Ovid Medusa Quotes

And so it is that in order to speak of our own times, I have had to make a long detour, by way of Ovid’s fragile Medusa and Montale’s pitch-black Lucifer. It’s hard for a novelist to convey his idea of lightness with examples drawn from the events of contemporary life without making it the unattainable object of an endless quest. Yet Milan Kundera has done just that, with clarity and immediacy. His novel Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1981) is in fact a bitter declaration of the Ineluctable Weight of Living—living not only with the desperate and all-pervading state of oppression that was the fate of his unlucky country, but with the human condition shared also by us, however much luckier we may be. For

Ovid and Aeschylus exemplify classic patriarchal strategies that blame the victim, set women against one another, and reframe ancient myths to the detriment of powerful females. Athena and Medusa have both been diminished in this way, as has Athena’s mother Metis, who has been ‘disappeared’ from the scene of Athena’s birth. But do we really wish to let these great goddesses of wisdom be defined by the authors and artists of patriarchy? Older, pre-patriarchal versions of Athena reveal her deeper nature.