deathofthenewgods:

So Hera. 

Ancient Greek goddess, one of the six children of Cronus, sister and wife to Zeus, queen of the gods of Olympus.

The lady gets a seriously bad rap. 

I know, I KNOW. She did a lot of batshit crazy things. She turned Io into a cow and sent a giant gadfly to sting her ass all the way to Egypt. She tried to kill most of Zeus’s illegitimate children while they were still babies, in a wide variety of creatively horrifying ways. She’s vain and proud and vengeful, even by the dizzyingly high standards of Greek mythology.

By and large, the reason she behaves like such a lunatic is that her husband constantly and unabashedly cheats on her with beautiful mortal women. To add insult to injury, Hera is the goddess of marriage and women. How much must that suck? You are the living embodiment of the scared bond of marriage, and you can’t keep your own husband from chasing mortal tail for more than two seconds at a time. On top of that, the fruits of his conquests are all hanging out on Olympus, drinking your nectar and eating your ambrosia and being a public insult to everything you stand for.

And Zeus? Sure, Zeus is just a lad having the banter. And sure didn’t he name Heracles after her to keep her happy? Why is she always bitching? Zeus’s exploits are frowned upon, but only barely, and usually only because everyone knows that Hera is going to lose her shit and unleash hell on the surrounding countryside once she finds out. Not because he’s a terrible husband.

Hera once plotted a revolt against Zeus. This is apparently because, by way of courtship, Zeus took the form of a lost cuckoo bird and tricked her into holding him to her breast. Then he surprised her by transforming back into a man and raping her. After that, she was forced to marry him to cover her shame. She ended up holding a bit of grudge over this (can’t imagine why.) In any case, her rebellion was foiled and, as punishment, she was hung from the sky with golden chains and left up there to writhe in excruciating pain for a few days.

The centuries have cast Hera as the epitome of the most negative stereotypes associated with feminism; raving, irrational, paranoid, angry, misandrist. She is a woman using her power and authority to further her own ends, a repulsive and offensive act in the eyes of any patriarchal society. She is cast as the villain, the nagging shrew, the evil scheming queen, cruel, manipulative, vicious.

She still plays this role in contemporary pop culture. The only exception I can think of is Disney’s Hercules, where she is in a loving and faithful relationship with Zeus, she is the mother of Hercules and everything is sugar and spice. Traditionally, Hera hated Heracles more any of Zeus’s other children and tried to kill him multiple times.

The most recent depiction of Hera I’ve seen has been in DC’s rebooted Wonder Woman. SPOILER ALERT, here she is about to decapitate a horse as part of her evil plan to kill a woman who, you guessed it, is pregnant by Zeus. 

Even the horse is like, “Okay, this bitch is CRAZY.”

So yes, Hera is kind of nuts and she killed/tortured a lot of people (mainly Zeus’s conquests and the resultant children.) But the whole Greek pantheon is crazy. Seriously, ALL of them. They spend most of their time punishing mortals for ridiculously childish reasons. Even Athena, goddess of wisdom and purportedly the most level-headed member of the clan, threw a tantrum when Paris didn’t choose her as the fairest goddess of them all and proceeded to take sides in Trojan War.

Even if Hera embodies the worst of feminism, she also embodies the best of women. She has strength and dignity, she’s passionate, she’s smart, she is a powerful woman and she doesn’t apologise for that, she is firm in her convictions and she is a fierce defender of women who have been scorned, shamed or abused by their husbands. She is also quick to punish women who transgress the boundaries of marriage, particularly those who sleep with another’s husband (not just her own.) Her tragedy is that she takes an awful lot of shit from her husband, but only responds against his lovers and children, because he has already proven to her that she can’t risk confrontation with him directly. (I actually didn’t know that they originally got married because he raped her until I started writing this.)

Hera may not be a good or admirable mythological figure, but she is a nuanced one with a complex moral code. As queen (both a ruler and female) in the patriarchal world of antiquity, she occupies a strange shifting space between power and powerlessness. She is ruled by her pride, and her wrath in the face of humiliation is swift and terrible, but she’s not a monster. I also don’t think she’s fundamentally crazy or jealous.

Here is an interesting quote from her entry on Wikipedia:

“There has been considerable scholarship, reaching back to Johann Jakob Bachofen in the mid-nineteenth century, about the possibility that Hera, whose early importance in Greek religion is firmly established, was originally the goddess of a matriarchal people, presumably inhabiting Greece before the Hellenes. In this view, her activity as goddess of marriage established the patriarchal bond of her own subordination: her resistance to the conquests of Zeus is rendered as Hera’s “jealousy”, the main theme of literary anecdotes that undercut her ancient cult.”

So, her persistent and violent attempts to defy Zeus, which are so often attributed to her being insane and jealous (you know, because her vagina makes her crazy, hell hath no fury etc.) can be seen as an on-going attempt to assert herself and defy her appropriation by a patriarchal pantheon to the detriment of her own position of power. 

Ultimately, she’s kind of a fascinating character and offers so much more fictional fodder than the vengeful sexually-controlling evil queen/wicked witch stereotype in which she is most frequently cast. I would like to see some deeper and more human portrayals of one of mythology’s most compelling female figures. Maybe the new Wonder Woman will do this. If not, that peacock feather cloak is awesome. 

On a sidenote, gods (Greek or otherwise) are an interesting foil to the modern idea of superheroes. The greatest and most non-human power that most superheroes possess is an unflinching moral compass that tells them to continuously put their lives in danger for the greater good of humanity. The Greek gods are far more powerful and have no fear of death, but they are also utterly and unfortunately human in the way they exercise that power. They take what they want from mortals and lesser beings, they are petty and vengeful, they hold grudges, they bitch and moan when they don’t get respect, they fear-monger, they squabble like children among themselves.

But that’s another post.

(Also, here is a super-interesting essay about Homer’s Hera in The Illiad. It contrasts her with the Virgin Mary and analyses the contradictions inherent in these early portrayals of strong women.)