Gender Transformation and Ontology in the Salmacis Legend

 Episodes of gender transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses primarily reflect and reinforce traditional binary gender roles, misogyny, and normative sexuality. These hegemonic ideologies are visible in the motivations for each metamorphosis, wherein masculinization is framed as a miracle performed on a willing subject and feminization as a horrific and unnatural curse born from the perverted desires of an assailant. Yet a close analysis of these narratives reveals a crucial point of difference between Ovid’s assumptions about gender and that of most modern Westerners: for Ovid, gender is at least hypothetically mutable. It is generally synonymous with sex, but once a person’s sex has been physically changed, they can and should take up their new social role and be accepted as a member of their new gender. In this essay, I (Stickley) will examine the story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis – from a queer and specifically transgender perspective which seeks to reveal the underlying ontology of Ovid’s conception of gender. I argue that although these stories reflect the hegemonic gender ideologies of the period, they still illustrate conceptions of gender that differ radically from the biologically determinist and immutable one that is hegemonic in modern Western culture, making the Metamorphoses a highly significant text for queer scholarship.

The story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (Met. 4.285- 415) contrasts with that of Caenis because the focus is on an act of feminization rather than masculinization. Both metamorphoses occur during an act of sexual violence, but Caenis’ transformation into Caeneus is a blessing to them and a marvel to other humans, while Hermaphroditus’ is a curse and a horror. The already androgynous youth Hermaphroditus, son of the two gods whose names he bears, chances upon a spring occupied by the nymph Salmacis, who falls madly in lust with him and rapes him after he rejects her proposition. She prays to the gods “that no day comes to part me from him, or him from me,” and “the entwined bodies of the two were joined together, and one form covered both … they were not two, but a two-fold form, so that they could not be called male or female, and seemed neither or either.” So transformed, Hermaphroditus (and it is he and not Salmacis who seems to dominate their shared form) prays to his parents that “whoever comes to these fountains as a man, let him leave them half a man, and weaken suddenly at the touch of these waters.” This story seeks to provide an etiology for the emasculating powers the spring was already rumored to have, and differs markedly from earlier versions of the tale in which Hermaphroditus is intersex since birth and/or Salmacis does not rape him but rather raises him as a mother figure. In Ovid’s version of the story, being overpowered sexually by a woman emasculates a man, resulting in his transformation into an androgynous being who is not fully male or female. There is a suggestion here of gender as an expression of power, defined by one’s relationship to others and echoed by the centaurs’ concern that Caeneus has made them “what he once was.”

Ovid’s account of Hermaphroditus’ transformation is anomalous not because it describes a man as a victim of rape – young men and boys especially were seen as targets for sexual desire and therefore as vulnerable to rape – but because it portrays a woman (nymph) as a rapist. Female desire and aggression are the driving monstrosities in this story, which “reinstates sexual difference by a nightmarish enactment of what happens when the familiar gender roles are reversed.” Ovid uses the expectations set by the poem thus far to misdirect the reader. Salmacis is a nymph, like many others in the Metamorphoses who are all subjected to attempted sexual violence by various gods. Hermaphroditus is commonly read by other characters as a woman in other stories, usually to humorous effect, and indeed “his features were such that, in them, both mother and father could be seen”; so the reader might expect that “perhaps [Salmacis] will mistake Hermaphroditus for a woman, and be lulled into a false sense of security.” But Salmacis is unlike all of the other nymphs in the Metamorphoses: “she is not skilled for the chase, or used to flexing the bow, or the effort of running, the only Naiad not known by swift-footed Diana (Artemis)… She only bathes her shapely limbs in the pool [and] combs out her hair.” She concerns herself primarily with her appearance and seems to have as little regard for the virginity prized by her fellow nymphs as she does for hunting. It is Hermaphroditus who plays the part of the chaste victim here and Salmacis the predatory divinity whose eyes “[blaze] with passion, as when Phoebus’ likeness (the Sun) is reflected from a mirror.”

After the gods grant Salmacis' wish, the narration seems to leave her aside and focus only on Hermaphroditus' feelings, even though they are now one being. His personality is the one that persists, and he is able to voice his umbrage in the form of his prayer to his parents. The transformation is described in the sense of weakening or diluting rather than gaining something: Hermaphroditus’ “limbs had been softened there,” leaving him “half male.” While we might argue that by this logic, Salmacis has also been strengthened. But, Ovid spares no mention of her, focusing entirely on the injury done to Hermaphroditus. In addition to reifying the traditional belief that men should be sexually aggressive and that women should be passive by mythologizing the shift in gender identity that occurs when a man is sexually overpowered, the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus reflects ideas of male superiority, and it is this misogyny which accounts for the drastic difference in tone between this episode and the others examined here.

This story reflects hegemonic ideals about gender roles, including a deep misogyny. It is notable that both instances of masculinization are framed as positive and miraculous events, while the one tale of feminization has a considerably darker tone. Hermaphroditus’ transformation is framed as horrific if somewhat farcical, representing a reversal of the perceived natural order wherein a sexually aggressive woman rapes a man and, in doing so, permanently feminizes him; yet despite this role reversal, the masculine half is still ultimately dominant in a dual-sexed body, as it is the persona of Hermaphroditus and not of Salmacis that seems to survive the encounter. 

Despite the pervasive misogyny of the Metamorphoses, the poem seems to lack the understanding of gender as an immutable fact set at birth which we might expect to see based on our understanding of modern gender politics. For Ovid, once someone’s body has been transformed, they are for all intents and purposes a member of that sex and should be accepted as such. Modern Western transphobia does not accept transgender people as their gender, even if they medically transition to the point that they would be visually indistinguishable from a cisgender person of the same gender, because of a belief in the primacy of the “original” gender assigned at birth, which Ovid does not appear to share. 

The Metamorphoses, then, has an underlying ontology of gender which differs markedly from the hegemonic modern Western one in its belief that gender is ultimately mutable, and may even represent some rudimentary questioning of the classical belief that gender is defined by sex.