Natalie Haynes began Pandora’s Jar (2020), her excellent nonfiction collection of essays about women in Greek myth, with the image of herself as a child, sitting on the sofa with her brother watching Clash of the Titans. Although that film inspired Haynes to study Classics, she never thought to question the presentation of Medusa. “She wasn’t a character,” she wrote, “she was just a monster… It would be years before I came across any other version of Medusa’s story, anything that told me how she became a monster, or why.”
This childhood memory appears to have inspired Haynes’s fourth novel, Stone Blind, which reframes the familiar myth of Perseus and Medusa as the story of an innocent girl corrupted and destroyed by an unforgiving world. We first meet Medusa as a baby abandoned on the Gorgon Shore of Libya: a rocky, unpeopled place. She is cared for by her sisters, Sthenno and Euryale. At first, it is unclear if Medusa is truly related to these terrifying creatures “with their tusks and their snaking manes of hair”. Medusa has wings, it’s true, and serpentine hair, but otherwise she looks human. What’s more, the child is mortal, unlike her sisters. We begin to perceive her as the sisters perceive her: they “hoped once again that they had kept her from feeling what they knew to be true: that she was a freak whose birth had horrified both parents”. Here we find the book in a nutshell – ideas of what is monstrous are culturally conditioned, predicated on fear of the unknown. As the sisters learn to love Medusa, they no longer find her monstrous. Unfortunately, Poseidon also catches sight of her, and, just after her 16th birthday, he engineers a meeting whose conclusion is as horrifying as it is inevitable.
