WOMEN IN METAMORPHOSES
Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains multiple female characters that is either a god or a mortal. The treatment towards female characters differs from each story and has a lot of variations to keep the reader interested in the story. The goal of this essay is to analyze how a particular female character are being portrayed and treated by the other male or female character in each story. The earliest female character that is announced by Ovid is “Juno”, she is the wife and sister of the god “Jupiter”. Like her husband, she is also a higher being, a goddess. Unlike her husband, she does not carry out world changing actions such as destroying the world in book one of the poem. However, she is portrayed with violence and vengeance…show more content… Io is turned into a heifer (female cow) by Jupiter to conceal his acts (“Jove had foreseen / his wife’s arrival; he had changed the daughter/of Inachus: she now as a white heifer.” 27; 1, 617-619), Juno is later convinced that her husband did not cheat and praised Io as a beautiful cow, for the next few years she is forced to remain a female cow for the next few years and suffers. Io is portrayed as a chaste woman that became victim to Jupiter’s lust, she is helpless as mortal and cannot resist.
The viewpoint that this story is told is from the male gaze, where the author focuses explicitly on the female as how a lustful man looks at his prey, this style of storytelling is also often utilized in the all of fifty rape incident spanned within fifteen chapters of the book. In the softer side of the story, Pyrrha, wife of Deucalion is one of two survivors of the great flood caused by Jupiter’s anger. The other survivor being her husband. Although she did not cause any harm to Jupiter, the flood indiscriminately wiped every human in existence. When the husband and wife couple consulted the god Themis, they are instructed to throw stones behind where they walk and the stones will turn into