The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Films may be our new folklore, and, given our current easy access to streaming shows, they feel at times like storytelling machines that we turn on with the flick of a switch. Ex Machina takes up cultural anxieties and desires and gets us talking about things that remove us from our comfort zones. In the safe space of once-upon-a-time-in-Hollywood and within the domain of the symbolic, we can face down the specters that haunt us. Disturbing metaphors are always easier to process than disturbing realities, and they lower our inhibitions, allowing us to engage our critical faculties in ways that often do not happen when we encounter trauma in real life.

  “He gave us language we didn’t know we lacked.” New York Times cultural critic Wesley Morris makes that pronouncement in an interview with Jordan Peele, director of Get Out (2017).42 Peele’s film seems an unlikely successor to Ex Machina as a refashioning of the Bluebeard story. But once Chris, a Black photographer who has traveled with his white girlfriend, Rose, to meet the parents, discovers a stash of photographs in the closet of a bedroom, all bets are off. Rose has been dating a succession of Black men, taking selfies with them that she then stores in a space with a chilling resemblance to Bluebeard’s forbidden chamber. The men are all destined to undergo surgery so that their bodies can be used to provide white auction winners, all members of a cult called The Order of the Coagula, with spare parts for their own deficient bodies. “You won’t be gone, not completely,” a blind art dealer, a man who craves Chris’s power of vision, intones. “A sliver of you will still be in there somewhere. Limited consciousness. You’ll be able to see and hear, but what your body is doing—your existence—will be as a passenger.”

  What better metaphor than that for capturing W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness? It works as powerfully as “the Sunken Place,” that space into which Chris descends when he is hypnotized by Rose’s mother and finds himself trapped at a site of physical and mental paralysis, a form of imprisonment that makes it impossible to be seen and heard. All the while, he remains part of a script written by white hosts. At the Armitage home, the auction of a Black man follows that script in a scene that reenacts the grotesqueries of the past but also functions as a wake-up call showing that the “long ago” is still in the “here and now.” Suddenly we see the unthinkable in a vivid tableau of what it means to be a Black person in an America that once prided itself on becoming “post-racial.”

  “While I was having fun writing this mischievous popcorn film there were real black people who were being abducted and put into dark holes, and the worst part of it is we don’t think about them,” Jordan Peele said in the interview with Wesley Morris. Inspired by a range of films in the horror genre, from The Amityville Horror to Rosemary’s Baby, Peele also drew on a strong folkloric tradition in which a rich, powerful figure lures an unknowing partner into a marriage doomed to end badly. His recycling of the Bluebeard fairy tale reveals that one swift turn of the kaleidoscope can reconfigure the tropes of the story and also lead to a role reversal that moves Bluebeard’s wife into a position of privilege, while her husband becomes the target of bodily harm. Get Out is a reminder of just how adaptable and malleable the folk tradition is and that it has always figured powerfully as a tool for the socially and politically marginalized, those whose physical labor and whose bodies have been the target of exploitation and abuse. At the same time, the film reveals what fairy tales do supremely well, finding a way to create attachment and solidarity by uncovering pain and collective trauma. The big surprise of Get Out, according to Wesley Morris, is that Peele made “a nightmare about white evil that doubles as a fairy tale about black unity, black love, and black rescue.” Fairy tales may seem to operate in some form of cultural-repetition compulsion, but in fact that is only because we continue to need stories that expose wrongdoing, reveal ways to survive, and point the way to justice. Is it coincidental that it took a Black director to resurrect “Bluebeard” and turn the tables in the story? Peele’s connection to the folk tradition, to a story that Richard Wright describes reading in moving terms in his novel Black Boy, reveals just how powerfully oral traditions, whether in the form of gossip, news, or stories, continue to shape our understanding of escaping subordination and finding justice.

  EPILOGUE

  LIFT-OFF

  All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it.

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, Goddesses

  CONSIDER CASSANDRA. Her name has become code for lack of credibility, and yet she had a perfect track record of accurate predictions. Why, when we hear the name Cassandra today, do we think madwoman rather than seer? There are many accounts of how Cassandra acquired her powers. Aeschylus tells us that Apollo promised her the gift of forecasting the future in exchange for sexual favors, but after receiving that power, the daughter of Priam and Hecuba went back on her word. Apollo could not retract his gift, and he spit in Cassandra’s mouth, cursing her by declaring that, henceforth, no one would believe her prophecies. Other sources tell us that Cassandra never broke any promises. Apollo simply granted her special powers as a lure and then, in a rage when she refused his advances, he turned her gift into a curse. Here is the Latin author Hyginus in his Fabulae: “Cassandra is said to have fallen asleep. . . . When Apollo wished to embrace her, she did not afford the opportunity of her body. On account of that, when she prophesied true things, she was not believed.”1 Which is the true story?

  Beautiful and true as Cassandra is (“She is the hope of many suitors,” Ovid tells us), she is universally seen as deranged, a pathological liar who cannot stop herself from spreading bad news. No one believes her when she reveals that the abduction of Helen will lead to the Trojan War, nor when she warns her compatriots about the Greeks concealed inside the Trojan Horse or about the fall of Troy. At the end of the war, she clings to a statue of Athena for safety, but is brutally raped by Ajax, “the Lesser.” Agamemnon takes her back with him as a concubine to Mycenae, where she is struck a death blow by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. But, in this case, there is payback, and it comes in the form of trouble for the Greeks, with deadly storms unleashed by Poseidon at the behest of Athena, outraged by Ajax’s rape of a woman seeking her protection.

  Cassandra’s story can be seen as part of what Rebecca Solnit calls a pattern of failing to believe women’s testimony. When the Trojan princess refuses to dally with Apollo, her words are, from then on, discredited. And the discrediting does not just apply to anything she might say about Apollo. Instead it takes over her entire identity, invalidating everything she says. “The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along,” Solnit adds.2 Cassandra’s backstory comes to us in bits and pieces from authorities who, to a man (and they are all men), emphasize only her tragic lack of credibility. But once we piece together the information about the curse placed on her and the violence to which she was subjected, a new narrative emerges, one told from a woman’s point of view. And suddenly we have lift-off. Cassandra has a future, not as a raving lunatic but as a woman who preserves her dignity and integrity despite assaults on her body and attacks on her character.

  Tondo of a red-figure kylix, Ajax Taking Cassandra, c. 435 BCE

  “Who feels sorry for a creature who has snakes for hair, and turns innocent men to stone?” the novelist Natalie Haynes asks.3 Medusa gets no respect, and who can hear her name without picturing those hissing snakes in place of hair, a horror to behold? And when we recall that the father of psychoanalysis equated the face of Medusa with the fear of castration, another layer of revulsion is added to the image. Medusa’s face exemplifies apotropaic magic, a charged symbolic image (like the evil eye) designed as a weapon to ward off harm. Medusa petrifies with her gaze, and so it is hard to imagine why Pindar would write about a “fair-cheeked Med
usa.” But in fact, when we turn, again, to Ovid, we discover that Medusa was once a fair maiden of exquisite beauty. She was, in other words, not born that way. The only mortal of the three Gorgons, she is said to have been seduced, violated, ravished, or raped (depending on which translation you read) by the sea god Poseidon in the temple of Athena. Poseidon was let off the hook, but Medusa was punished for her damaging encounter with a god when Athena turned her into a monster, transforming her beautiful locks into a tangle of venomous snakes.

  In common parlance today, Medusa’s name is synonymous with monster. But Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley, and other writers have all invoked her name in poems that celebrate the paradoxical logic of her image as capturing monstrosity and beauty, threat and defense, toxin and remedy. And feminists have reclaimed her, rehabilitating her as a figure who is not all “deadly,” but beautiful. “She’s laughing,” Hélène Cixous tells us in an essay that urges women to assert their identity through writing.4

  Perseus, the mortal who decapitates Medusa, becomes a shining hero. He is almost always depicted, most notably in the statue made by Benvenuto Cellini in 1554, as a modest, invincible, exalted figure. It is he who weaponizes the head with its dreadful locks, using it to vanquish his enemies, and, in a final stroke of irony, presenting it to Athena, the goddess who cursed Medusa, so that she can use it to ward off her foes. Medusa is transformed, irreversibly, from a beautiful woman desired by a god into an image of fright, with looks that can now kill.

  If looks can kill, they are damaging not just to the beholder but also to the face of beauty itself. Who can fail to think in this context of the face that launched a thousand ships? “Grows up to be a real man-killer”: that’s how Stephen Fry describes Helen of Troy in his retelling of stories about heroes in Greek myths. A closer look at the life story of the most beautiful woman in the world reveals a more complex narrative. Helen, as the daughter of Zeus and Leda, is the product of what could most accurately be described as a rape. As a girl (she is seven in one account, ten in another), she is kidnapped by Theseus and his brother Pirithous, who intend to keep her prisoner until she is old enough to marry. Rescued by the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux), she is then courted by many suitors, with Menelaus emerging victorious. Her suitors are required to pledge military support to Menelaus, should Helen ever be abducted. Then comes the seduction, elopement, or abduction (depending on the source you read) by Paris after the beauty contest staged with Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, in which Aphrodite promises to give Paris the most beautiful woman in the world. Helen is one of the few to survive the Trojan War, and she returns home with Menelaus, who plans, at first, to punish his “unfaithful” wife for her abduction but then, taking one look at her, falls back under her spell. Did Helen bewitch Menelaus when she was repossessed by him or was she always loyal to the Greeks? The ancient sources give us conflicting accounts, and in his dramatic poem Faust, Goethe tells us that Helen is “much admired and much reviled.”5

  Caravaggio, Medusa, 1595

  Francesco Primaticcio, The Rape of Helen, c. 1535

  Beauty, the one attribute that could guarantee women a happily-ever-after in times past, was paradoxically also what turned you into a target for both gods and goddesses, not to mention mortal men. Psyche, beloved for her beauty and kindness, does not fare well at the hands of Venus, who is enraged by reports that the girl looks like she could be her daughter and that she is her rival in beauty. Radiant Andromeda is chained to a rock to divert a sea monster sent by Poseidon, all because Cassiopeia bragged about her daughter’s beauty. Recall Athena’s anger at the bewitching beauty of Medusa’s ringlets. And then we have Europa, Io, Leda, Callisto, Persephone, Philomela, and so on—alluring, glamorous women and all seduced, abducted, and raped, again depending on the teller. There are many versions of each of these stories, ranging from what can be found in ancient Greek sources to compendia of classical mythology put together by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Graves, Edith Hamilton, or Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire.

  In a TED talk of 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about the danger of reductive thinking and the perils of telling a “single story.”6 When told once as a child that a family was “poor,” Adichie imagined a joyless, bleak day-to-day struggle, full of gloom, without any redemptive moments at all. A beautiful basket woven by a member of that “poor” family shattered her preconceived notion of their life. Poverty, she realized, did not preclude creativity, beauty, pleasure, and dignity. “When we reject the single story,” the Nigerian writer went on to say, “we regain a kind of paradise.” Single stories, she added, create stereotypes, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” As I listened to Adichie speak, I was reminded of how the hero with a thousand faces has been tragically reduced to a stereotype, one that is not just incomplete but, in a sense, also untrue, for it often tells only a small part of a story, just half the story, and sometimes even less than that.

  The heroines with a thousand and one faces in this volume reveal new sides to old stories. The faces of these women are malleable and mutable, resisting all efforts to freeze their features and to capture one representative expression. No single heroine dominates or endures. Instead heroines keep evolving, challenging authority and legitimacy, rebelling, resisting, and demanding makeovers. Traditional hierarchies of heroism are forever being reshuffled and rearranged as cultural values shift and are rebalanced. This holds true for both heroes and heroines. They reinvent themselves ad infinitum, just as the number 1,001 in Arabic suggests.

  Once we begin to look at the classic stories told and retold in our culture and experience them from the perspective of figures on the sidelines—slaves, concubines, sacrificial lambs, misfits, all those on the losing side of history—we are suddenly cut loose from the obligation to admire, worship, and venerate. Instead, we become radically inventive, seeing things differently and finding new ways of reading the stories and histories in which they appear.

  We are told that the Trojan War began with a beauty contest and the seduction/abduction of a women hailed as the fairest of them all, who was then blamed for the devastating damage and loss of life in the conflict between the Greeks and Trojans. When we learn that there may be another side to that story and realize that a noncanonical account of the Trojan War has Helen drugged, while another has her exiled in Egypt, faithful to Menelaus, and that she never engineered the beauty contest or the kidnapping, we are less willing to shoulder her with responsibility for the hostilities, and we suddenly see her as another victim of war. Never mind that the ambitious Greeks, with their aspirations for building an empire, looted Troy, all the while claiming that they were going to war to salvage their honor. In a similar vein, recall how Charles Dickens found in the sexual assault of a woman (Madame de Farge’s sister, raped by an aristocrat) the secret cause of the French Revolution. In some perverse way, the effects of war (sexual violence) became the casus belli.7

  I want to conclude this volume with a meditation on unsung heroines, not just the vilified and marginalized women in accounts of war, but the real-life women who found ways to tend to the wounds of war, blending passion and compassion even when aware that their work was unlikely to earn the glory and immortality won by military heroes. My aim is not to perpetuate standard-issue platitudes that frame care and comfort as natural to women and see aggression and anger as permanent features of the male psyche. Rather, I want to provide some examples of how women have found ways to cope in times of crisis and also to offer, despite what must have felt like the hopelessness of their ventures, some measure of resistance to the uncontrolled brutality of war.

  Let me return to the Trojan War. Readers of this volume will have quickly registered that it loomed large in my mind while writing this book, for the behavior of gods and men in classical antiquity is exactly what led me to wonder about their “heroism.” How does the Trojan War begin? Before the Greeks set sail, they are obliged to appease Artemis with a sacrifice, and who else but a
virgin to placate the goddess? Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia leads to a cascading series of murders, from Clytemnestra’s killing of her husband to the slaughter of Cassandra. How does the war end? What else but another virgin sacrifice. This time Polyxena, daughter of Hecuba and Priam, is the designated victim, and she declares herself willing to die rather than to live on as a slave. Astyanax, the son of Hector, is thrown from the walls of Troy for fear that the child will grow up, avenge his father, and rebuild Troy. The body count climbs, and suddenly the Greek victory becomes a hollow one, its heroes anything but heroic.

  Who wins a war? The side capable of inflicting the highest number of injuries—injuries that turn bodies into casualties of war—emerges victorious. There are always the warriors but, in the midst of combat and conflict, there are also those who nurse the injured. You would expect to find women among them in the Trojan War, but instances of healing in The Iliad are largely limited to men tending to battle injuries. We discover that Achilles has learned the art of medicine from Chiron, the best of the centaurs. We watch Patroclus treat Eurypylus, who in turn goes to the aid of Ajax the Great when he is injured in combat. We learn about Machaon, son of Asclepius, who heals Menelaus, hit by an arrow. But we also discover that Achilles, despite his medical knowledge, “has no care, no pity for our Achaeans.”

  When I looked for curious, caring women in The Iliad, I could not find them. But the absence of evidence, I quickly realized, is not necessarily the evidence of absence. “I liked Machaon,” Briseis tells us in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. And why does she find the Greek healer who fights in the Trojan War appealing? Because she learns from him how to minister to the wounded. She remembers days spent in tents for the wounded as an oddly “happy time.” “But the fact is, I loved the work. I loved everything about it. . . . I lost myself in that work—and I found myself too. I was learning so much from Ritsa, but also from Machaon who . . . was generous with his time. I really started to think: I can do this.” Barker may have made this up, and she may be buying into the myth of what Diane Purkiss has called the feminist fantasy of dissident women as healers, but her account conforms almost exactly to the sentiments expressed by war nurses who tended the injured in later centuries.8