The Queer Metamorphosis of Byblis

Garrett Jacobsen (Denison University)

Queer theory's fundamental proposition of identity, especially gender and sexual orientation, as a cultural construct, fluid and inherently unstable, is an especially valid approach to reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, an epic of shifting identities. The story of Byblis and Caunus, located in Book IX in the middle pentad of the epic, on one level is representative of what Holzberg cleverly names “Framing Heroes and Frothing Heroines” (Holzberg 2002, 128). Perhaps more importantly, however, it is the first myth of the Metamorphoses in which Ovid examines a principle sexual taboo—incest—within the world of humanity, as opposed to the Olympian society of gods and goddesses. The tale of Byblis and Caunus is actually a misnomer, as Ovid’s narrative is truly the story of Byblis herself and her doomed attempt to liberate herself from the arbitrary strictures of family and society.

The introductory declaration that this story should be read as a cautionary exemplum for feminine identity, establishes the primacy of Byblis in the narrative:

Byblis in exemplo est, ut ament concessa puellae,
Byblis Apollinei correpta cupidine fratris;
non soror ut fratrem, nec qua debebat, amabat.

(Meta. IX.454-456)

Ovid’s prefatory lines to this tale of forbidden sexuality anticipates Judith Butler’s notion that “law is not only that which represses sexuality, but a prohibition that generates sexuality or, at least, compels its directionality”(Butler 1993, 95). The tragic tale of Byblis focalizes the discourse on human sexuality and passion comprising the middle pentad of the Metamorphoses, by illuminating both the internal psychological and the external social determinants for identity. The threat of incest in this tale is not only the perversion of sexual orientation, but also the subversion of gender roles within the strictly patriarchal order of Roman society (Keith 2000, 63).

The climactic metamorphosis of Byblis is not a punishment for incest, for in fact she never violated that sexual taboo. The gentle assimilation of Byblis into the landscape precludes amatory pathos as the rationale for her transformation, but rather justifies reading the metamorphosis as the fate of an individual who locates herself beyond the margins of society, and thus, in critical parlance, becomes queer (Sedgwick 1993, 8).

Compared to the narrative of Myrrha’s incestuous ‘lusus’ with her father (Meta. X.465-470), there is a curious lack of graphic sexuality in this first tale of incest. Ovid rather presents Byblis as a psychological study in the construction of identity, initiated by the sexual attraction to her twin brother and complicated by the conflict between self and other. It is this trial of Byblis that shapes the tale and her fate, as she assays her private identity within the public arena and consequently attempts to subvert traditional Roman social institutions, the “ut ament concessa puellae.”