Salmacis, Hermaphrodite, and the Inversion of Gender: Allegorical Interpretations and Pictorial Representations of an Ovidian Myth, Ca
Chapter 3 Salmacis, Hermaphrodite, and the Inversion of Gender: Allegorical Interpretations and Pictorial Representations of an Ovidian Myth, ca. 1300–1770 Karl Enenkel Introduction: The Ovidian Myth and Its Gender Narrative Although from antiquity on, the concept of the nymph has included a great variety of minor deities connected with different local cults and various habi- tats, all nymphs seem to have in common that they were imagined as young, beautiful, gracious girls, and that they were thought to behave in a female and feminine way; if attached to Diana, they were believed to act as virgins. The myth of Salmacis, however, refers to a different kind of nymph: a nymph that excels in the inversion of “normal” gendered behaviour, and that was thought to have caused the disturbing bodily phenomenon of Hermaphroditism.1 The myth as it was depicted and interpreted in the early modern period is entirely based on a literary invention by Ovid, in his Metamorphoses (IV, 288–388).2 Ovid’s highly imaginative story, however, does not give an account 1 On the physical and medical phenomenon of Hermaphroditism in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the Renaissance (which in itself will not be the topic of this contribution) cf., inter alia, Brisson L., Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, transl. J. Lloyd (Berkeley, California U.P.: 2002; originally French, Paris: 1999); Long K.P., Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot: 2006); Duval Jacques, Des Hermaphrodits […] (Rouen, David Geuffroy: 1612). 2 Except for Ovid’s narrative in his Metamorphoses, there are no Greek or Latin sources from antiquity that provide other substantial versions of the myth.
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