This chapter analyzes the connections among rhetoric, sexuality, and subjectivity in Ovid's Metamorphoses to enable us to see why disquieting convergences like the one between Daphne's use of figura – the form of her body – and the narrator's – Apollo's poetic tropes – continue to inform Renaissance appropriations of Ovidian narrative, particularly later imitations of Ovid that claim to speak to a difference between male and female experience. By examining what the often violent intersection between rhetoric and sexuality means for the speaking subjects of Ovid's poem, moreover, I hope to give a sense of how important it is for a feminist critique of the Metamorphoses and its afterlife that in it we encounter what Simone Viarre, following Roland Barthes, calls a “fusion between poetry and rhetoric” – a thoroughgoing conversion of rhetoric into a “poetic technique.” In other words, the punning movement of figura, the resonant word that signifies both Daphne's body and the god of poetry's speech, suggests a crucial place where a feminist analysis of the Metamorphoses might intersect widely acknowledged aspects of Ovidian poetic practice.

I have already emphasized Ovid's habit of turning poetic and rhetorical self-reflection into stories of desire and sexual violence: Apollo's rapacious desire for Daphne is also a poet's love for a figure; Pygmalion's desire to “move” his statue is also a sexual version of a rhetorician's aim to “move” his audience; Perseus first uses Medusa's os (against Atlas) as a kind of rhetorical prosthesis, enforcing the compliance that his “soothing words” cannot; the aetiological story of the Gorgon's head, in its turn, converts a rape and a beheading into the origin of the fountain of poetry; and so forth.