![]() In addition, it makes some claims about how the image of Medusa’s head was found on the lintel of women’s shelters, and it was patriarchal Rome that subverted this myth into the one of rape and victim-blaming and turned her ugliness into something shameful.įirst let me say, I am all for reinterpreting and retelling Greek myths! People have been doing it down the ages, and I love the Romantic fixation on Prometheus and Freud’s fetish for Oedipus and tumblr’s fascination with Persephone/Hades. And Athena gave her the power to never be at the mercy of a male again” It’s only when we begin to talk about Medusa as a monster from birth that rape isn’t an inherent part of her story, and yes, there’s a whole bunch of literature about that - The Medusa Reader is a good sourcebook for all the debate about Medusa, from Freud’s ‘Medusa’s head = castration complex’ waffle to Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘maybe Medusa just wanted to be loved’ poetry.By now, most of you have probably seen this post about how “ 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…As the original myth tells it, she lived in solitude because she did not wish to be around men after what Poseidon had done. So yes, when we’re talking about Medusa as a transformed being, rape and unjust punishment is unfortunately a key element to her narrative. The Medusa we’re most used to seeing, by Caravaggio in 1597, when Metamorphoses was still one of the most influential texts in the West (image from here): Here is Medusa as she was depicted in around the 7th century BC (image from here):Īnd here she is in her later Roman incarnation (image from here): Nowadays, obviously, we don’t ascribe to the same moral code, and so when we retell myths in which we want the protagonist to remain sympathetic, we often veil the original story in words like ‘seduce’. Part of this is because of the sexual politics of the time, when the lines between sex and rape were not really considered in the same way that they are now, and characters / participants could essentially rape without losing their morality or empathy. There are some translations and retellings which sanitise the myth and turn her into a willing participant, but this is true of many of the more well-known myths many of Zeus’ famous ‘conquests’ are actually his victims. With Metamorphoses being one of the most important texts up to and throughout the Renaissance, the second narrative is the one most commonly invoked when we think of Medusa. The inference here is that she is made monstrous by Athena, although she isn’t described as being particularly grotesque, and many Roman depictions showed her as being beautiful beyond her snake hair. Several stories in this source are old Greek myths which Ovid embellishes to add a transformative element, so the Medusa myth isn’t alone in that respect. The source for this is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a much later source, first published in 8 AD. For this transgression, she is punished by Athena and has her hair turned into snakes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |