From “a serpent, a lamia” to a rainbow-sided creature: Keats’s Lamia and the metamorphoses of the monster

Abstract

The abundance of female characters in Keats’s works has generated a long tradition of criticism, especially by feminist theorists, who have divided them into “mortal maidens” and “omnipotent goddesses”, ascribing them the diegetic functions of means of preservation and agents of destruction of the male heroes’ identities. Whereas the first type occurs mainly in the poems of 1817, the latter is more typical of poems written in and after 1819. Composed in the summer of that year, Lamia depicts a female character who is neither a mortal maiden nor an omnipotent god, but can be seen as a transitional stage between the two types. In Lamia, the figure of the mythological snake-woman is problematised as a monster when she is opposed to the philosopher Apollonius, and this opposition comes to represent that between poetry and science. Her identification with poetry and the imagination makes her a sympathetic, though ambiguous, character, and aligns her with other monsters whose status were reassessed by other Romantic poets. Lamia’s monstrosity lies in her excesses, and as such she is both an ideal to be achieved and a danger to be feared.