The Original ‘Nasty Woman’

Æ  Medusa  The Original ‘Nasty Woman’

For centuries, Medusa has been used to criticize powerful women. So it’s no surprise the mythological Gorgon has re-emerged this election cycle.

As a professor of English, I teach a humanities course on female icons in pop culture, and one of the first examples my students learn about is Medusa. A Gorgon from classical mythology, Medusa is widely known as a monstrous creature with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Through the lens of theology, film, art, and feminist literature, my students and I map how her meaning has shifted over time and across cultures. In so doing, we unravel a familiar narrative thread: In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Medusa has cropped up repeatedly during this heated election cycle, one that may end with the United States electing its first woman president. One image in particular keeps recurring—the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as the mythological snake-haired monster. Clinton has been compared to Medusa by conservative writers like Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart News and bloggers like Ron Russell at Right Wing Humor, and in political merchandise sold online. Meanwhile, her opponent Donald Trump has been portrayed as her conqueror, the Greek demigod Perseus. On Zazzle, people can buy products emblazoned with an image of a stoic Trump raising the severed head of a bug-eyed Clinton, her mouth agape in silent protest—an allusion to a sculpture by the Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Today, the political references to Medusa only underscore the pervasive misogyny that drives many attacks against Clinton and other so-called “nasty women.”

Medusa remains a potent icon at a time when women leaders continue to be viewed skeptically or, at worst, as inhuman. Indeed, almost every influential female figure has been photoshopped with snaky hair: Martha Stewart, Condoleezza Rice, Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Merkel. (Have a few minutes? Do a Google Image search: Type in a famous woman’s name and the word Medusa.) These businesswomen, politicians, activists, and artists made the same “mistake” that Susan B. Anthony identified when she commented on the lack of women’s voices in 19th-century newspapers: “Women … must echo the sentiment of these men. And if they do not do that, their heads are cut off.” These women infringed upon the domain of men. The only response, as suggested by their Medusa-fied images? To cut their heads off; to silence them.

The implicit violence of the Medusa comparison relates not only to beheading, but also to rape culture—another issue that has figured into the current election. Bits of Medusa’s story date back to at least Homer’s Iliad, but it is with Ovid’s Metamorphoses that her story emerges most fully. A closer read of her tale may surprise those who only know her vaguely from popular culture. In Ovid’s story, the god Neptune sees Medusa, desires her, and decides that, because he is a god, he is entitled to her body (sound familiar?). He rapes her in Minerva’s temple, and Minerva, incensed that her temple has been defiled, punishes the victim rather than the perpetrator (again, sound familiar?). Minerva transforms Medusa into a snake-haired monster who now, instead of inspiring men’s desire, literally petrifies them. Later, Minerva gives her shield to Perseus to help him kill Medusa; he uses it as a mirror, deflecting Medusa’s curse. He beheads her while she sleeps and then carries her head in a bag, a trophy he pulls out as needed to destroy enemies.

Medusa has since haunted Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency. As the art historian Christine Corretti has explained, Cellini believed Medusa symbolized both the threat of women’s burgeoning political power and a feminized Italy. Corretti notes that these sentiments were popularized during the Renaissance by Machiavelli who, in The Prince, alluded to the Medusa icon when he described the state as a woman “without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn,” desperate for a manly rescuer. Medusa again became a symbol of a monstrously feminized republic during the French revolution. In 1791, Marie Antoinette appeared as a beastly Medusa in the print “Les deux ne font qu’un.” A year later the English artist Thomas Rowlandson created a print depicting the vision of liberty espoused by the rebels of the French Revolution as Medusa-like.

Later, as women’s colleges began to open in the United States, the 19th-century painter Elihu Vedder imagined Medusa as a self-absorbed woman who petrifies herself by looking into a mirror. Sigmund Freud notably used the myth to explain his concept of castration anxiety. And as women rallied for the right to vote, various anti-suffrage postcards linked suffragettes to the monster. Concerns about gender and power continued into the 1940s when the writer Philip Wylie, in his invective Generation of Vipers, evoked Medusa (and her Gorgon sisters Stheno and Euryale) in order to urge readers to resist the women who had entered the work force after the first two world wars. By then, Medusa’s history as a rape victim had been erased from the cultural consciousness. She had simply become a woman with a terrifying potential power to emasculate men.