Shedding the Skin: Lamia, Metamorphosis, and Plastic Surgery

Metamorphosis has long provided artists and writers with a way to explore the relationship between bodily form and identity. In John Keats's Lamia, a serpent undergoes a painful transformation into a woman, shedding her former appearance before recognizing her new human form. John William Waterhouse's paintings of Lamia (1905 and 1909) make this transformation visually tangible through the serpent's discarded skin. The shed skin may be viewed as a material trace of a former body: no longer part of the living organism, yet retaining evidence of its previous identity. This image offers a metaphorical perspective on plastic surgery, in which the human body is altered by the removal, rearrangement, repair, or replacement of tissue. Unlike mythological metamorphosis, surgical transformation is deliberate, anatomically constrained, and does not create a fundamentally different species or identity. Nevertheless, both raise a similar question: what remains of the former body when its visible form has changed?. Keats's Lamia, Waterhouse's visual interpretations, and the practice of plastic surgery converge at the boundary between the body we have and the body we become. The serpent's shed skin suggests that transformation does not necessarily erase the past; rather, the discarded form may remain as a trace of what the transformed body once was.