Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

Oh my, how you change! See how you’re already neither two [beings] nor one!

—Sinners in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno , The Divine Comedy lines 68–69

In her study Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2002) Marina Warner starts from the premise that metamorphosis, as a concept, “runs counter to notions of unique, individual integrity of identity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition” (2). Transformation, Warner claims, allowed Christians to distinguish good from evil, as it was considered a marker of “heterodoxity, instability, perversity, unseemingless monstrosity” (36). It was supposed to evidence a subject which had been invaded by strangeness, a subject which had been possessed, even. It is no wonder that one of the distinguishing features of Satan is, precisely, his duplicitous nature, and he is described as “inhabit[ing] other identities,” in an attempt to fulfil his “unnameable desire to be other than he is” (Belsey, Desire 172, 173). The satanic overtones of transformation and duplicity, in turn, ignited fears about the preservation of the presumed coherence of a subject which had to show no fragmentation, no difference, and no plurality in order to be considered pure.

This is probably one of the reasons that led Dante Alighieri to focus upon the issue of physical transformation when he described his Inferno in The Divine Comedy (1308–1321). In one of the epigraphs opening this section, Dante’s sinners are horrified when they witness a being whose protean nature is evidenced by its having not one, but two heads. Transformation, once more, entails lack of purity. Dante knew as much, hence the reason for his infernal metamorphoses showing the “impossibility of identity perjuring,” as illustrated by Caroline Walker Bynum (185).

If anything, metamorphosis must be understood within narrative fiction as a metaphor for the perpetual mutations to which personal identity is subject. Ovid explores this idea through fifteen books in his Metamorphoses , where his subjects, who, incidentally, mutate in moments of extreme crisis, acquire a shape which “more fully expresses them and perfects them than their first form” (Warner 4).