Bitches and Witches: Grotesque Sexuality in Ovid’s Scylla (Metamorphoses 13.73014.74)

As paradigmatic emblems of fantasy and imagination, creative freedom and poetic license, hybrid monsters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses preside over the author’s playful engagement with traditional aesthetic, moral, and societal values, and gendered ideals. This article aims at a subversive reading of one monstrous creature in the final pentad of Ovid’s epic: Scylla (Met. 13.730-14.74). As a monster, Scylla incorporates several misogynistic stereotypes (“doggishness”, puella dura, self-laceration, vagina dentata), but she eventually escapes the objectifying male gaze and finds rest in a stable, permanent shape that is no longer the feminine-gendered battlefield for male heroism. Breaking away from the conventional epic plot structure “male hero wins over feminized beasts and/or beautiful girls”, Ovid considers the Roman national hero Aeneas with but a minimum of attention, while nymphs and women take center stage: Scylla’s transformation from a girl into a monster and, finally, into a geological rock formation, is intertwined with tales about female solidarity and intimacy and about women’s sexual desire, rage, and revenge. While Scylla’s canine bloodlust and Circe’s vengeful magic certainly reproduce typically patriarchal anxieties projected onto women, they are also traces of unruly, recalcitrant femininity within the canonical, male-dominated world of heroic epic.