This paper focuses on feminist and ecofeminist cautionary narratives that challenges one-sided moralities and rather draw on the ambivalent morality of the genre to suggest a liberation of their hybrid characters from gender norms and social structures, letting the so-called ‘others’ transgress and create “lines of flight” through their metamorphoses – all this without building on the “pedagogy of fear” (Shaijan 8). While nonhumans and women have long been confined to the category of the monstrous due to their transgressive characteristics, these works use elements of the carnivalesque, Russo’s concept of the feminine grotesque, and – literal and metaphoric – metamorphoses as tools to free their female protagonists from structural judgement. Christina Rossetti’s poem, as a nineteenth-century precursor of the genre, overwrites Victorian values by letting her protagonists create a “tender life” even after their transgression, thereby normalising female sexuality. Meanwhile, Sarah Hall’s and Samantha Hunt’s respective short stories construct narratives enacting metamorphoses and processes of becoming-animal to envision a life for their female protagonists that is not controlled by patriarchy and to also call for more balanced relations between humans and animals, humanity and animality, civilisation and nature. They also recognise that traditional values need to become undone, and the millennia-long systemic repression of interspecies relationships and female sexuality has to be addressed.