I recently reread Sue Woolfe’s 1989 novel Painted Woman, the story of a woman’s relationships to art and her father, and the relationship of art and violence. For those who haven’t read it (and it is worth reading), the story unfolds in two voices, the younger and apologetic Frances Montrose, and the older, more confident Frances. The younger Frances is convinced she helped her father murder her mother so he could teach Frances how to Art. While the novel lends itself to interpretation through the Oedipus complex/Electra myth, it is the Medusa myth that nests most deeply in the narrative. The ‘classical’ Medusa story, and those myths connected to it, could be key to understanding the novel’s relationality, and the axiomatic relation of creativity and violence. I will attempt one day to publish a phenomenological reading of Painted Woman and the Greek myths it plays with. For the moment I'll dip my toe into the ancient stories of Medusa, which show that there's more to Medusa than you learned about from your grandmother’s Reader’s Digest Dictionary of Greek and Roman Myths.
There are multiple versions of the myths in which the Medusa features, and evidence of a complex ancient transmission and reception history of the Medusa-Gorgon figure.[1] Medusa could first have been the gorgoneion, the apotropaic head on Athene’s aegis and Agammemnon’s shield, and in one early text the Gorgon is only a head in Hades.[2] “The ritual object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster.”[3] Some versions of the myth have her as the only mortal sister of the three Gorgons, hideously ugly, “winged with snakes for hair, hatred of mortal man,” according to Aeschylus.[4] In other versions she is a beautiful human woman transformed by the various cruelties of the gods. In these versions it is the goddess Athena who transforms Medusa the human woman into the piteous creature of myth. In one version, Medusa is in Athene’s temple when Athena overhears her self-admiration and transforms her as punishment for it into “a monster with a round, ugly face, a scowling visage with glaring, bulging, bloodshot eyes, bared teeth, protruding tongue, snakes for hair and a deadly visage and glance that turned victims to stone.”[5] In a later version, Athena transforms Medusa after Medusa is raped by Poseidon.[6] In Ovid’s Metamorphoses it is Medusa’s hair which attracts Poseidon, so Athena transforms the hair into snakes.[7]
However Medusa becomes The Medusa, in almost every mythic version she is able to petrify, in the sense of frighten, the men who look at her. In the earliest mention of the Gorgon, Homer describes “the Gorgon only as a monster of the underworld.”[8] Odysseus is frightened by the prospect of seeing the head of the Gorgon, but this Gorgon has neither a body nor the ability to turn anyone to stone.[9] Later textual accounts of the Gorgon-Medusa do empower her with this ability, such as in the myth of Perseus, who famously has to use a mirror to avert her gaze, and in that of Athena, who in one myth accidentally petrifies her human sister by allowing her to see the head.[10] Some modern analysis equates Medusa and the Evil Eye, but this seems unlikely.[11] In the ancient myths at least it is not her eyes but her voice, head, face, hair, blood, or skin that are harmful.[12] In visual representation of the Medusa sometimes her eyes are closed or blank, and she remains harmful even when she has her eyes closed, is asleep, or even dead.[13] Perseus uses her decapitated head, reducing the Medusa again to the gorgoneion, to petrify his enemies, and delivers the head to Athena who puts the image on her aegis.[14]
In some versions of the Medusa myth it is Perseus who kills Medusa, but lesser known versions have Athena or even Zeus in this role.[15] In what is possibly one of the oldest versions of the myth, Athena slays the chthonic Gorgon, gaining for herself “some of the Gorgo’s ocular power.”[16] When Perseus slays Medusa he is assisted by Athena, who gives him her bronze shield, with which he is able to approach the sleeping Medusa by looking at her only through her reflection in it.[17] In yet another version of the myth, Medusa sees herself in Perseus’ shield, “petrifying herself through her own lethal gaze.”[18]
In versions which would have the Medusa pregnant, possibly by Poseidon, two children fly from the blood at her neck, or a mixture of blood and earth, or of blood, pain, and sea foam, upon decapitation.[19] Pegasus, the winged horse who took its name from the springs of Ocean, and Chrysaor, a giant born holding a golden sword, are born from the Medusa’s death.[20] In ancient times, Pegasus was more frequently known in his role as the carrier of the thunder and lightning of Zeus than for his relationship to creativity.[21] But when his hoof strikes the earth before his first flight, “Medusa’s blood flows into the hollow to form the Hippocrene spring that is sacred to the Muses.”[22] It is for this act Pegasus was adopted by Romantic poets and artists as “a symbol of the flight of creativity and a figure associated with the Muses,” just as the Medusa figures in Romantic art and literature as the dark love, the classic beauty, and the sentimental, suicidal woman with similarities to the “Romantic woman artist.”[23] It is not Medusa per se who is associated with creativity, but the products of her violent death. The blood of Medusa from which Pegasus springs can be used for both death and life. Robert Graves provides three such accounts of the use of Medusa’s blood. Athena gave Asclepius two vials of blood.
With what had been drawn from the veins on her left side, he could raise the dead; with what had been drawn from her right side, he could destroy instantly. Others say that Athene and Asclepius divided the blood between them: he used it to save life, but she to destroy life and instigate wars. Athene had previously given two drops of this same blood to Erichthonius, one to kill, the other to cure, and fastened the phials to his serpent body with golden bands.[24]
Given Athena’s presence in the Medusa myth, as well as the explicit reference to her in the novel, it is worth briefly noting her origins also.[25] The virgin goddess of wisdom, good counsel, warfare, and some handicrafts, springs fully formed from her father Zeus’ head after Hephaistos cuts it open to alleviate a headache.[26] In ancient myth and in modern scholarship, Athena is described as a motherless goddess.[27]
“ATHENA: For I did not have a mother who bore me. No, all my heart praises the male.”[28]
Athena has been described as “the archetype of a motherless daughter: Zeus’s forehead is her ‘mother.’”[29] It is not true, however, that Zeus ‘gave birth’ to Athena. Athena’s mother is the Titan Metis (wisdom), who became, in Stoic and early Greek philosophy, a symbol of wisdom or cunning.[30] Zeus feared that the children Metis bore him would be a danger to him, the second child would become more powerful and overthrow him. Zeus therefore tricks Metis into turning herself into a fly and he eats her, but she is already pregnant with Athena, and Metis forges armour for her before Zeus has his head cracked open and Athena springs from the gash.[31] Some commentators consider Metis’ integration into Athena’s ‘birth’ through Zeus evidence of the ‘de-feminising’ of wisdom, the submission of female wisdom and creativity under patriarchy.[32]
Adapted from K. Imray, "Novel as Philosophy in Images: Mr Handsome and The Look." Dissertation, Deakin University, 2020
Notes
[1] Cathy Ann Dioro, “Silent Scream of Medusa: Restoring, or Re-Storying, Her Voice” (PhD diss., Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2010), 18. [2] Stephen R. Wilk, Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24. [3] Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908),187. [4] Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. James Scully and C. John Herington, in The Complete Aeschylus, Volume II, Persians and Other Plays, ed. Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, 289–381 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 354. [5] John H. Elliot, Beware the Evil Eye: The Evil Eye in the Bible and the Ancient World, Volume 2, Greece and Rome (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), 133. [6] Wilk, Medusa, 25. [7] Elliot, Beware the Evil Eye, 133–134. [8] Wilk, Medusa, 24. [9] Wilk, Medusa, 24. [10] Graves, The Greek Myths, 224–225, 21. [11] Rabun Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 203–205. [12] Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, 203. [13] See Wilk, Medusa, 33. [14] Athena’s aegis has on it the head of Medusa, or sometimes her flayed skin (Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, 203). [15] Wilk, Medusa, 25. [16] Elliot, Beware the Evil Eye, 135. [17] Other gods assist also: Hermes, winged sandals, Hephaestus, a sword, and Hades, a cloak of invisibility (see Graves, The Greek Myths, 224–225). [18] Elliot, Beware the Evil Eye, 134. [19] Graves, The Greek Myths, 106–107; s.v. “Pegasus,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities, eds Charles Russell Coulter and Patricia Turner (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), 376. [20] Hesiod, Theogony, 280–285, in Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn–White, 78–153 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann LTD], 1914). [21] Hesiod, Theogony, 284–286. [22] Anne DeLong, Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012), 97. [23] DeLong, Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse, 97; See also Jerome McGann, “The Beauty of Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology,” Studies in Romanticism 11, no. 1 (1972): 3–25. [24] Graves, The Greek Myths, 157. [25] Woolfe, Painted Woman, 18, italics original: “Over here is Athenian queen who had two drops of blood from the Gorgon.” [26] Graves, The Greek Myths, 21. [27] She has a plethora of fathers – Pallas, King Iton of Itonus, Poseidon, and Zeus (see Graves, The Greek Myths, 20–21). [28] Aeschylus, The Oresteia, cited in Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (San Diego; New York; London: A Harvest/HJB Book, 1989), 2. [29] Chesler, Women and Madness, 23. [30] She was “wisest among gods and mortal men” (Hesiod, Theogony, 886–887). [31] Graves, The Greek Myths, 21. [32] Even Graves (The Greek Myths, 21) accepts that the birth of Athena through Zeus’ head is “a dogmatic insistence on wisdom as a male prerogative; hitherto the goddess alone had been wise.”