RESURRECTING DANAË Rethinking the Role of Perseus’s Mother

Guest post by Laura Gill

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I have to confess that one of my favorite films is the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. As much as I love the exploits of Perseus, and the love story with Andromeda, I have always been curious about the story of Perseus’ mother, seen briefly at the beginning of the film being thrust with baby Perseus into the wooden chest, and later breastfeeding him on a beach among a community of fishermen; I always imagine the fisherman Diktys standing just out of camera view in that nursing scene. However, by the time young Perseus grows into Harry Hamlin and begins his adventures, Danaë has died; she rates a respectful but passing mention in an early scene between Perseus and unemployed playwright Ammon.

The 2010 remake is a different matter altogether. As Hollywood seems to do with Greek myths these days, the filmmakers kept the names but changed the story. Here, beautiful Danaë is married to King Acrisius of Argos, who in Greek mythology is actually her father. Zeus has no tender feelings for young Danaë as he does in the 1981 version or in the original myth, and she is already dead when the fisherman Spyros (note: not Diktys) pries open the lid of the wooden chest and discovers baby Perseus nestled in her arms.

Both films treat the Perseus-Andromeda dynamic as the central set-piece, rewriting the original mythology to make the Medusa quest a progression of the love story: Perseus must save Andromeda, his affianced bride, when her foolish mother, Cassiopeia, offends one of the Olympian goddesses—either Aphrodite or Themis—thus incurring her terrible wrath. The ancient Greeks knew the potency of mothers. Their myths are filled with mature women whose maternal instincts often go spectacularly awry. Clytemnestra chooses vengeance for a dead daughter knowing that murdering Agamemnon will fatally alienate her from her surviving children. Medea is the ultimate scorned woman who enacts the ultimate revenge on the man who did her wrong. Jocasta unwittingly commits incest with her own son and pays dearly.

Hollywood heroes have love interests and sidekicks. They might have troubled relationships with their fathers, but we rarely hear much about their mothers. Danaë is not interesting enough to the demographic or the Hollywood executives who make the creative decisions to allow her to be portrayed beyond the conveniently dead mother; she is never shown as a tough, resourceful mother on the level of Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies. It’s the Perseus story, the quintessential hero’s journey, that sells tickets.

Readers of my novels know that I prefer to flesh out the marginal characters of Greek mythology rather than rehash the familiar ones. There are plenty of stories about Helen, Achilles, Herakles, and Medea. But who has written about Danaë? Between the lines of the Perseus myth, I discovered an interesting heroine in his mother. It was high time to take an obscure female character, a footnote in her son’s adventures who is usually portrayed as a victim, and toughen her up.

The first place to start was the cover. Danaë’s portrayals in art oscillate between two extremes of interpretation: the sober virgin who calmly accepts Zeus’s unorthodox method of impregnation—a pre-Christian version of the Annunciation—to a venial hussy who throws her head back in obvious pleasure as she receives her divine lover. As interpretations go, the latter is so hard to shake off that when researching public domain images to incorporate into the cover artwork, I found precious few that did not sexualize Danaë. My heroine is a woman who lives a hard life far from the palaces of fourteenth century B.C. Mycenaean Greece. She is frightened, confused, and determined. I did not want to mislead readers by sexualizing her on the cover.

My readers also know that I avoid supernatural plot twists wherever possible. While a character might perceive an event as magical, there is always some logical explanation—a dream, an oracle, the aftereffects of an hallucinogenic substance. Danaë is a departure from that. Perseus is the son of Zeus. Although I could have found a more plausible alternative to the story of Zeus and the golden rain by inventing a mortal lover for Danaë, that nevertheless left me with later trying to explain the effects of Medusa’s head and Danaë and baby Perseus surviving the trauma of being cast to sea in a wooden chest. Therefore, I decided to explore for once the possibility of writing a book in which the gods play an active role.

One intriguing observation I made is that Hera does not persecute either Danaë or Perseus. Possibly, the Perseus myth is the oldest of the known Greek hero-tales, and dates to a period when Hera’s role in Greek mythology as the jealous wife and stepmother was not yet fully developed. I took the opportunity to show Hera in a more benevolent light. Thus, it is the Queen of Heaven, not Zeus or Poseidon, who ultimately rescues Danaë and Perseus from death in the wooden chest. As for restoring Danaë’s virginity, that idea comes from both Danaë’s early, medieval association with the Virgin Mary, and from the myth describing how Hera annually renewed her own virginity in the sacred spring of Kanathos, Argolis.

One of the most fantastical of all the elements of the Danaë story is that Acrisius, upon learning about the dreadful prophecy that he will die at the hands of Danaë’s son, locks her in either a tower or underground chamber of bronze. Acrisius is hardly likely to have wasted valuable bronze, used for household implements and weapons, on securing his virgin daughter, so I had to find a more reasonable alternative.

The underground chamber—and later the wooden chest—point to themes of death and burial. I reasoned that a fourteenth century B.C. Acrisius might have sent his only daughter to serve as a virgin priestess in a sacred cave so carefully guarded by other women that she could not possibly encounter any men. There is a sacred cave on the hill of Argos, but I chose to transfer Danaë to a more remote and mythical landscape, which is not something I usually do in my novels. I wanted my Acrisius to be more complex and torn than in typical portrayals. This virgin priestess option humanizes him in that he spares Danaë from a crueler fate, though one could argue that later condemning his daughter and infant grandson to be drowned or suffocated in a wooden chest undoes whatever prior good he might have done. The ancient Greeks, of course, would have seen this very differently. Acrisius dares not kill Danaë and baby Perseus directly for fear of the blood pollution the slaughter of two innocents would incur, so he takes the next available option, which is to let the gods determine their fate.

The sacred cave/priestess element let me introduce the self-sufficient Women of the Mountain, worshippers of the Mother Goddess. I knew that my Danaë would need both practical skills and determination/a strong sense of self-worth to survive life in a fishing village on Seriphos, but I did not necessarily want to rely on clichéd tropes of feminism such as the Mother Goddess. What we know of Mycenaean Greek religion is that both powerful gods and goddesses were feared and worshipped. A community like that of the Women probably never existed as described. I have to confess that I took as much pleasure deconstructing the cliché as I did in exploiting it. My Danaë is tough enough to throw a punch when necessary, and she possesses the confidence to be a single mother, but deep down she is inherently afraid of men, so she rejects Diktys. Her eventual growth comes with the realization and acceptance of the fact that for the world to work it takes both men and women. For there to be a Perseus, there has to be a mother of the hero.