Transcript:
Erected outside the courthouse where Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison is a statue of Medusa with the Head of Perseus. It’s a powerful scene -- a scorned woman gripping a hero’s head as though it were a basketball in front of the room where justice was handed to our generation’s most notorious rapist. There’s just one problem: that’s not how the real myth goes.
In the classical version, Medusa, a beautiful maiden, was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. In a fit of anger, Athena turned Medusa’s hair into snakes and eyes into poison (Poseidon, of course, was left unpunished). Perseus later beheads her, and in her death she gives birth to the son Poseidon impregnated her with: Pegasus.
This is the story that’s actually on display next to the courthouse where justice was only kind of served, after decades of jokes and looking the other way. Take a look:
[Ricky Gervais clip]
“Our next presenter starred in Netflix’s Bird Box, a movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing. Sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein.”
That was in 2020. But as early as 2005, famous celebrities like Courtney Love were already hinting at troubled waters:
[Courtney Love clip]
“If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don’t go.”
Not so powerful now, is it?
Let’s add more layers to this: I read Lore by Alexandra Bracken early last year, and a quote from it has stuck with me ever since:
“They imagined [Medusa] hideous because they feared to meet the true gaze of a woman, to witness the powerful storm that lives inside, waiting”.
So, what if Medusa’s hair was never made of snakes at all? What if her eyes never actually could turn men to stone? What if, after being the victim of a violent rape, she remained as beautiful as ever, and the legend of her hideousness was simply the way that white men who have retold her story for centuries have vilified her? It’s no coincidence that Athena is the one to allegedly curse Medusa -- of course we shift the blame off the shoulders of men, off the shoulders of Gods and heroes, onto those of women. After all, isn’t that still happening today?
By choice or design, our society is one that fosters division amongst and within minority groups, preventing them from ever uniting against the prejudiced majorities in power.
This is true with women -- a look at the “I’m not like most girls'' trend will confirm as much. But, this is also true amongst the LGBTQ+ community -- Caitlin Jenner, arguably the most well-known transgender individual in Western pop culture, has gone on record supporting Florida’s transphobic and homophobic legislation, calling it “common sense”. This is true amongst racial minorities -- without spoiling too much of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, isn’t it funny the plot is that two minority groups end up at war with each other because of something that the American government threatened to do?
Medusa is a sexual object, then she was a villain. She’s the representation of female rage, then every woman with ambition to come after her, from Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, is faced with an onslaught of comparisons to her. The vast majority of the general population hardly remembers the myth, only that she was evil and hideous -- and, well, isn’t that exactly the kind of erasure the men writing her story want?
And Medusa is hardly the only one -- let’s shift our focus to the Trojan War. The Mycenean Greeks waged war against the city of Troy after Paris, the prince of Troy, abducted Helen in her sleep. The Trojan Horse eventually secured the Mycenaeans a victory, but fret not, Helen’s role in the war cemented her as “Helen of Troy, destroyer of ships, destroyer of men, destroyer of cities.” (Aeschylus’s Agamemnon). It’s interesting that a smart, beautiful woman gets blamed for one of history’s most destructive wars, thus effectively absolving the men who actually carried the spears and shields for ten years of all guilt.
But beyond that -- the Trojan War is infamous for being the main battleground for Achilles, Greece’s great hero. Those a little familiar with the text know of the tensions between Achilles and Agamemnon, the leader of the Mycenaean army, that eventually cost Achilles his life. Those a little more familiar with the text would know that the primary cause of their conflict was Briseis, Achilles’s prisoner-turned-concubine-turned-Agamemnon’s-prisoner.
Achilles raided Lyrnessus, Briseis’s village, and proceeded to slaughter her father, husband, son, and mother. He then took her back to the Mycenaean camp, where Agamemnon offered her as a sexual slave for Achilles. Achilles took her. Years later, Apollo infested the Mycenaean camp with a plague, causing Agamemnon’s slave to perish, and so, Agamemnon insisted that Achilles give Briseis back to him. Achilles gave her, but refused to engage in combat as long as Agamemnon was leading the charge, so Agamemnon returned her.
If this sounds like a property exchange, you’re right. In the original Ilead, Briseis remains almost entirely silent, barely speaking, thus becoming a clean canvas for the men around her to project themselves onto. Which begs the question -- is Briseis at the root of the feud between these two men, or is it their pride, selfishness, and inability to see their own fallibility that ultimately served as their downfall?
Pat Baker’s modern-day retelling of the tale, in Silence of the Girls, opens with the following quote: “Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
Was Briseis supposed to enjoy being kept a political prisoner for the better part of a decade, sexual slave to a man who killed her entire family? She was a woman with, to quote an article by Rachel Herzog, “dramatically limited choices”, disappearing from Greek history and mythology as soon as Achilles is no longer alive to abuse, torment, and imprison her.
But of course, women becoming scapegoats in war is nothing new. Let’s fast forward a couple centuries to the French Revolution, arguably one of Europe’s most important insurrections:
France was broke. Struggling under the burden of heavy war debts and only collecting taxes on approximately 55% of the population, the French government was out of money, and out of options. They turned to their nobility, the elite class of Frenchmen previously exempt from property taxes, and attempted to levy taxes on them to support the war effort. But the nobles rioted.
They demanded that King Louis XVI call the Estates General, the Parliamentary system in France that had not existed on anything but paper in several hundred years. The representatives at the Estate General banded together, then sat down in a tennis court and decided to spend the next two years “having discussions” about what the new Constitution of France should look like.
In the meantime, the women of France, who were broke and starving and struggling to feed their families, decided to storm Versailles to demand change. They were eventually the ones who caused the King and Queen of France to relocate to Paris and become political prisoners of the Tennis Court Assembly. They were the ones that overthrew the monarchy of France.
But still, women are excluded from the narrative arc of the Revolution, unless, of course, we’re beheading Marie Antoinette and cementing her name in history as the clueless, apathetic queen who told her starving subjects to “eat cake” -- which, by the way, she never actually did say. Nor was she any actual threat to the new Republic of France, but I suppose the history textbooks forgot to include that part…
Is this our place in history? Forgotten, erased, eliminated, forcibly propagandized in a demeaning way? Name one victim of Harvey Weinstein. Name one victim of Larry Nassar. Name the journalists who uncovered their story. Infamous or not, we give wicked, powerful men control over the narrative, letting them exclude or rewrite parts that don’t fit.
In Oedipus Rex, Jokasta, Oedipus’ wife, with the least amount of information possible, still manages to figure out that Oedipus is her son before he does. She then pays the heaviest price for it -- her life. Theseus rapes Phaedra, yet it is Phaedra who is remembered as the liar who brings false allegations of sexual abuse against one of Greece’s most treasured heroes. Orpheus, a man of eternal charm and infinite charisma, managed to charm Hades into returning his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld. But did anyone ask Eurydice if she wanted to return from the dead? If she wanted a few more years with Orpheus, and if it was worth the disruption from the eternal peace she was promised in the Underworld?
Of course not.
So let’s end where we started: Harvey Weinsten’s courthouse. Medusa holding the head of Perseus. I was doing research about this statue, trying to figure out how the sculptor could have ever thought that this was a feminist statement. I mean…if anything, shouldn’t Medusa be holding the head of Poseidon, the man who raped her? I realized eventually that Luciano Garbati, the sculptor, is a man who, notably, is not a victim of any of the things Medusa fell prey to. So the twisted irony here is that even as we try to rewrite the stories of women in history with a more considered lens, we are, by default, once again, translating their stories out of their perspective, and into that of another.
And to quote RF Kuang, the author of Babel, “translation is always an act of betrayal.”
Works Cited:
Barker, Pat. The Silence of the Girls: A Novel. Anchor Books, a Division of Penguin Random House, LLC, 2019.
Bracken, Alexandra. Lore. Quercus, 2021.
“Briseis in Greek Mythology.” Greek Legends and Myths, https://www.greeklegendsandmyths.com/briseis.html.
Donohue, Tyler A. “The Mishandled Myth of Medusa.” Medium, An Injustice!, 30 Dec. 2020, https://aninjusticemag.com/the-mishandled-myth-of-medusa-1f66fda1874b.
Gaze of the Medusa: The Defeat of Hillary Clinton - Athensjournals.gr. https://www.athensjournals.gr/humanities/2018-5-3-2-Clebanov.pdf.
Haynes, Natalie. Pandora's Jar: Women in Greek Myths. Harper, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2022.
Herzog, Rachel. “Reading Consent into the Iliad.” Medium, EIDOLON, 1 Sept. 2019, https://eidolon.pub/reading-consent-into-the-iliad-e2c42ae0b221.
Jan Haywood Teaching Fellow in Ancient History. “Was Helen Really to Blame for the Trojan War – or Just a Scapegoat?” The Conversation, 13 Sept. 2022, https://theconversation.com/was-helen-really-to-blame-for-the-trojan-war-or-just-a-scapegoat-64456.
Kuang, R. F. Babel ; or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. Harper Voyager, 2022.
Lita, Eliza. “'The Silence of the Girls' Is the Feminist Iliad We Needed All Along.” Medium, Coffee Time Reviews, 19 May 2022, https://medium.com/coffee-time-reviews/the-silence-of-the-girls-is-the-feminist-iliad-we-needed-all-along-1b43e9252c30.
Pavia, Will. “Medusa Statue at Weinstein Court Angers Rape Survivors.” World | The Times, The Times, 14 Oct. 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/medusa-statue-at-weinstein-court-angers-rape-survivors-b8fnbk5hn#:~:text=A%20statue%20of%20Medusa%20holding,justice%E2%80%9D%20for%20the%20modern%20age.
Sophocles, and Francis Storr. Oedipus Rex. East India Publishing Company, 2020.
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