Myths and Monsters: The Dehumanisation of Women in Classical Literature

 by Anya Shankar

Perseus kills Medusa

Women are always the villain in ancient myth. At face value, it's easy to overlook the patriarchal values that dictate Greek and Roman myth in particular, but as we look and think deeper into the nature of ancient myth, a surprising number of the monsters and villains are female. 

The ancient Greeks lived in a lost past in which humans lived simultaneously with heroes, gods and the supernatural. The tales of female monsters reveal more about the patriarchal constraints placed on women than they do about women themselves. With inspiration calling from the numerous feminist retellings of ancient myth in the form of novels, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind and Pat Barker’s the Silence of the Girls, I wanted to explore the ways in which women are presented in ancient myth.

Many are familiar with Medusa, a mythical monster with snakes for hair who meets her end at the hands of a male hero, Perseus. She was the only mortal of the three monstrous Gorgons, descended from Gaia, goddess of the Earth. Now, there are two versions of the myth of how Medusa got her infamous snakes for hair. The most popular one was that the sea god Poseidon, who admired Medusa's beauty, slept with her in the temple of Athena. Enraged as the virgin goddess was, she punished Medusa by cursing her with the snakes who turned anyone she looked at to stone. The version that seems less dictated by the patriarchy and that doesn't pit women against each other said that Medusa was raped by Posiedon in the temple of Athena. Still enraged at the act of defilement that occurred, Athena gifted Medusa with the snakes so that she could never again be abused by anyone. The difference shows the way that societies don't like women to empower each other, but rather compare women and make them hate each other because every time one of them breaks, it entertains us.  

Madeline Miller’s Circe received high critical acclaim and praise when it was released in 2018, over the past few years it had been increasingly more popular and shared on social media. Circe was an enchantress and minor goddess who lived in exile on an island called Aeaea. She features as the titular character in book 10 of the Odyssey, where she is depicted as a wicked witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs and dogs for fun. She has a year-long affair with Odysseus, who then leaves her to continue on his journey home to his wife and son. Miller’s evocative retelling provides an account of Circe’s whole story with all her true intentions and misgivings, giving a voice to a woman whose story was shaped by the desires and falsities of the patriarchy. Circe’s different stories seem to suggest that powerful women are feared by men. The more powerful a woman is, the more men try to devalue her and make her less worthy of her success. Circe is shamed in the Odyssey for seducing men like Odysseus, who pulls a sword on her to get her to surrender. Miller’s story incites that the reason Circe uses her witchery to turn groups of men into animals was sexual abuse by a group of men similar to Odysseus’ crew. The account of Circe, helpless and powerless, violated by strangers is powerful and raw, relating to countless women in her mission to protect herself from that in the future. In this way, women are villainised from trying to protect themselves against the violations they once received, in order to ensure they nor other women ever have to feel powerless again. 

Furthermore, many women were victims of the fleeting attachment of men’s love on their heroic journeys. Medea fell in love with Jason when he came to Colchis with the Argonauts in search of the golden fleece. Medea was a powerful and proud woman who was driven to the homicide of her two children to get revenge on Jason for cheating on her. Euripides’ Medea reveals Medea as an abuser of power rather than just a user of power, reinforcing the fact that men simply don't allow women to have power without it driving them crazy. Another example of this is Dido in the Aeneid. Dido is the ruler of Carthage, a city state in North Africa, in which Aeneas arrives after a storm. Dido is injected with Cupid’s poisoned arrow in order to fall in love with Aeneas, which strikes her almost like a madness or disease. She risks everything in the fall, her power and her political position. When Aeneas eventually leaves (of course), she is devastated. Her irrational obsession leads to her frenzied suicide out of her love and loss. Both of these examples depict a woman's purpose as only being a victim for the hero because his story is more valued than hers. They seem to suggest that women fall in love and that is what ultimately leads to their destruction, but men don’t fall and they can leave very easily because they don't get emotionally attached. 

Women have been villainised in stories for centuries, because stories are an easy way to encode expectations and pass them on. In this way, the patriarchy has dictated what women can do, wear and say for centuries through the stories they created.