Morphing Forms: Metamorphosis in Twenty-First-Century British Women’s Experimental Short Fiction

This chapter argues that, in the twenty-first-century short stories by British women writers featuring human/non-human-other transfigurations, metamorphosis replaces anthropocentrism with a more liminal and fluid bodily space. By questioning the immutability of the human form, these texts ask readers to consider a world where humans are neither dominant nor the sole mediators of what the world means. A selection of stories by Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson, Irenosen Okojie, and Helen Oyeyemi is analysed to show how these authors’ experimental writing uncouples anthropomorphism from the anthropocentric notions that define anthropomorphism as a metaphor for the animal in the human. Instead, metamorphosis (as a form of anthropomorphism) works to connect the female human body to the natural world in material ways. The chapter suggests that these authors’ experimental writing retains consciousness, agency, and voice with the transformed (and other non-human) forms bringing them into subjectivity opposing discourses which divide the observing human subject from the observed animal object. It also argues that the ‘willed’ transformations of female characters deliberately subvert their human forms to resist both their gendered and their species-bound bodies, working against imposed transformations often found in older traditions of metamorphosis (classically in Ovid).