THE SHAPE-SHIFTING MOTIF

Shape-shifting is one of the most universal human phenomena there is and yet we deny it even as we react to it. For instance, consider the changes between conception and birth: from one cell and a second nucleus (which is about all a sperm is: a nucleus with a tail) forms a blastocyst, a tiny ball of cells, and then unfolds from that what some think of as the history of the evolution of mammals: a little critter like a fish, then an amphibian, slowly forming human characteristics until it is ready to survive on its own -- with a lot of help -- outside its mother’s body. We don’t know when it becomes conscious and there is argument over when it becomes human. One can see when it becomes gendered.

Then the infant begins a long arc of shape-shifting called “growing up” and an almost-plateau called “maturity” and then the long slide into aging and death. We don’t know when it stops being conscious and there is argument over whether it goes on being human, just somewhere else.

So that’s one pattern. It seems to me that the very process of being alive causes one to “shape-shift,” mostly centering on the things vital to life. We’ve talked about birth and death. Few talk about eating and excreting. Other cultures do, but Western scholarship is very reluctant to even admit there is such a thing as the latter. Maybe the closest we come is to say someone one is so irreproachable that they shit cold cream. Or that a light shines out of their rearend instead of the darkness others are famous for sticking their heads into. Very rude ideas!

I just watched “Wide Sargasso Sea” which is the invented story responding to “Jane Eyre,” the proper governess of low but virtuous station who comes to the rich Mr. Rochester as a helper and something of a savior. Mr. Rochester has an insane wife kept in a tower room, the archetypal “Madwoman in the Attic,” and Jean Rhys' novel is her imagined story. This Mr. R. is neither rich nor wise, so he accepts a beautiful wife with a big dowry without knowing much about her. In the end this is nearly a selkie story, the tales about men or women who come out of the sea, discarding their sealskins to become human and are captive in marriage because the human who loves them has hidden their skin so they can’t shift back. In Wide Sargasso Sea the woman is creole and her world in Jamaica is as foreign as the sea. Captured and misunderstood, her only route home is through madness and death.

In its mild form this is such a near-universal experience that it powers many contemporary novels. A person marries or enters a romance having certain expectations, certain convictions about the nature of the other person. When those ideas turn out to be wrong, it can seem to be a matter of madness or enchantment. The experience can also work as redemption and then we have “Beauty and the Beast,” which is a script so powerful that way too many people enter upon relationship with the purpose of changing the other person in a redeeming way: kissing the frog, so to speak.

Yet there’s no guarantee that “growing” and becoming educated and wiser and so on -- “improving” -- will preserve the relationship. In fact, change -- ANY change -- is scary.

So we could make a typology: good change versus bad change, a shape-shift that is wanted (maybe even undertaken deliberately) versus one that is forced upon one -- an enchantment or maybe a change necessary to survive or maybe truly a madness. Because we live in bodies, the body may change due to an accident or disease, so the imposed physical shape-shift forces mental and emotional changes because it’s no longer possible to think the same.

There are endless lists and types of shape-shifting in every culture: fairy tales are famous for them, modern fantasy sci-fi is besotted with them, and real-life stories abound. Websites are devoted to them and the discussion of them.

One of the most interesting is a shape-shift into an inanimate being: paralyzed, unable to move, in bondage. Or when a human shifts to an animal and begins to acquire the animal’s mind, losing the ability to think like a human. Our culture’s idea of gender is so rigid that mistakenly relating to a disguised person is a huge plot driver, whether we’re talking Shakespeare or Ellen Degeneres. And the pathos of not just failing to realizing a lover’s true identity but then finding oneself forever separated by the truth is at the heart of West Side Story. Separation by death gives us Orpheus and Euridice. Then the separated person might try his or her own shape-shifting, changing to accompany or stay in relationship with the lover. Maybe the saddest story is “the Little Mermaid,” who changes to be with her human lover -- even though it causes her excruciating pain -- only to realize that he prefers another. It’s all been for nothing. Or has it?

Another important category of shape shifting stories is about the person in danger who becomes someone or something else in order to escape. Sometimes there is a long series of changes in which the pursued changes into something, the pursuer turns into a suitable predator, and the pursuer changes again. In real life this is sort of what happens when a child is abused: they dissociate, become someone else. At the very least they may try to be invisible. Others become defiant saboteurs. Or they may become absorbed into the angry intolerant persona of their abuser.

In the larger social scheme of things a minority group, particularly one that is stigmatized, may take the place of the child, forced into economic niches or ghettos or diasphoras, disguised by a pretended conformity or obedience. In fact, it becomes clear that so many things can be described or analyzed in terms of shape-shifting that a thinker must be careful to sub-divide the category to stay clear-headed. Of course, it’s also possible to proceed in a poetic, free-association way to see where one’s subconscious processes take one. Bound to be interesting.