Nature cannot be changed

Nature cannot be changed is a recurring moral in three fables: the Raven’s pursuit of the Swan’s plumage, a purchaser’s effort to change a servant’s complexion, and the Cat’s transformation into a woman. Each story turns on a desired change of appearance or identity that cannot overcome the nature the character already has.

The Raven and the Swan

The Raven sees the Swan’s beautiful white plumage and mistakes washing in water for its cause. Leaving the nearby altars where it had found food, the Raven settles by lakes and pools and repeatedly cleans its feathers. Their color does not change; deprived of food, it dies. The fable makes the cost of imitation concrete: in trying to acquire another creature’s appearance, the Raven abandons the means by which it lived, without gaining what it coveted.

The Aethiop

In “The Aethiop,” a purchaser believes a black servant’s skin color comes from dirt left by former masters’ neglect. At home, he subjects the servant to incessant scrubbing, but the servant catches a severe cold and his complexion remains unchanged. Here the failed effort is not the Raven’s self-directed imitation but an attempt by one person to impose a mistaken explanation of another’s body. The intervention produces suffering without producing the change its purchaser expects.

The Cat and Venus

A Cat in love with a handsome young man asks Venus to make her a woman. Venus grants the request, and the transformed Cat becomes a beautiful damsel whom the young man loves and takes home as his bride. The change initially appears complete: outwardly, the Cat now occupies a human role and has won the relationship she desired.

Venus tests whether the change of shape has also changed the Cat’s habits. While the couple reclines in their chamber, Venus lets a mouse down in the middle of the room. The Cat springs from the couch and pursues it, wishing to eat it; absorbed in the chase, she forgets her new condition. Venus, disappointed, restores her former shape. The mouse exposes the limit of the transformation, and the ending makes the reversal visible: a new appearance cannot secure a new nature.

A Shared Moral

Across the three tales, change is measured by what remains. The Raven washes but stays black; the servant is scrubbed but retains his complexion; and the Cat becomes a woman in form but responds to a mouse as a Cat. The first two stories show appearance resisting attempted alteration, while the third distinguishes bodily transformation from changed habits. Together, their outcomes give the moral its force: efforts to remake nature fail, and the attempt may cost food, health, or a desired new life.