Across myth and literature, women and animals are bound by themes of transformation, wildness, and voice. In myths, women often become animals — Daphne turning into a laurel, Philomela into a nightingale, selkies shedding their skins — transformations that reveal both vulnerability and hidden power.

Literature inherits these symbols: the caged bird in The Awakening, the beast in Beauty and the Beast, the wolf in Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves. These creatures mirror women’s struggles between captivity and freedom, instinct and reason.

Where patriarchy once used animal imagery to mark women as irrational or wild, modern retellings reclaim it — the animal becomes a source of wisdom, desire, and resistance. Between myth and story, the woman and the animal are not opposites, but reflections of one another: both silenced, both powerful, both longing to run free.

The female form has long been a central subject in art, symbolizing beauty, culture, and emotion. In modern times, artists like Frida Kahlo, Judy Chicago, and Jenny Saville have reclaimed it as a tool of empowerment and protest, challenging societal norms and redefining its meaning in art and history.