ABSTRACT: Ovid’s fascination with the human body pervades the Metamorphoses . This paper examines one striking place, however, where the poem defers from grounding corporeal change in the immediate experiences of the flesh, namely: the question of what bodily metamorphosis feels like. Eschewing any confirmation that physical transformation itself can be perceived sensorily, Ovid repeatedly narrates beings unaware of their changed bodies until visually confronting them. In doing so, the Metamorphoses evokes an epistemological horror of self-discovery and suggests that the true horror of corporeal transformation is not necessarily the transformation itself but the possibility of never knowing it to have occurred.
Kathleen Cruz (Mon,) studied this question.