WHAT DIFFERENT THINGS DOES METAMORPHOSIS MEAN FOR THE SUBJECT UNDERGOING THE CHANGE IN THE METAMORPHOSES

‘Ovid’s tales of transformation are immensely varied’. One thing they have in common is that each subject is affected physically by their metamorphosis. In most cases the individual affected looks different. But, as ever, Ovid complicates simple notions and makes his changes affect his characters in a variety of ways. I will focus on the way that subjects are either liberated or inhibited by their transformations.

There are many examples of metamorphoses saving the subject from a negative situation. But there are an equal of cases where the subject is limited, imprisoned if you will, by the changes imposed on them. Metamorphosis can be freeing for the subject. Many women who become trees are changed in order to alleviate the stressful situation they find themselves in. For example, Daphne is able to avoid being raped by Apollo by becoming a tree. Myrrha is also turned into a tree so that she does not have to bear her suffering any longer (10.488-98). These changes to trees signify a return to nature from a culture that is restrictive and disagreeable. Myrrha’s love for her father is wrong because of a social taboo, inscribed by man. Nature does not observe such familial laws and so her transformation into an object of nature frees her from society’s constraints. There are also animal changes that occur which liberate the subject. Cadmus has witnessed the sufferings of his offspring and cannot endure the burden any longer.

Ovid is precise in his description of Cadmus and his wife as ‘worn by their woes and weight of years’ (4.567), increasing the pathos of their situation. Cadmus prays that he ‘May be a snake and stretch along the ground’ (4.576) and becomes a serpent ‘Even as he [speaks]’ (4.577). His request is fulfilled and he is freed from human responsibility. Harmonia also requests and is granted a serpentine transformation. This is an incident in the epic where the metamorphosis is out of choice. Not only are Cadmus and his wife allowed escaping their misery but they are also able to choose the means by which they do it. An interesting example of metamorphic release is the change of Philomela. As a bird she is given a voice that she lacked after Tereus ‘seized/Her tongue with tongs and, with his brutal sword,/Cut it away’ (6.553-55). As a bird she can function fully, she is restored to a complete form; her rape and mutilation disappear, they are no longer physical reminders of the crimes she was the victim of. The fact that she becomes a bird is also liberating in that she now possesses the power of flight, a power to go wherever she wishes without restrictions. She is literally able to rise above what happened to her, and above ordinary human capacity.

Another bird transformation is that of Perdix. His talent as an inventor surpassed his uncle Daedalus’s so, ‘In jealous rage his master hurled him down/Headlong from Pallas’s sacred citadel’ (8.250-51). But Minerva ‘clothed the lad with feathers as he fell’ (8.254) and turned him into a bird. Perdix’s transformation saved him from a painful death and allowed him to see Daedalus bury Icarus (8.235-37), a revenge he would not have been able to witness without the change. Here Ovid uses metamorphoses as an alternative for death, a transition to a new state of being but not an end. This is consistent with Pythagoras’s speech in Book 15 in which ‘Our souls/Are deathless; when they leave their former home,/Always new habitations welcome them’ (15.157-59). Ovid emphasises that Perdix is changed to ‘A bird unique and never seen before’ (8.238). It crystallisesPerdix’s talent for invention, he becomes an entirely new creature. So it could be said that his metamorphosis has allowed him to continue to innovate, in a way that death would have certainly denied. His change also gives the boy a kind of immortality because every partridge down through time will be a reminder of him. It is liberation from death. This leads onto a discussion of Daedalus. To all intents and purposes he metamorphoses himself into a bird. This literally liberated him when he felt that ‘seas on every side/Imprisoned him’ (8.184-85). His self-transformation enables the inventor to escape from Crete and the oppression of Minos. Daedalus experiences flight, something that mankind has never been able to achieve. In a way, he goes beyond human capability; he evolves, freed from the limits of human aptitude.

Hercules also ascends to a new level when he is deified. Ovid says that ‘his mortal frame is removed’ (9.271). Hercules is released from the concerns of humanity, freed from his role as civilizer and destroyer of monsters. He is no longer subject to the whims of others, like Eurystheus and Omphale, and so can finally rest. His metamorphosis, like the others I have discussed, has allowed him to escape from societal constraints and suffering. This allows one to argue that transformation can be a good thing, liberation from a negative situation.

The second half of my discourse will focus on what Penny Murray calls a ‘sense of bodily imprisonment’. Ovid also catalogues transformations that restrict the subject. There are even metamorphoses that are both liberating and limiting. To return to Perdix, he is freed from death by become a partridge but Ovid emphasizes that ‘this bird never lifts itself aloft’ (8.257).

As I pointed out in the case of Daedalus, invention allows a subject to go beyond the realm of human ability. Through this kind of progression mankind can evolve, both personally and culturally. Invention leads to social betterment. But as a flightless bird, if we equate flight with invention, rising above the established parameters of human capacity, Perdix cannot push these boundaries, as he would have done in human form. He is robbed of his capacity to innovate, his talent is curbed. His transformation has saved his life but restricted his talent. Likewise Daedalus is saved by his self-metamorphosis but Icarus is lost. The loss of his son could be seen as a punishment for the inventor, a warning not to overreach. Icarus’s transformation caused his death, he attempted to go too far beyond human capacity and so his life was limited.

The myth teaches temperance and so suggests that mankind should restrict his ambition to avoid failure. In relation to my discussion of Daphne and Myrrha, the Metamorphoses also catalog other changes to flora. Narcissus becomes a beautiful flower, a physical reminder of the boy’s beauty. It must also be noted that a flower cannot move about as animals do and so it also represents the fact that Narcissus was rooted to the spot by his perverse affection, ‘My love’s myself’ (3.467). The flower serves as a warning to other people against similar self-obsession. The effect this has on Narcissus, the boy, is to negate all other aspects of his personality in favor of focusing on this one characteristic. He has ceased to be a multifaceted human being and is now exclusively an emblem of vanity. There is not only a plant named after him but a noun (narcissism), only identified with what Ihab H. Hassan calls the ‘central, unifying, and self-degrading impulse which Narcissus has traditionally embodied’. To stick with this myth the same idea can be applied to Echo.

Yael Maschler points out that ‘Juno has punished Echo precisely with regard to her conversational skills’. She is reduced to the one aspect of her being that caused offence, ‘only her voice and bones are left; at last/only her voice’ (3.398-99). Both these myths have an element of aetiology; they explain the existence of a particular flower and the phenomenon of echoing. Despite the fact that the myths exist as an explanation of the natural world to a primitive people, they create characters that must be believed to possess personality traits like any real person. With this is mind one can argue that myths like those of Narcissus and Echo reduce potentially complex individuals to representations of one idea. Their transformations have limited their potential to embody a number of attributes.

As with Echo, metamorphosis is often a punishment, particularly towards the beginning of the epic. Arachne is changed to a spider, ‘still/Weaving her web’ (6.142-43), to punish her hubris. We see again that all that is remembered of the girl is her weaving and arrogance towards Minerva. The metamorphosis has reduced our perception of Arachne, limiting our understanding of her to this one feature of her personality and life up to the point that she was changed. The metamorphosis produces a kind of stasis, the subject has no option of changing their life for the better, and they are doomed to repeat their crime, rooted like the narcissus. Her metamorphosis is inhibiting because the subject can never make amends for their offence. In some cases the punishment a subject receives at the hands of a god is not deserved.

Medusa ‘Was violated in Minerva’s shrine/By Ocean’s lord’ (4.797-98); the goddess punished her by making her an ugly monster, particularly changing her ‘lovely hair to loathsome snakes’ (4.801). As the girl was raped she cannot be held accountable for the action. The subject is transformed without deserving the punishment. As a gorgon, Medusa cannot live a typical life in society as she might have planned to before the change. She is robbed of a normal life and destined to be remembered as an evil creature. It is interesting that Ovid chooses to include the reason that Medusa became a monster, an angle often omitted in other retellings of the popular Perseus myth. It could be argued that he is attempting to liberate her from the negative perception a reader often has of her.

From Ovid’s explanation for her situation we can see that Medusa is in fact an innocent, beautiful girl, trapped in a prison-like transformation imposed on her because of male aggression. Having discussed a return to nature as a positive thing I shall now look at how becoming a creature of the natural world can restrict an originally human subject. The obvious problem is the inability to communicate with people those results from becoming an animal. Callisto caused ‘Her power of speech [to be] quenched’ (2.482), while Io could not tell her family her true identity, ‘not even her father/Knew who she was’ (1.644-45).

Ovid stresses what Penny Murray describes as ‘feelings of a person being imprisoned within a body that is not what he or she essentially is’. Io is unaware of her change and is shocked to see ‘her muzzle and her horns’ (1.642). This highlights the distance between the subject’s appearance, which is effected by the transformation, and her personality, which remains unchanged. Ovid accentuates this concept by having Io ‘[flee] in terror from the self she [sees]’ (1.643). Actaeon does not initially realize his transformation either. Ovid also makes him another victim of communicative restriction. He attempts to tell his men and his hounds that he was actually their leader but only produces a sound ‘Not human, yet a sound no stag could voice’ (3.238). Not only does this betray an inability to express oneself but it also shows that a human who looks like an animal is in fact neither fully man nor beast. For example, Callisto flees ‘[i]n panic from the horror of the hunt’ but also ‘hides from the creatures of the wild’ (2.493 and 495 respectively). She is neither fully integrated into nature, nor able to participate in the culture she once belonged to. Her transformation alienates her from the world; she cannot function in either realm and is therefore isolated entirely. Penny Murray talks of Io in the same way, ‘because she retains her human consciousness she is not a cow either’.

Metamorphosis is once again a prison for the subject. Callisto goes on to become a star; this could be seen as a positive deliverance from both her bear-form and the death she would have experienced at the hands of her son, Arcas. But after the transformation has occurred there is no more mention of Callisto the individual. She has escaped death, the fate of mankind, but lost her personality. She will always be remembered but only as ‘the erstwhile object of Jupiter’s affections’.

My discussion has catalogued a number of both positive and negative results of metamorphosis in Ovid’s epic. For different subjects the same kind of change can have very different results, take for example Daphne and Narcissus both become plants, but she is remembered for ‘her shining loveliness’ (1.550) and he is an icon of vanity, a warning against the vice. I can conclude that the meaning a metamorphosis can have for the subject undergoing change is as various as the kinds of change that the Metamorphoses encompasses.