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see if this helps:

this is from an article by Andrew Feldherr in the
_Cambridge_Companion_to_Ovid. (He's also a graduate of Berkeley.)

Let me know if this helps,
bt


When the nymph Daphne realizes that she will never win the foot-race against
Apollo and will forfeit her virginity, she prays to be transformed and so to
lose the external form that has caused her downfall by arousing the god’s
desire…Here the relationship between the new shaped and the old becomes much
more complicated. Far from fixing her in a state that her permanently
expresses her essential qualities, Daphne’s metamorphosis strips her of the
swiftness by which she has been characterized in the narrative; Ovid figures
the transformation itself as a process of occlusion and possession. To try to
red this metam according to the Lycaon paradigm by stressing the persistence
of her beauty raises new problems, for it was her external attractiveness that
warred against her desire to remain a virgin. Indeed if anything has been
preserved of Daphne it is the tragic discrepancy between her inner will and
outer appearance. To read her metamorphosis as a clarification, then implies
that her essence lay in what she seemed to others to be rather than
recognizing her as subject in her own right.





Ben Tran