We have always been obsessed with Medusa. Her image has populated artworks across history, ranging from ancient Greece to the 2013 Rihanna cover of British GQ shot by Damien Hirst, in which the pop star donned a crown of squirming snakes. Still, followers of fashion may best know her as the logo of Italian fashion label, Versace. The house’s founder Gianni Versace chose the mythical creature for her ability to make people irreversibly fall in love, hoping that Versace clothes would acquire the same seductive powers. But it is the history of how she became a monster that makes her particularly relevant to the #MeToo era.
At first glance, the fashion house might seem unaware of Medusa’s loaded symbology, until you watch Donatella Versace’s The Story of Medusa (2018) YouTube series, that is. Here, supermodels including Naomi Campbell, Natalia Vodianova and Gigi Hadid recount the myth of the brand’s emblem, proving that the house is very much aware of the significance of the Greek anti-heroine. The 11-episode playlist emphasises female strength and beauty, highlighting Medusa’s incomparable looks and undivided worship of the powerful goddess Athena, but it also shares the lesser known tale of how she was raped by the Greek god Poseidon in the temple of Athena — an act for which Medusa was punished for and transformed into the infamous Greek gorgon she is known as today.
Despite this horrific backstory, Medusa is commonly depicted as a villain in art and literature. Her most famous depiction is not her own story, but that of Perseus who decapitates her. When her name comes up, most minds go to Caravaggio’s gruesome painting, depicting her severed head, blood streaming from her neck and her eyes aflame with the desperate realisation of her fate, but these portrayals seem to ignore her status as a rape victim, who has been punished for the crimes of her attacker.
It is the blatant misogyny and female victim shaming in Medusa’s story that makes her myth so relevant in 2018 — as it feels all too comparable to the stories brought to life in the #MeToo movement, and the horrendously insensitive treatment of women in rape trails even in the supposedly “woke” Western world. Just take the recent rape case in Ireland in which a teenage girl’s black lace thong was used to argue that she was effectively “asking for it”. Thankfully, many protested this gross suggestion that a woman’s clothing denotes consent, with Irish women posting pictures of their underwear on social media , and asking what type of clothing would a man have to wear to make him qualify as a sexual deviant in court. Yet, even in 2018, people are still looking for reasons to blame females for their abuse.
With cases such as these at the forefront of our minds, it’s unsurprising that Medusa is enjoying multiple reconsiderations in 2018. One such project is the dance work Medusa by London-based Israeli choreographer Jasmin Vardimon, which premiered in September. Vardimon told SLEEK that she was inspired by our current political climate to explore how the myth can be seen through a modern lens. She highlights parallels between sexual politics and environmental concerns about sea pollution, citing how Medusa is the name for jellyfish in over 28 languages. But her allusions to our #MeToo society grabbed the most attention. “Gender and injustice are subjects I’ve previously explored in my work over the years, but perhaps the current climate brought me back to explore this old story in a much wider reflection,” she explains. “Throughout history the image of Medusa has been used many times in association with strong female figures in an attempt to silence them,” Vardimon continues. “Another reminder was the 2016 US presidential election, when Donald Trump supporters were seen wearing t-shirts of Trump as Perseus, holding the chopped head of Hilary Clinton as Medusa.”
The performance itself displays many scenes of violence towards women, with molesting hands engulfing Medusa’s body and then turning into her head of snakes, as well the female performers enduring multiple moments of hitting, punching, muzzling and being chopped down like trees, highlighting Medusa’s troubled past, explaining why she is the way she is, and most jarringly, revealing how women themselves are sometimes the perpetrators of the patriarchy. As critic Lyndsey Winship observed in her review of the show in the Guardian, “it is Athena, after all, who punishes Medusa for Poseidon’s actions… an early honour crime that shuts down any idea of sisterhood.”
This vindication for Medusa was first popularised in Ovid’s Metamorphoses back in 8AD, but this line of thought is having a renaissance as the focus of the exhibition, Dangerous Beauty: Medusa in Classical Art, currently on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, charting the different portrayals of female hybrids from late 6th Century to the 20th Century. It explores why all these monsters, including Medusa, were gendered female in Greek myth. “We can’t just say misogyny and that’s the end of the story. But I do think it has to do with fear,” the exhibition’s curator Kiki Karoglou says in an interview on the Met’s website. “In a male centred society like ancient Athens, the feminisation of monsters goes hand in hand with the demonisation of women. It’s an issue of control of female sexuality and power.”
But the big question is, why make these supposedly fearful emblems of female transgression so beautiful? It’s undeniable that artefacts in the exhibition including its signature piece – a bronze Roman ornament from a chariot pole that Karaglou “built the show around” – depict Medusa with mesmeric eyes, symmetrical human features, and enviable windswept hair —even if it is filled with serpents. “One could… claim that the beautification of monsters is a mode of control,” Karoglou suggests. “Beauty is a form of controlling women that persists today.”
No one can relate more to the idea of being controlled by beauty than classicist Mary Beard, who has frequently been targeted and trolled on Twitter for not adhering to the stereotypical standards of on-screen female beauty. Beard also used Medusa as a symbol for her feminist manifesto Women and Power: A Manifesto, published late last year, which looks at how women have been categorised, marginalised and silenced throughout history. Despite the depressing revelations of Beard’s book, it opens with an inspirational survey of how far women have indeed come since the classical period. That’s not to say that we should be happy with where we are – in fact the “you’ve never had it so good” attitude is a frequent tactic used by men to silence troublesome feminists — but hopefully, if powerful choreographers, curators, fashion houses and authors continue to challenge accepted views of women as they have done with Medusa, it’s a step towards overturning stereotypes and myths for good.