Hot with Love

I've spent my Spring break taking in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is no small feat. Held up as one of, if not the most important source of classical myth, Metamorphoses is said to be "the most comprehensive, creative mythological source handed down to us from antiquity" (Galinsky). Ovid sings of "bodies becoming other bodies" (3) and, indeed, the binding theme is transformation: it occurs in every story throughout the 15 books.

While all the stories are united in the theme of change, there are variations of themes beneath it, and one of these that is inescapable is that of love. We've been seeing in classical lit that everyone in Greece is "hot with love". It's portrayed as an epidemic; the characters we're meeting are sick with love, love is driving them to madness. But no where in literature have I ever encountered more incessant, colorful descriptions of this epidemic than in Metamorphoses. And I'm having a lot of fun with it!


The painting to the left is from the story of Coronis, the Raven, the Crow, and Nyctimene in book 2. Coronis tells the story of how, one day, while she was walking by the shoreline, Neptune (the sea God) saw her and "grew hot with love" (p. 60) He chased Coronis down trying to have his way with her, and the Goddess Athena pitied the virgin and turned her into a bird so she could fly away and escape her.

The picture to the right is from the story of Narcissus and Echo in Book 3. When Echo sees Narcissus roaming through the woods, she becomes "inflamed with love" (p. 92). She was cursed by Zeus' wife Juno, and punished so that she could only repeat the last syllable of what she heard. Narcissus shunned her, and in her depression she wasted away until she was only a voice.

In subsequent stories we encounter characters who are taken out of their element by love. In the story of Medea and Jason, Medea, the king's daughter, sees the hero Jason and is struck by "the raging flame of love" (p. 209). I like how Medea describes her condition in the soliloquy that follows. She has never been overtaken by love, and she laments "If I could blaze no more, I would be healed. Instead, despite myself, a force that I have never known before impels me now: my longing needs one thing; my reason seeks another. I can see- and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse" (p. 209-10). This relates back to my previous blog about extremes... her soul is at odds, reason waging against passion. And while she knows what is best, she is hot in the flame of love and she cannot fend off her passion. She must help Jason. As the story goes on, the fire analogy is used repeatedly to depict the burning desire that she must succumb to.
Variations of the theme of madness and love are rampant in Ovid's stories, increasingly as we get into books 6-11. The pathos of love is perfected in Metamorphoses. Senses are heightened in the reading; we experience the passion these characters suffer vicariously through vivid descriptions of hot, burning, feverish, uncontrollable love. And I enjoy it all over again as it comes up in each story, this notion of our lust experienced in heat. Last semester in American Lit 2 we read a poem by Wallace Stevens called "Poems of our Climate". The poem closes with these lines:
"The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds"

That line- "The imperfect is so hot in us" - was one of my favorite things that I read in Wallace Stevens, one that will never leave me because, ironically, that is the perfect way to express what it is to be human, and flawed, and prone to excess, contending with our conscience and collapsing under the weight of our desires. To see it resurface again and again in Ovid- these perfect depictions of the heat of imperfection- has been exciting and beautiful.