I have always used literature as a manual—a vade mecum—for interpreting my life. When my husband and I first married, I looked to Homer’s The Odyssey, because Penelope was one of the few examples I could find of a military spouse. She was an impossible role model, too faithful, too self-sufficient. Penelope retains control over the island kingdom of Ithaka during her husband’s long absence, fighting off 100 suitors who want to marry her and take the throne. She slows time to a piece of cloth woven and unwoven on a loom. I could never be a Penelope. But at least her place in the poem served as a reference and allowed me to believe that my role in the narrative of my military marriage might matter.
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Nearly five years ago, when my husband was preparing to retire after 20 years in the U.S. Navy, I turned to Ovid’s Metamorphoses to understand the nature of transformation. I knew my husband was about to undergo a radical change from officer to civilian and that his metamorphosis would be mine as well. Ovid, I thought, could teach me about the shifting of bodies, how we learn to respond to forces too large to control, the thunderclap of a god, the furious and magical words of a goddess.
Transformation can give us what we believe we most desire, only to realize after the fact that we never knew our longings.
In reading Metamorphoses, I became convinced that it was an unexpected guidebook. Ovid’s fantastical stories read as metaphors for how to cope with our greatest upheavals. He gives us war, loneliness, disastrous loss. He gives us passion and longing. He gives us parents and children, romantic partners, friendships. Perhaps, this is the text we should be offering to loved ones after a divorce, a death, or some unforeseen event that seems to tilt the days vertiginously on their axis.
I also wonder if Metamorphoses shouldn’t have been mandatory reading in 2020, when the pandemic changed each of us into a locked house or a closed room. And now, in an era of political turbulence, what might Ovid teach us about government, empire, heads of state whose rulings are governed by whims, their decrees unpredictable as the weather?
Metamorphoses is divided into 15 books, beginning with the myth of creation and ending with Julius Caesar (Ovid was, after all, a Roman poet, and did not have the luxury of remaining indifferent to the political climate). He retells hundreds of myths, the text united by its focus on physical, psychological, and spiritual transformations. In Charles Martin’s translation, Metamorphoses begins:
My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed
into new bodies: O gods above, inspire
this undertaking (which you’ve changed as well)
and guide my poem in its epic sweep
from the world’s beginning to the present day.
So often in Metamorphoses, transformation is imposed by an external force like a deity or a ruler with enormous influence. During the years when my husband was deployed for many months on end, I thought of the Navy as resembling one of those capricious Roman gods. Sometimes our marriage felt like a small ship attempting to navigate the treacherous strait between Scylla and Charybdis. But as Ovid makes clear even the gods can’t predict the effects of their meddling in human relationships.
Transformation can give us what we believe we most desire, only to realize after the fact that we never knew our longings. Think of Midas. How quickly he understands that his ability to transmute everything to gold is a “strange catastrophe / of wretchedness in wealth.” Midas begs for mercy, and the god Bacchus releases him from the burden of that gilded touch. The king bathes in a river until the gold seeps out of his fingers and into the moving waters. I see myself in this story.
In the final year of his military service, I was desperate for my husband to leave the Navy, the deployments and billets increasingly difficult. Our relationship had hardened like gold into something I barely recognized. But when we were finally reunited, living again in the same house, his military service done, our marriage glittered with strangeness. It would take months before the tension softened, drifted away like flecks of gold in a stream, and we were able to rediscover the living, breathing parts of our marriage.
Sometimes the pain of undergoing a transformation allows us to engage in self-reflection, which can lead to additional alterations. Narcissus falls in love with himself in a “clear pool of reflecting water.” Slowly, he realizes that this untouchable, unkissable face is his own. For the first time, he appreciates the hurt he has inflicted when toying with the feelings of the women and girls who loved him. In death, he loses his “inflexibility and pride” and becomes “a flower, whose white petals fit / closely around a saffron-colored center.” Narcissus, of course, lends his name to the personality disorder we call narcissism. But as a perennial plant, the young man no longer possesses such pathology. He is useful: an ingredient in perfumery, an extract with many therapeutic properties, an object to be cut and placed in a crystal vase on a table.
Six years into marriage, my husband and I almost divorced. We had just endured a particularly challenging deployment. For nine months, while he was overseas, we weren’t permitted to speak. His emails arrived like whisps of smoke. When he returned stateside, my husband’s presence seemed elusive as a faint tendril of burning incense. Or he was protean, shapeshifting each time I tried to hold him. Our marriage barely survived the reunion. I have come to believe that we needed the difficult mirror of that time to consider our relationship and to study its flaws. We were both so deeply immersed in our own reflections that we did not see one another’s faces.
I appreciate how transformation can lead to inventiveness, the making of complicated, vulnerable art.
For Ovid, transformation isn’t good or bad. It simply is inevitable. Transformation can turn the gentle fierce and the ferocious into trembling things. Lines of power shift, allowing the unprotected to defend themselves. Unasked-for change frequently reveals a truth about a character’s interior life. The exquisite Daphne, pursued by Apollo, calls out to her father—a river god—to rescue her from being raped. Her plea for help is heard, and she turns into a laurel. Although Daphne remains lovely, “her supple trunk…girdled with a thin / layer of fine bark,” she is now untouchable, able to be part of the “forest’s deep seclusion” just as she always wanted.
Trauma cannot take her. The near-assault doesn’t annihilate her. Instead, she becomes a serene creature rooted securely in the earth. I find this lesson comforting. So many active duty servicemembers return from war transformed. They become stone. They become a lake of tears. I once mentored a student—a veteran—who regretted his service in the Army and spent years as a monster trapped in a labyrinth of self-loathing. I hope he has managed to escape the maze. I would like to believe that trauma doesn’t have to mean the self is entirely lost in dark corners.
Most importantly, our transformations can be the very things that allow others to remember us. One of my favorite tales in Metamorphoses is that of Arachne. The way Ovid tells it, Arachne is a skilled maker of tapestries and is reported to accepted “praise that set her / above the goddess in the art of weaving.” Athena disguises herself as a crone. She goes to the young woman, warning her to be modest, but Arachne dismisses the advice to “admit / the goddess as your superior in skill.” Furious, Athena casts off her camouflage and, in her sudden and terrifying glory, demands a contest. And what happens next? The two set up their looms. They work their shuttles through the threads of the warp. Athena weaves scenes that depict the generosity and justice of the gods, her fabric framed by “a border / of peaceful olive leaves.”
Arachne’s swift hands produce images of satire and political critique, the gods fallible, cruel, frequently dangerous figures. There is “Europa tricked by Jove,” and there “Leda, lying under a swan’s wing.” Divine disguises are a means of raping a vulnerable girl or of dragging her from home, each cry for help like a throttled bird. Arachne’s work is excellent, so good that the goddess shreds the fibers, furious to be presented with such “convincing evidence / of celestial misconduct.” Devastated, Arachne tries to hang herself. Pallas Athena, “stirred to mercy,” magics the hanging rope into a line of silk, the girl into a spider, transformed and forever a creature who pursues “the art of weaving as she used to do.”
When I read the work of military spouses—novels and short fiction by Siobhan Fallon, poems by Lisa Stice and Abby E. Murray, essays by Alison Buckholtz—I appreciate how transformation can lead to inventiveness, the making of complicated, vulnerable art. Writing is itself an act of metamorphosis; it fixes a narrative to the page so that our small lives endure beyond us. The books of contemporary military spouses allow readers to understand the difficult transformation that war enacts on a marriage, how distance, trauma, and reunion reshape both halves of a couple, “forms changed / into new bodies.”
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Civilians: Poems by Jehanne Dubrow is available from LSU Press.
