Between a Rock and a Hard Race: Gender and Text in Ovid’s Deucalion and Pyrrha Episode (Met. 1.313–415)

Chapter 3 discusses Deucalion and Pyrrha’s regeneration of the human race after the destruction of the flood. The chapter links the hermeneutic ‘transformation’ of stones to bones both to a thematic interest within the narrative in the relationship of the new future to its Iron Age past, and to the readers’ experience of the text before them. The key to perceiving the connections between the content and the real-world presence of Ovid’s text is the phenomenon of sexual difference. Within the narrative, the opposition between male and female encodes the difference between an ordered, stable future and a rebellious past. But this tension also involves the relationship between the new forms imposed on the world and the subsistence of a material stratum that implies sameness. New transformations, like Deucalion’s of bones to stones, struggle to reconfigure reality, while the readings of a Pyrrha threaten to erase this difference. The chapter suggests that Ovid’s foregrounding of gender as a formal aspect of his text helps to create a parallelism between the experience of the reader and the hermeneutic challenges that play out within the story.