Lea Tsvayg, Period 6, 12-13-23

 Lea Tsvayg, Period 6, 12-13-23

Modern Mythology 2024

Literacy & Learning

The book “Stone Blind” by Natalie Haynes completely reversed the image of Medusa I now see. Going into this unit, like almost everyone else, I pictured Medusa as this “monster” with snakes for hair, brutally killing everyone she comes across. However, I learned that this couldn’t be further from the truth. While yes, she does have snake hair, nothing about Medusa makes her a monster. She was an innocent girl who was raped by an arrogant and conceited god, and then wrongly punished. Despite being cursed and having plenty of reason for being angry with the world, Medusa was determined to never hurt anyone. She suffered, not letting herself go outside of her cave and if she briefly did, her eyes were tightly bound, just to ensure that nobody would be turned to stone. Despite her innocent and harmless nature, and despite everything she did to prevent causing harm to anyone, she was murdered by Perseus.

Perseus is considered the hero in the story, but is he really? He killed a sleeping gorgon who was causing him no harm. He mercilessly killed and then used Medusa’s head to kill even more. Perseus did nothing remotely heroic during his quest. He was heavily aided by the gods and did a lot more harm than good. Perseus is the one who committed murder and used Medusa’s “powers” to harm others, while Medusa was extremely cautious not to cause harm to anyone.

After watching the interview with Natalie Haynes video in class a while ago, the idea of characters being misrepresented really stuck out to me. No Ancient Greek myth ever suggested that Medusa was a horrible “monster”. This made me wonder who else in literature is horribly misrepresented. With that in mind, for the assignment where we had to draw a connection between Hayne’s interview and something else, I decided to look into these misrepresented characters. I remembered about “Frankenstein” and instantly was able to find similarities between that and “Stone Blind”. Even though she never killed anyone, people think of Medusa as a horrible creature that's dangerous and scary. This reminded me in a way of Frankenstein's Monster because although he did kill people, his character is horribly misunderstood. Dr. Frankenstein created the "monster" using a mishmash of body parts taken from corpses, so it was no surprise that people found it to be ugly and scary. The "monster" started off as a blank slate with good intentions, but everyone was repulsed by him and refused to see any humanity within him. He only became angry after being abandoned. In the story, Dr. Frankenstein should be considered the monster, just like with "Stone Blind", Perseus is more of a monster than Medusa was.

Beyond that connection, “Stone Blind” made me think about people being wrongly labeled as “monsters” and “heroes” in real life. People are so quick to judge a situation, oftentimes without considering the full story. We don’t take the time to listen to both sides and then fact check. We blindly follow the version being pushed out to us. I think as a society, we need to start reevaluating how quick we are to slap a label on a person and start taking into account that there are many perspectives to every story.