I recently read Natalie Haynes’ incredible new novel, Stone Blind: Medusa’s Story (which I highly recommend), and that got me thinking about female monsters – and menstruating women. The Medusa is an ambiguous figure: both fascinating and repulsive, aggressive and victimised. While we all know her power to turn men who looked at her into stone, few people know her story.
Imagine that you’re a 16th-century person flicking through the pages of Alessio Piemontese’s best-selling book, which contained everything from how to make invisible ink to how to make strawberries preserve. And then you come across this most interesting ‘secret’:
From the mid-16th century to the early 20th century, young girls described as suffering from bodily weakness, dietary disorders, heart palpitations, fainting spells, paleness, and an absence of menstruation (amenorrhoea), were often given the diagnosis of ‘green sickness’, the ‘disease of virgins’.
As she finds out the witches’ prophecy about Macbeth being crowned king and the current king’s imminent visit to their home, Lady Macbeth invokes evil spirits to help her be rid of her feminine qualities so that, together with Macbeth, she can murder the king: