interrogates Jerome's paradigm, it illustrates the remarkable power of that hermeneutic denial of female desire, repeatedly representing attempts to articulate female desire as splintering off into images of deviancy and sexual dissidence. For Philomela, there is no way to articulate a female emotional experience, except by taking on the tools and linguistic strategies gendered masculine, a process that causes her to resemble other women whose appropriation of masculine tools indicates their sexual deviancy. As women seek to voice their emotions, they are forced to take on the habitus, the stance, the rhetorical or somatic devices associated with female deviant desires.