Metamorphosis
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's form or structure. Some insects as well as other species undergo metamorphosis, which is usually (but not always) accompanied by a change of habitat or behaviour.
Metamorphosis as trope
Metamorphoses of any kind have been popular since Ovid's The Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is a frequently used horror trope which can take many forms: crosses between humans and plants, objects and humans, etc…
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) by Roger Corman in which a plant becomes a carnivore, and after it has eaten a number of people, the last buds of the plant open and reveal the faces of the people it has eaten. Voilà, man is crossed with a flower –> metamorphosis.
A particular variety of metamorphosis is people turned into furniture. Two stories in which humans transform into chairs make use of this plot device: the French libertine novel The Sofa (1742) by Crébillon and the Japanese short story The Human Chair (1925) by Edogawa Rampo. In both stories a man becomes a sofa, in the former quite literally so (by a curse), in the latter, a man hides in sofa to feel the persons who sit in him.
See also
- Metamorphoses
- Pygmalion (mythology)
- The Metamorphosis
- List of films about possessed or sentient inanimate objects
