Medusa

I don’t remember how or when I first learned about Medusa. It seems as though I’ve known about her forever. She is a character who is defined by her appearance, and has become so prevalent in pop culture that all we need to see is a woman with snaky hair and we know that we are looking at a representation of Medusa. She is on the label for Vesace, she makes an appearance in the movie version of the young adult series Percy Jackson. A statue of her, reimagining her as the victor over Perseus, instead of the other way around, was placed outside of the New York Criminal Court as a direct response to the Harvey Weinstein trials. Most recently, she even features in her own Amazon commercial, where she orders sunglasses to help with that little problem of turning everyone to stone. In the commercial, Medusa is portrayed as misunderstood. She doesn’t want to turn everyone to stone, as the commercial suggests, she wants to have friends, female friends, in particular, and sunglasses are one way that she can do that. 

I’m sure that the first time I encountered Medusa was through an image. The parts of her that get portrayed most are her head, her serpentine hair, her monstrous and horrified face. While she is the one who is supposed to petrify everyone who looks at her, the images seem to evoke that detail in Medusa herself, making her appear petrified and frozen in time. She looks scary. But then I remind myself that many of the famous renderings are by men. A few years ago, I read a story in the New Yorker, by Pat Barker, called “Medusa.” This was 2019, in the height of the #MeToo movement. The story details a rape – the kind that I’m sure many of us are afraid of – a woman completes the mundane task of taking the trash out and then returns into her home to find that a man has snuck inside; he rapes her. This was the first place that I remember reading that the Medusa of mythology was a rape victim of the god Poseidon. Barker writes from the point of view of the main character, Erin: “For one thing, I knew the story, or at least I knew one version of the story. Medusa had been raped by the god Poseidon inside the temple of Athena, and, to punish her (oh yes, her), Athena had transformed her beautiful hair into hissing venomous snakes” (“Medusa”). I’m embarrassed to say that this was the first time I consciously realized that Medusa was a victim of rape. I’ve read Ovid’s Metamorphoses many times, the only place where this part of Medusa’s story is told, and I’d never noticed it. What’s more, this is one place where translators do use the word “rape” in translation, where they call the act what it is. The Latin: “hanc pelagi rector templo vitiasse Minervae dicitur.” Mandelbaum’s translation: “Her beauty led the Ruler of the Sea to rape her in Minerva’s sanctuary” (141). I’ve learned now that there are about fifty different stories of rape in the Metamorphoses and that vitio, vitiare is a verb that is often used to mean “rape,” where the verb rapio, rapere, from which the English cognate “rape” derives is used less often to mean rape, and more often to indicate when someone is kidnaped or carried off (which also, in many instances does indicate rape). Looking more closely at these stories and the vocabulary used in Latin and English is significant not just because I learn what really happens, but because it helps me listen to women better, it helps me hear the places where they are silent and where their voices need to be heard more loudly and more widely. Myth is important for this, particularly when a major way that women get to speak in these contexts is through retellings like Barker’s “Medusa.” 

At the end of the Amazon commercial, we see a man making eyes at Medusa from across the bar. Medusa lowers her sunglasses and turns the man to stone, then laughs about it with her girlfriends. This Medusa is carefree, she’s strong enough to banish the men who express interest in her and she has a group of female friends who appear just as carefree as she herself is. The narrative of the commercial erases the other part of her narrative, though. Even though it’s uncomfortable, it is part of the story, and it is the part that we can’t forget or push under the rug or choose not to hear. In Barker’s story, while Erin views the sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa and other famous pieces, she writes: “I suppose I may have wondered why, in this epicenter of European culture, the rape of women should be so celebrated; but no, I don’t think I did. I simply looked” (“Medusa”). I think this marks what many viewers and readers of myth do, even as myth provides a foundation for many of our values and beliefs, particularly about women. Looking isn’t enough; instead of just looking, we need to listen, and once we’ve heard the story, we need to retell it, louder, for a wider audience. 

Sources

Barker, Pat. “Medusa.” The New Yorker. 15 April 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/medusa.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Harcourt, Inc. 1993.