Judith slaying Holofernes, Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne
When looking at Greek myths with their pantheon of both male and female deities, we can easily forget that these tales were born out of a deeply patriarchal society where women were treated harshly to maintain their subservience. Evidence of misogyny can be traced back to the Greek myth of the origin of women. Prometheus famously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, thus gifting them with knowledge. As punishment, the gods chain him to a rock, and a giant eagle eats his innards. How do they punish man? They give him women. Pandora is of the first race of women, outwardly beautiful, inwardly flawed. She receives a box that she is forbidden to open, but temptation gets the better of her and so she lifts the lid, releasing all misery and suffering upon mankind. Only hope remains. This echoes of elements of the biblical Eve, seduced by the snake on the Tree of Knowledge, succumbing to what was forbidden and blamed for the original sin. Framing the origin of women in such a way perpetuates the misconception that weakness and aspects of deceit and temptation are inherently female traits. Weakness in particular is key because it speaks to power; those who have it and those who don’t.
In Mary Beard’s Women and Power, she opens with the story of Odysseus’ wife Penelope who is ordered to be silent by her son Telemachus when she enters the communal space to complain about the singing. Songs were used to narrate significant stories, and when Penelope complains, he silences her and tells her that stories are men’s domain before banishing her to her chambers. It is interesting that, while his father Odysseus spent years away on voyage, it was Penelope who ruled Ithaca in his place. Yet a woman remains inferior. Likewise, in Aeschelus’ play, Agamemnon, when the chorus yells an insult at the eponymous character, they shout “You woman!” (p. 65). Here ‘woman’ implies weakness, in that it means to be less than a man. When the chorus praises his wife Clytemnestra who rules Argos in her husband’s absence, they say she has “…words like a man’s, both wise and kind”(p. 23). So even when a woman is permitted to speak and does so well, she is never fully credited since speech, words, and stories have been identified as the domain of men.
My first experience of Medusa was as a small child watching Clash of the Titans. She was a monster: snake-haired with a petrifying gaze. I feared for Perseus and cheered as he used his cunning to slay the horrifying creature. The image of Medusa’s severed head, snakes writhing beyond the point of her death, still haunted me days later. When I met her again in Ovid’s version of her tale within Metamorphoses, my image of her as a monster was challenged. Here, she is a beautiful mortal, raped by the sea god Poseidon in the temple of Athena. Athena was his rival and so this act of desecration would humiliate the goddess as well as Medusa. In an act of vengeance, Athena transforms the once beautiful Medusa into the well-known snake-haired monster with the power to turn anyone who looks upon her to stone. No longer will she be an object of desire. Here Medusa is clearly the victim of a violent crime, and I began to see how her transformation could be metaphorical of the irrevocable damage caused by sexual assault. Her transformation into a monster compounds her inferiority both as a woman and within the tale, because it dehumanises her.
Another of Athena’s victims, Arachne, suffers a similar fate. When the goddess becomes so enraged by Arachne’s superior talent for weaving, she transforms her into a spider, fated to weave for the rest of her life. Sometimes it is the gods themselves who transform in order to obtain the object of their desire. When Poseidon pursues his older sister, Demeter, she transforms herself into a horse to escape him. But he does the same, catches up with her and rapes her. Zeus also transforms himself into the form of a swan to ‘seduce’ Leda, and in another instance, disguises himself as Alcmene’s husband and rapes her, resulting in the birth of Hercules. Calisto, he rapes while she sleeps.
The theme of rape is prolific within Greek mythology. Look at the stars. The sky is filled with constellations depicting victims. Take Andromeda, also known as ‘the Chained Lady’. When we see her in the night sky, we see a princess chained naked to rocks, while she waits for the sea monster Cetus to eat/rape her. You can also find her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, seated on her throne in the sky. This depiction strikes us at first as regal and distinguished. But appearances are deceiving because she is, in fact, another of Poseidon’s victims, suffering a fate much like her daughter’s. She, too, is bound for all eternity, not to rocks, but to her throne as punishment for her vanity.
This brings us back to the role of female beauty in the subjugation of women within these myths. Reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy is at the root of an epic war. It is said that a thousand warships were launched for her sake. Later, we see the same Helen crop up in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Only this time, her beauty is responsible for Faustus losing his soul. Helen’s beauty is so tempting that he bargains eternal damnation for a single glimpse of her face. Similar to Medusa and Cassiopeia, her beauty was her only crime. This is important: When the myths don’t explicitly acknowledge rape, they describe the gods as either being ‘seduced’ by a woman’s beauty, or of obtaining her by ‘seduction’, when actually, it’s still rape. The use of ‘seduce’ is significant because it weakens the image of sexual violence, and, in a lot of cases, places the onus on the victim. This resonates with modern-day victim-blaming culture. However, it is clear that the gods either raped women or punished them for refusing their advances. Take Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy. Inspired by her beauty, Apollo gives her the gift of prophesy. When she later refuses to sleep with Apollo, he curses her gift so that no matter what she foretells, nobody will believe her. This story thus features another discomforting theme that extends to modern-day society.
Mortal women are not the only ones to suffer at the hands of the gods. Not even the goddess of wisdom and military victory, Athena, is immune to this threat. She is pursued by her half-brother, Hephaestus, the blacksmith who attempts to rape her. He fails, but it is recounted in Hyginus’ ‘Fabulae’ that, while they struggled, Hapheatus’ seed falls on the ground and creates a child, a boy whose lower half takes the form of a snake. And even Persephone’s Olympian parentage of her mother Demeter and father Zeus doesn’t protect her from Hades who kidnaps and rapes her.
Telemachus says to his mother Penelope that stories are the domain of men. But what happens when women begin to tell their stories? Take Carravagio’s Medusa, severed head suspended in the air, her eyes wide in horror. She is the monster slain. In contrast, when we see female figures from myth and allegory painted by another renowned Baroque artist, Artemisia Gentileshi, we are met with a different story. Her paintings frequently depict women from myths, allegory and biblical stories, but these women show complex emotions. They are not subservient. They have agency. Artemisia was the first woman to be accepted into the Academia di Arte Disegno and also a rape survivor.
Like Medusa, the witch Circe is traditionally perceived as a villain. Daughter of Apollo, she is famed for turning men into pigs for no reason. In recent times, she has undergone a retelling by classicist Madeline Miller. In her novel, we encounter a character who is vulnerable, rejected, and alone on an island. There she spends time learning the art of magic. Through this knowledge she is empowered to protect herself from rape by the sailors that she provides shelter to. Unlike what we have seen with other deities, Circe does not transform these mortals to punish them, but as an act of self-defence.
We need more of this, women taking control of the narrative. For so long, stories have belonged to the domain of men, resulting in them being filtered through a deeply patriarchal lens. Now women can tell their own stories. We can revisit the past and lend these wronged women the voices they didn’t have.