“[S]tereotypes are the west’s stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art’s assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth. We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.”
— Camille Paglia1
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Roland Barthes speaks of myth as a “type of speech chosen by history”.2 If we follow his view, then Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad or any of the countless recent re-tellings or feminist re-analyses of the classic Medusa story are more than just modern takes on an old story. Rather, the modern story which describes Medusa as a victim of sexual assault or as an empowered woman is itself a representation of our societal myths about sexuality, female power, and consent in exactly the same way that Ovid’s tale signifed ideas about the need to keep all things holy separate from carnality.
In a world where teenagers on TikTok have decreed that a tattoo of a snaky-haired woman signifes that the individual in question is a rape survivor—and not just a fan of the classics—the myth of Medusa certainly means something both more and less than the tale of the gorgon who could turn men to stone with a look did. But then the original tale—if a story arising from an oral tradition can be said to have a single point of origin—also represented more than its narrative content alone. Some versions of the story begin with a trio of monster-sisters who have amongst them a single eye which Perseus must steal, but in the version popularized by Ovid, Medusa is a pious young woman led astray by the lusts of men. As such it becomes about the embodiment of the mythos of sacred pure femininity and a warning to keep sexuality separate from religion. By the same token, the multiple modern ‘feminist retellings’ of the Medusa story that one hears of late in magazines and articles, with their emphasis on Medusa being raped rather than seduced by Poseidon, signify more than just a narrative change which vindicates Medusa and makes her a victim twice over, punished for another’s crime.
Like all art, the Medusa story holds a mirror up to society. The ways in which sex brands women, publicly changing them from virgin to harlot were always part of the Medusa myth; what better metaphor for a sexually transmitted infection could there be than hair transformed into snakes that turn each subsequent man who looks at our heroine to to stone? Our modern post MeToo world shifts some of the details of course as the potential pitfalls surrounding consent are mythologized in young adult novels “re-telling” Medusa’s story and NY Times think-pieces alike, but it is still a myth, a signifer of our collective unconscious’ obsession with female sexuality.