This post gets a big TW (trigger warning) for stories and artwork depicting sexual assault. There's nothing graphic (well, except for one link, but you don't have to click on it and there's a warning), but if that topic is triggering for you, you may want to move along to a different post.
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The legend of Alpheus and Arethusa goes something like this: Arethusa, the nymph, decides to bathe in a river in the woods. The local god of the river, Alpheus, sees her bathing and decides he wants to have sex with her. He approaches her and she flees. He chases her through the woods, both in human form, both naked. Arethusa prays to Diana (Artemis); Diana listens because Arethusa is a devoted worshipper of hers who has carried her hunting equipment for her before. Diana veils Arethusa in a thick fog, and Alpheus is unable to find her. Unfortunately, the intense emotion causes Arethusa to begin transforming into water. As a river god, Alpheus can sense this new aqueous presence and pinpoints her location. The situation now at a critical point, Diana herself descends and stops Alpheus' approach. Angry, he transforms himself to water, hoping that his current will join with Arethusa's so that they may become one. Diana splits the earth asunder; Alpheus' flow drops into the chasm and never reaches Arethusa.
In some versions, rather than splitting the earth apart, Diana sends Arethusa underground, and Alpheus successfully follows her and joins himself to her. This version is supposed to be a legend of origin, explaining how an actual spring named Arethusa supposedly joined with the river Alfeios through an underwater current. In other versions she simply escaped unscathed onto the island of Ortygia in Syracuse, Sicily.
I encountered this myth in my Greek and Roman mythology class. It is a fairly obscure myth, mentioned in passing by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (he tells the version in which she successfully escapes). We were not assigned to read it; I found it because I specifically wanted to learn more stories about Artemis (Diana). While she is technically a goddess of virginity, I like to think of her more precisely as the goddess of consent, which makes her a fascinating feminist character. (Of course, like all Greek and Roman mythological figures, her heroics are counterbalanced with plenty of extremely problematic stories.) Besides that, she is interesting simply as a powerful and popular female deity from ancient mythology. She uses a bow and arrow, which is cool; she is associated with the moon and with deer, both of which are things that I think are cool; her Greek name is awesome (her Roman name is fine too, but less interesting because it's now a common name in English and several other Romance languages); and for some reason I have just always felt drawn to her as a character. Part of it may be that she and Apollo are a close team of siblings, and my sister (named Dana, which now that I think about it is eerily similar to Diana) and I are kind of a unit of our own, fairly independent of the rest of our family and certainly much closer. Or maybe it's just that I played a lot of Bomberman 64 as a kid.
At any rate, I had to do a creative project for my mythology class. I knew I would be starting this blog soon (we are finally getting to stuff that I actually made recently) and that I wanted to work on an actual portfolio, so why not enter into a dialogue with a long-standing Western tradition of depicting scenes from Greek and Roman mythology in oil paints? Add in my interest in Artemis, and my interest in feminist analysis of art history (more on that below), and the story of Alpheus and Arethusa became my top choice for what to depict.
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So, about that interest in feminist art history. The brief backdrop is that I have always been uncomfortable with patriarchal treatment of the women in my life; that quickly extended to women in general and attracted me intuitively to feminist ideas from a very early age. However, I rarely encountered any sort of formal feminism, as I was raised in a very sheltered and conservative household, and high school treatment of feminism still leaves something to be desired. It is only recently that I've begun to really delve into learning how to be a good feminist ally, but art history was probably my first real exposure to academic feminism.
Say what you will about my conservative college experience, but the art history department at least is run by feminist professors. My first art history class, taught by a female grad student, included an assignment to curate a fantasy museum exhibit, using various samples from the Renaissance to today to explore a theme. I decided to address various depictions of sexual assault, since rape is a common theme throughout art history, and I have a huge problem with how the subject is treated. All too often, rape is at best trivialized and at worst glorified, the woman is depicted as "coming around" and finally enjoying it, the beauty of the work is celebrated while ignoring the problematic subject matter, etc. etc.
- "I object! 'Rape' just meant kidnapping back then!" Right, which is why they're always naked while they're being kidnapped. Also, it didn't mean kidnapping, it meant theft of property, which means that women were depicted as property in addition to being sexually assaulted. Your objection sucks.
I contrasted several of the artworks linked to above with some less problematic ones. This one was painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, a woman who had herself been raped by a fellow apprentice in her father's art studio. It clearly depicts the victim of the assault as horrified and traumatized, unlike this older painting of the same scene, in which Susanna barely seems phazed. Having an actual victim depict the emotion elicited by that kind of trauma clearly makes a difference.
As I mentioned before, Picasso was infamously cruel to women, but at least his depiction of the rape of the Sabine women (the horrific story on which the "feel-good" 50's musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is based) is disturbing, unlike the heroic version painted by Poussin.
And then there is the other piece I used in my assignment, the contemporary work. Do not click on this link if you cannot handle disturbing, violent material. Here it is. It is an installation piece, displayed in a street-level studio in several major cities, where people could see it through the windows as they drove by. Needless to say, this extremely disturbing piece got a lot of complaints. Understandable, you might think; it's pretty gruesome, and unsuspecting people shouldn't have to see something that triggering and horrific on their morning commute.
BUT WAIT
We wait in line to see Renaissance paintings depicting a sanitized, "beautiful" version of rape. We glorify the "geniuses" who created them. Why is it okay to whitewash a story, to say "oh, it was only a kidnapping," as if it were okay to kidnap human beings with the obvious intent of making them into sex slaves, but it is an outrage to confront people with the grisly reality of what sexual assault really looks and feels like?
I'll cut my rant short here, because plenty of prominent feminists have said it much better than I can. The relevant point here is that I wanted to illustrate a story involving sexual assault, but I wanted to do it in the right way. That meant I had a few requirements:
- I needed to depict the victim as suffering.
- I needed to depict the perpetrator as a monster, not a hero.
Those requirements might seem simple and obvious enough, but art throughout history has failed to fulfill them. Including a story in which a goddess saved a woman gave me the added bonus of fulfilling some other feminist initiatives:
3. My painting could depict a woman filling an active, rather than just a passive, role.
4. My painting could include multiple female characters, filling different roles, portraying the reality that not all women are one-dimensional archetypes.
I'm not sure how successful my painting was. After all, it looks a little cartoony and is brightly colored... That is my style, but it may have made the painting seem more light-hearted and trivial than the subject matter should allow. Also, I am not a sexual assault victim myself, and I am a male, which means that I have neither experience with this kind of scenario nor full solidarity with the gender most likely to experience it. But I had to try. After all, one of the main reasons for my interest in illustration is to use my talents to give a voice to those who have trouble expressing their thoughts visually. I'm hoping to get some feedback on this one--on how I did, and how I can do better with really serious subject matter in the future. After all, I started this blog to document my learning process.