Once upon a time, someone remarked of three old women that they had a single eye and a single tooth between them. The jibe became a stock joke and then a legend, and the Graeae took their place in the pantheon of Greek mythology. And now along comes Natalie Haynes to write a knockabout Beckettian riff on the theme. In her darkly comic retelling of the entwined stories of Medusa, Perseus and Andromeda, Perseus steals the shared tooth and eye and throws them into the sea. Haynes’s narrator steps forward to jeer at any reader on his side. “I suppose you thought it was clever. Clever Perseus using his wits to defeat the disgusting old women?” In this version of the ancient stories, the hero is as thick as two planks, the maiden tied to a rock is vain and self-centred, and the monster is piteously misunderstood.
Medusa, the Gorgon, is the misogynist’s nightmare. To look at her is to be turned to stone. Freud thought her face, framed by the live snakes she has in place of hair, stood for the mother’s genitals, a glimpse of which would be enough to petrify a boy. Female thinkers, led by Hélène Cixous, have reclaimed and celebrated her. More recently she has been identified as an early target of victim-blaming: it was after Poseidon seduced or raped her in Athena’s temple that the offended goddess transformed her into a monster.
