TV Tropes on Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

 TV Tropes page on The Metamorphoses, pages on Hermaphroditus and Salmacis

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Bishōnen: Half the male cast really, the most well known being: Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, Hyacinth, Ganymede and Adonis, ...

• Romantic Fusion: A nymph named Salmacis lusts after a young boy named Hermaphroditus, but he fights back when she tries to force herself on him, prompting her to wish that they could never part. The gods, who side with Salmacis, respond by merging their bodies into one.

Nightmare Fuel / The Metamorphoses

• Ovid's take on Hermaphroditus' origins—originally, Hermaphroditus was a young boy, born to Hermes and Aphrodite (hence his name), but one day, a nymph fell in uncontrollable lust with him. Hermaphroditus wanted nothing to do with her, but she refused to take no for an answer. Eventually, she called out for the gods to let them be together forever. What did the gods do? Well, they decided to answer the request...by merging them together into a single entity. So now, poor Hermaphroditus is forced to share a body with his attempted rapist...forever. Did we mention Hermaphroditus was underage when this was happening?

Sparknotes - Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

Summary

 Alcithoe, ..., tells the final love story. The sexually adventurous Salmacis desires Hermaphroditus, but he spurns her. She grabs him when he jumps into her pool, and she prays to the gods to make them one. The gods answer her prayer by making Hermaphroditus become soft and feminine. Salmacis’s nature becomes part of him.

Analysis

As the sisters literally weave, they figuratively weave stories of unfulfilled love. While their love stories feature different kinds of people, they all center on frustrated longing. ...

Salmacis’s love for Hermaphroditus is one-sided. Even when the gods fulfill her request, they do so in an unexpected and unwanted way. Melding her with Hermaphroditus actually prohibits the kind of love she desires.

Book IBook IV page 2

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.

TAPROOT TEXTS, DEFINED

If ever there was a taproot text – in John Clute’s terms, a fantasy that branches out into a thousand other fantasies – this is it (referring to the Curdie and Irene diptych by George MacDonald).
Unknown lecturer, Glasgow University (2010s).

Encyclopedia of Fantasy (John Clute, 1997)
Taproot Texts

Only in the last decades of the 18th century, when (at least in the West) a Horizon of Expectations emerged among writers and readers, did a delimitable genre now called Speculative Fiction (Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc.) appear. Before that there were writings which included the Fantastic – and such works can be described as taproot texts. To exemplify: The presence of the sylph Ariel and of Prospero's staff in William Shakespeare's The Tempest (performed circa 1611; 1623) do not make that play a fantasy or spec-fic, according to this criterion; The Tempest, however defined generically, may contain elements of the fantastic, but these elements did not govern its audience's sense of its generic nature: it was, first and foremost, a theatrical play. On the other hand, Goethe's Faust (1808) clearly reveals its author's consciousness that he is transforming a traditional story containing supernatural elements into a work mediated through – and in a telling sense defined by – those elements. For our purposes, The Tempest is best conceived as a Taproot Text and Faust as a proper fantasy.

The notion of the Taproot Text seems necessary – or at least desirable – for at least two reasons. The first is that a Water Margin of not easily definable intentions marks what we may now read as an irreversible impulse towards fantasy and proto-science-fiction. over the last decades of the 18th century, and it seems advisable to have a blanket term available to use in order to distinguish relevant texts composed or written before those we can legitimately call fantasy or science fiction. The second is that, because almost any form of tale written before the rise of the mimetic novel could be retroactively conceived as ur- or proto-fantasy (or ur-/proto-sci-fi, etc.), it seems highly convenient to apply to works from this Ocean of Story a term – i.e., "taproot" – which emphasizes the heightened significance of the text mentioned. When we refer to a text as a TT, in other words, we describe one that contains a certain mix of ingredients and stands out for various reasons – not excepting quality.

The list of Taproot Texts, therefore, may be long, but it is by no means endless; and a clear degree of qualitative judgement will be apparent in any individual cataloguing. Beyond those already mentioned, some other texts seem to fit the taxonomical needs for which the term was devised.

Relevant texts from classical literature include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (composed by the 8th century BC); Hesiod's Theogony (composed 8th century BC), Aesop's Fables (composed before 560BC) (> Aesopian Fantasy); certain works of the Greek playwrights, like Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (produced before 456BC) and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (produced before 406BC); Ovid's Metamorphoses (circa AD1), Lucius Apuleius's The Golden Jackass (before AD155) and most of the surviving works of Lucian of Samosata.

Relevant early modern texts (from the turn of the Renaissance onwards) include Dante's The Divine Comedy (before 1321), Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (before 1353), the various Chivalric Romances and epics that mass together around the Matters of Britain (Arthurian cycle) and France (Carolingian cycle), including works like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (written circa 1370) (> Gawain) and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1485) ed Thomas Caxton, some episodes of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (before 1400), Luigi Pulci's The Greater Morgante (1470; exp 1483), Orlando Innamorato (1487) by Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564), the Nights (1550-1553) of Gianfrancesco Straparola, Luis de Camoes's The Lusiads (1572), Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1581), Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus (written circa 1588), A Midsummer Night's Dream (performed circa 1595; 1600) and other Shakespeare plays, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-1615), the Pentamerone (1634-1636) of Giambattista Basile, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) (>>> Pilgrim's Progress), Charles Perrault's Tales of Times Past or of Mother Goose (coll 1697), the various versions of The 1001 Nights (> Arabian Fantasy), Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). The list could be considerably extended, but there is a distinction to be made: huge quantities of work can be treated as being of backdrop interest only; these titles cannot. 

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (From the podcast Literature and History)

To many generations of readers, authors, and artists, the Metamorphoses served and still serve as a card catalog for classical literature, encompassing a thousand years of Ancient Mediterranean stories in a single volume, stories which moved loosely from the moment of creation up to Ovid’s contemporary world of the Pax Augusta.

The twelve thousand lines, and over 250 stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses focus on a single theme. This theme is not only in the epic’s Latin title – Metamorphoseon libri, or Books of Transformations, but also in its very first line. “Changes of shape,” writes Ovid, “new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me / now to recite” (I.1-2). Whether they transform to birds, trees, flowers, rocks, water, or dozens of other things, the humans, nymphs, satyrs, and gods of the Metamorphoses live in a world of perpetual flux, in which one’s identity and physical form are endlessly mutable.

The challenge of reading the Metamorphoses is formidable – one not only has hundreds of tales occurring in rapid succession - these tales also often contain or interpenetrate one another like Russian nesting dolls. At the end of Book 10, for instance, Ovid describes Orpheus telling the story of Adonis, in which (in turn) Aphrodite tells the story of the beautiful huntress Atalanta and her lover Hippomenes. Stories are told within stories being told within stories, and tales break off at unlikely moments. As one critic remarks, “Even when we turn to the individual tales, beginning as they do in mid-sentence and mid-hexameter, straddling book divisions, and framing each other, they resist separation and reordering. While tales are often sundered and woven together according to the formal whims of the poet, they are also filled with a galaxy of proper nouns – places, deities, both well-known and obscure, mythological creatures, mythical and semi-legendary historical figures, and a dizzying meshwork of legends and lineages that makes even the most experienced reader turn to the footnotes from time to time.

One of the advantages to doing a serial podcast on literary history is that we have covered much of the salient material that Ovid uses in the Metamorphoses. Ovid read and incorporated stories from Hesiod and Homer, Sophocles and Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Callimachus, and nearer to his own time, Catullus and Virgil. Scholar Peter Levi writes that “Few generations of genius have devoted such prolonged and deep study to what poetry is and can be as Virgil’s did,” and in our many shows on Roman writers thus far we have learned that Latin literature’s golden age was characterized by an overall interest in erudition and synthesis. Catullus wrote widely in a range of meters; Horace’s poems span many genres and tones; Virgil’s three works self-consciously display his encyclopedic learning; and Propertius, though he died relatively young, was even by his fourth book of poems enthusiastically moving beyond the constraints of love elegy. And Ovid, perhaps more than any of his predecessors, marked the apex of Augustan-age literature’s desire to consume and repurpose the entire literary history that had preceded it.


Because of the scope, the density, and the intermingled nature of the Metamorphoses, offering you a summary of Ovid’s 250 interlinked stories presents me with a challenge. On one hand, we could group the tales by theme, talking about the stories involving rape (ie pride before a fall), or tales involving hubris, or narratives concerned with specific mythological events. On the other, it’s quite important to remember that the Metamorphoses is a continuous narrative poem that begins with the faceless chaos that preceded creation, and ends with the ascendancy of Augustus, and that almost without exception Ovid moves us from story to story with notoriously brilliant little narrative inserts. In other words, while the stories that fill the Metamorphoses are deservedly their centerpiece, the structure of the Metamorphoses also ended up being quite influential, inspiring the linked short story collections of Chaucer and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, not to mention many others. And because the form, as well as the content, of the Metamorphoses was widely prominent in later literary (and scenic, and musical, and visual artistic) history, I’ve decided to summarize the epic in chronological order.

[···]

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

Now remember, in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses we’re still in a frame narrative, and the blasphemous sisters who deny the sacred rites of Bacchus are still telling the stories. With the tale of the sun’s ill-fated romance wrapped up, another sister began the next story – the story of a certain magical fountain. The fountain in question is the fountain of Salmacis, whose waters could make even the brawniest and most manly man soft and effeminate, and the story is about how this fountain came to be.

François Joseph's The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1829) shows the moment when Salmacis, watching the bathing youth, can stand it no longer, and rushes to embrace him. 

Once, there was a boy, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. At just 15, the young man began a long trek through the rugged terrain of modern day Turkey. After many adventures, he found a still pool unclogged by aquatic plants, full of clear water and surrounded by a carefully manicured lawn. A nymph lived there called Salmacis – a nymph who had rejected the virgin cult of the huntress Artemis, and spent her days preening her hair and gazing into the still pool. This nymph, again Salmacis, saw the adventurous fifteen-year-old boy tramping around her pond.

The nymph Salmacis carefully arranged her hair and then gave lavish compliments to the boy, whose resulting blushes were becoming on him. Unable to resist, she leaned in for a kiss, but the boy wouldn’t let her, and so Salmacis retreated to a hiding place, leaving him alone to bathe. And bathe the boy did. Salmacis watched him, drinking in the details of his naked body as he paddled around her pool. Finally, she could resist no longer. The nymph Salmacis tore off her clothes and flung herself into the pool, seizing the boy and twining her limbs together with his. He resisted her kisses and other efforts, but she told him that even if he would not yield, he’d never escape. The nymph Salmacis prayed that she would never, under any circumstances be parted from her beloved youth, and the gods granted her wish – Salmacis and the boy were fused as one, and the new being was rightfully called Hermaphroditus (which incidentally was the name of the lad before this animesque fusion!). Hermaphroditus prayed to their divine parents that, for the sake of what they’d endured, anyone who touched the fountain of Salmacis would be softened and made effeminate, as they had been, and the gods granted their wish. [short music]

When the Girl Rescues the Prince

When the Girl Rescues the Prince: Norse Fairy Tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”

In the second century AD, the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis interrupted the winding plot of his novel, Metamorphoses, or Asinus Aureus (a title used to distinguish the work from its predecessor, Ovid’s Metamorphoses) to tell the long story of Cupid and Psyche—long enough to fill a good 1/5 of the final, novel-length work. The story tells of a beautiful maiden forced to marry a monster—only to lose him when she tries to discover his real identity.

If this sounds familiar, it should: the story later served as one inspiration for the well-known “Beauty and the Beast,” where a beautiful girl must fall in love with and agree to marry a beast in order to break him from an enchantment. It also helped inspire the rather less well-known Norse “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” where the beautiful girl marries a beast—and must go on a quest to save him.

I like this story much more.

“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” was collected and published in 1845 by Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, and later collected by Andrew Lang in his The Blue Fairy Book (1889). Their tale beings with a white bear deciding to knock on the door of a poor but large peasant family. So poor that when the bear asks for the youngest daughter, promising to give the family a fortune in return, the maiden climbs up on the back of the polar bear, and heads north.

I must admit that when I first read this story, I missed all of the questionable bits, because I could only focus on one bit: she was getting to ride on a polar bear! Talk about awesome. And something easy enough for Small Me, who rarely even got to ride ponies, to get excited about.

In the far north, the peasant girl and the bear enter an ice cave, finding a castle within. I must admit, I’ve never quite looked at such ice caves the same way again: who knows what they might be hiding, underneath that snow. During the day, the girl explores the palace, and only has to ring a bell for anything she might want.

And every night, a man comes to her in her bed—a man she never sees, always in the darkness.

Eventually, all of this gets lonely, and the girl wants to return home—thinking of her brothers and sisters, not to mention her parents. The bear allows her to leave—as long as she doesn’t talk to her mother en tête-à-tête. That, too, is a twist in the tale. In most versions, mothers are rarely mentioned: the dangers more usually come from the sisters, evil, jealous, concerned, or all three.

In this version, the mother is very definitely on the concern side, convinced that her daughter’s husband is, in fact, a troll, if not Satan himself or at least a sex offender. A possibility that should have occurred to you when he showed up to your house as a talking polar bear, but let us move on. She tells her daughter to light a candle and look at her husband in the dark. Her daughter, having not studied enough classical literature to know what happened to her predecessor Psyche after she does just that, lights the candle, finding a handsome prince.

Who immediately tells her, awakening when three drops of hot wax from the candle fall upon his shirt, that if she had just waited a little longer, they would have been happy, but since she didn’t, he now must marry someone else—and go and live east of the sun and west of the moon.

This seems, to put it mildly, a bit harsh on everyone concerned. Including the someone else, very definitely getting a husband on the rebound, with a still very interested first wife. After all, to repeat, this version, unlike others, features a concerned mother, not evil sisters trying to stir up trouble. Nonetheless, the prince vanishes, leaving the girl, like Psyche, abandoned in the world, her magical palace vanished.

Like Psyche, the girl decides to search for help. This being an explicitly post-Christian version—she does not exactly turn to goddesses for assistance. But she does find three elderly women, who give her magical items, and direct her to the winds of the cardinal directions. The North Wind is able to take her east of the sun and west of the moon. Deliberate or not, it’s a lovely callback to the Cupid and Psyche tale, where Zephyr, the West Wind, first took Psyche to Cupid.

Unlike Psyche, the girl does not have to complete three tasks. She does, however, trade her three magical gifts to the ugly false bride with the long nose, giving her three chances to spend the night with her husband. He, naturally, sleeps through most of this, but on the third night he finally figures out that just maybe his false wife is giving him a few sleeping potions, skips his nightly drink, and tells his first wife that she can save him if she’s willing to do some laundry.

No. Really.

That’s what he says: he has a shirt stained with three drops of candle-wax, and he will insist that he can only marry a woman who can remove the stains.

Trolls, as it happens, are not particularly gifted at laundry—to be fair, this is all way before modern spot removers and washing machines. The girl, however, comes from a poor peasant family who presumably couldn’t afford to replace clothes all that often and therefore grew skilled at handwashing. Also, she has magic on her side. One dip, and the trolls are destroyed.

It’s a remarkably prosaic ending to a story of talking bears, talking winds, and talking… um, trolls. But I suppose it is at least easier than having to descend to the world of the dead, as Psyche does in one of her tasks, or needing to wear out three or seven pairs of iron shoes, as many of the girls in this tale are told they must do before regaining their husbands. In some ways, it’s reassuring to know that a prince can be saved by such common means.

In other ways, of course, the tale remains disturbing: the way that, after having to sacrifice herself for her family, the girl is then blamed by the prince for following her mother’s instructions—and forced to wander the wide world for years, hunting down her husband, and then forced to give up the magical golden items she’s gained on the journey just for a chance to speak to him. (The story does hurriedly tell us that she and the prince do end up with some gold in the end.)

But I can see why the tale so appealed to me as a child, and continues to appeal to me now: the chance to ride a talking bear, the hidden palace beneath the snow, the chance to ride the North Wind to a place that cannot possibly exist, but does, where a prince is trapped by a troll. A prince who needs to be saved by a girl—who, indeed, can only be saved by a girl, and doing something that even not very magical me could do.

No wonder I sought out the other variants of this tale: “The Singing, Springing Skylark,” collected by the Grimms, where the girl marries a lion, not a polar bear, and must follow a trail of blood, and get help from the sun, the moon, and the winds, and trade her magical dress for a chance to speak with the prince; “The Enchanted Pig,” a Romanian tale collected by Andrew Lang, where the girl marries a pig, not a bear, and must wear out three pairs of iron shoes and an iron staff, and rescue her prince with a ladder formed from chicken bones; “The Black Bull of Norroway,” a Scottish variant where the girl almost marries a bull, and can only flee from a valley of glass after iron shoes are nailed to her feet; “The Feather of Finist the Falcon,” a Russian variant where the girl must also wear out iron shoes in order to find her falcon—and her love.

These are brutal tales, yes, but ones that allowed the girls to have adventures, to do the rescuing, and to speak with animals and stars and winds and the sun and the moon. Among my very favorite fairy tales.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.