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Compare And Contrast Callisto And Ovid

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Recommended: Gender role in ancient greece

In Sickness and in Health
Fall 2016
Paper 1

Callisto’s Vacant Sense of Agency In Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes translates many mythological tales from the work Metamorphoses. These tales written by Ovid add a very grotesque nature to many classic Roman myths. By retracing these stories, he successfully inputs a series of audacious ideas when looking into the role of genders in ancient Rome and contrasting the sense of agency between women and men. More specifically in the tale of Callisto, Ovid unveils controversial myth where a woman loses her sense of control on her own body. Eventually punished for impurity, Callisto’s fate is morphed into a nightmare as she is destined to physical and mental agony for a situation she fell victim to. Through specific examples, the tale Callisto and Arcas shares a sense of vacant female bodily agency in Rome, and suggests that purity is a virtue importantly pointed more directly towards women than that of men. Opening of the tale the reader is introduced to a situation where Callisto, a nymph, wandering comfortably in a forest. A forest where she could confidently roam with her arrow at hand, belonging to the forest and belonging with all of the other nymphs who inhabited it. Until one day when her safest place became violated. …show more content…

She had to conform to the life as a bear unwillingly and often, “Sometimes forgot what she was/ And hid from other creatures. As before--/ Above all, what this bear feared were the bears” (46). This situation still remaining to mirror the agony she felt when she was hiding from other nymphs. All though she is bear now and physically looks likes other bears, she mentally feels as an outcast, constantly confined to her own secrets and sins. Except these secrets and sins were events she had no bodily agency

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