thebeggarandtheking:
queennubian:
She was once the a beautiful virgin shadow maiden of Athean. After Poseidon rapes Medusa in Athena’s temple, Athena punishes Medusa….making her the embodiement of death and damning her to a life of solitude.
What does this say about society then, and now?
Well, the myth that tells Medusa’s metamorphosis into a monster as a punishment by Athena is the patriarchal Roman version. The ancient Greek myth, which has closer ties to its progenitor, the Egyptian tale of Wadjet, tells us that Athena gifted Medusa with ugliness and the power to turn men to stone as a way of protecting her from further violations of her person. Even so, her ugliness was emphasized in the Roman retelling as a way to further demonize and disenfranchise Medusa (i.e. she only lashed out on men because she was too ugly to be loved by them, her ugliness forced her into seclusion from men, ugly women are bad, etc. ((I am ironically using abbreviations for Latin words here yes)).). As the original myth tells it, she lived in solitude because she did not wish to be around men after what Poseidon had done. And Athena gave her the power to never be at the mercy of a male again. So originally, Athena was pissed at Poseidon, not Medusa. And then, of course, the Romans took it one step further and had Perseus behead her (yay the vindictive old hag is dead) and give it to Athena for her shield.
But yeah, renderings of Medusa’s head appeared in the doorways of many women’s shelters in ancient Greece because she was a symbol of female empowerment, not a monster feared by men and women alike.
This brings me to my awkward segue into a cool essay on the subject: The Laugh of the Medusa by Helene Cixous actually touches on the system of misogynistic fear behind the Romanized version, but most importantly why women need to write their stories because this is the shit that happens when dudebros get ahold of them. It’s also an awesome overture to queer theories of writing. If you can read French, I highly suggest getting your hands on the essay as it was originally written, because Cixous’ voice is just incredibly inspiring when you read it as she intended it to be read. Also, the essay itself is worthy of criticism as it is not as intersectional as it absolutely needs to be. I feel I should add that before someone thinks I advocate the problematic things she says.
But now that I’ve totally digressed from my original point: It’s important that we’re always mindful to question the credibility of those telling us not only history, but also legend.
(I became absolutely exhausted halfway through this so forgive me if the connection I’m making between the original post and this essay is more arbitrary than I think it is at the moment)
Very interesting! Pear and I were talking about Medusa the other day, actually, and about how the turning of the ‘heroes’ into stone is usually just thought of as a fancy way of killing them, and perhaps as a warning to others, but that looks at it from the attacker’s point of view. What does it mean for the gorgon that she protects herself by creating statues? A statue is a way of constructing a public memory of someone, of broadcasting their character and achievements. Usually they present the subject as the subject wants to be presented (or as someone else wants them to be presented) rather than necessarily as they are. But the statues Medusa creates are like photographs and can’t lie. And the memory they preserve and broadcast is of an aggressor. Medusa turns her attackers into permanent memorials of the fact that they were trying to kill her. It’s a bit like taking a screen-shot of an abusive message, or a video of an act of police brutality.
I’m a bit wary of talk about ‘the original myth’, though, because it’s very rarely possible to identify such a thing. You can often find the oldest recorded version, but that’s rarely the first time the story was ever told, and it’s often possible to detect traces of earlier layers. Sometimes written versions of later date can actually contain elements that go back further than earlier written versions. Homer, for instance, the oldest surviving Greek source, seems to talk of only one gorgon, but a short time later Hesiod has three; but Euripides, much later still, refers to only one.
Similarly we probably shouldn’t talk about ‘the Roman version’ because there were many Roman versions and many Greek versions, and those categories overlap chronologically (since Greeks and Romans coexisted). It certainly isn’t right to say that the Romans introduced the beheading of Medusa by Perseus: that goes right back to Hesiod (Theogony line 280 or thereabouts) and is common in Greek visual art. And I’m a bit unsure about thebeggarandtheking’s suggestions of the differences between Greek and Roman accounts of Athena’s motives and intentions in causing Medusa’s transformation: my impression is that it’s rather more patchy than that. In Ovid (Metamorphoses book 4), a Roman source, the snaky hair is depicted as both a punishment imposed by Minerva and also a form of empowerment, or at least self-defence, for Medusa: ‘to terrify her enemies’. In one strand of the tradition it’s nothing to do with Poseidon at all but revenge for Medusa’s attempt to rival Athena’s beauty. I’m not aware of any version that depicts Athena as mainly motivated by a desire to protect Medusa: it sits rather uncomfortably with the fact that in most versions, both Greek and Roman, she’s the one who orchestrates and assists Medusa’s assassination by Perseus, but then again gods changed their minds a lot, and I’m certainly not familiar with every version of the story, so there may well be support for that reading somewhere.
Similarly the ugliness or beauty of Medusa doesn’t seem to me to observe a clean division between Roman and Greek sources. In Pindar, an old Greek poet, she’s beautiful, but in Apollodorus, also Greek but somewhat later, she has scales and tusks; in Greek vase-painting, on the other hand, she was usually monstrous in the archaic period but became beautiful in the classical period. In Ovid her face is unpleasant or terrible but it isn’t entirely clear whether this is because it’s unattractive or simply because it causes death and / or is itself dead (after being severed and mounted on a shield).
There are a lot of interesting ways to read the Medusa tradition, drawing on various different strands and sources. (We haven’t even touched on the fact that the gorgons were generally thought to have lived in Africa!) We can get a lot out of it without succumbing to the idea, which seems to thrive on Tumblr, that ‘the original version’ is somehow better or more interesting or less (or more) implicated in oppressive thinking or otherwise more worthy of attention (see also sundry arguments about Sherlock Holmes adaptations, or people citing the novel Les miserables as support for their interpretations of the film, or that post that went round a while back claiming that there was an ‘original’ version of Peter Pan in which Peter murdered the Lost Boys to stay young). I completely agree that we always need to ask who’s telling the story and what shapes the way they shape it, and that’s precisely because there is no original: there is no neutral starting-point. Every version is a combination of pre-existing elements and new ideas, and that’s as true of our own retellings and interpretations as it is of Hesiod’s and Ovid’s. Thebeggarandtheking has taken elements from different readings of Medusa and made a new reading, and that reading has informed and deepened my reading even though there are elements of it I disagree with, and so onwards and outwards and down the generations.
