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How We Are Formed
Ancient male authors inscribed their fear of — and desire for — women into tales about monstrous females: In his first-century A.D. epic Metamorphoses, for example, the Roman poet Ovid wrote about Medusa, a terrifying Gorgon whose serpentine tresses turned anyone who met her gaze into stone. Earlier, in Homer’s Odyssey, composed around the seventh or eighth century B.C., the Greek hero Odysseus must choose between fighting Scylla, a six-headed, twelve-legged barking creature, and Charybdis, a sea monster of doom. Both are described as unambiguously female.
These stories may sound fantastical today, but for ancient people, they reflected a “quasi-historical” reality, a lost past in which humans lived alongside heroes, gods and the supernatural, as curator Madeleine Glennon wrote for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. What’s more, the tales’ female monsters reveal more about the patriarchal constraints placed on womanhood than they do about women themselves.
Female monsters represent “the bedtime stories patriarchy tells itself,”
— Marek Peter Kaziniec
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“Learning how we are really wounded, how our childhood was lacking, and how we need to be healed and grow is crucially important to living a fulfilled life. If we aren’t able to determine and face the truth of how we were formed, then in our radical…
