Whether a name is as light as a feather or conjuring of horror is as much determined by the passage of time and how we remember, as the casting and slipping of cultural values, such that Medusa on her own may be described as the Gorgon’s head, or Medea associated with the unnatural mother, an idea that has found renewed currency in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter.

It is a film that does not entirely make good on its promises, but in portraying the awful suffocation of a young woman gasping for space and who also, it would seem, genuinely dislikes the kind of intimacy with children that parenting requires (for reasons made painfully clear in her desperate attempts to establish a career, amid the ravenous demands of her daughters) undoubtedly captures something of my own thoughts about the weight of being a mother and the thankless tasks that inhere in that portrait, though it is not without its love (but often without much grace or gratitude). Indeed, women who contemplate heteronormative biological reproduction particularly, are faced with the horrific precarity that underscores the conditional nature of what in might mean, (while out hovers at their back, like a draughty reminder that there is no elegant solution to the conundrum of belonging). It is a cruelty of Gyllenhaal’s script that she balances Coleman vertiginously between two (intimately horrific) extremes, pitching this portrait of misery against a kind of wasteland of loneliness, inevitable for women in whom the maternal instinct has failed.

Which is why I raise (and in so doing attempt to recuperate) the name of Medea, with whom I recall the poet, Dorothy Porter, was fascinated in the last several years of her life and about whom I heard her (on more than one occasion) offer a provisional answer to what it is that makes Medea so perennially fascinating. I think it would be a misreading to say that Medea resembles particularly the themes of maternal failure we find in The Lost Daughter, but rather that in Medea we see competing objectives, which are not wholly fulfilled by the maternal imperative; added to which it is also worth noting that the idea that a child should outlive their parent is recent, and in a longitudinal sense not particularly well supported (I am reminded of Cicero who writes the Tusculan Disputations as a means towards solace after the death of his daughter, and in which he recounts the remarks of another father – not coincidentally deployed in another Euripides play – and which Cicero reports was a line taken from the life of Euripides’s own mentor, who confronted with similar news is alleged to have said: ‘I always knew I had fathered a mortal’).

I suppose what has so often been regarded as damning in the case of Medea is that she should dare to put her own interests first, including that she should value those interests above the price (or indeed, the life) of her children. But Euripides is not I don’t think unsympathetic to his eponymous character, when he has the chorus wonder aloud, ‘all of this toil and heartache is it for children who’ll turn out to be worthless or decent?’ While it might grate with a modern sensibility, that presupposes the inherent worth of children to a mothers’ eye (even in the face of persuasive contrary evidence) it would seem true enough to venture that at least for Medea, this is not a rhetorical question, certainly it is not flippant.

I mention Porter here also because quite recently I revisited her fifth book of poetry, Akhenaten, which I remembered (inaccurately) as a work that centred and rehabilitated a female figure, only to find that her title plays a straight enough bat and (as she explains in her introduction), that in 1976 she was in a West Berlin museum to see Nefertiti, but it was to the contrary, ‘the smirking, distorted, oddly beautiful face of Akhenaten that put out tentacles to my imagination. A strange confession from a feminist poet’. While it is her first verse novel it is not, I now see, the one that makes her famous, this will be two years later, the Monkey’s Mask, which is the moment at which she gives herself license (I think) to pursue the still relatively marginal plotline (in 1994) of a lesbian love triangle, albeit implied, between the detective, the murderer, and the deceased. It’s a relief to me now that she gives herself this ahead-of-its-time kind of permission to write this, and it suggests also, in retrospect, how she works her way back to the ancients, who, while not uninterested in categorisation and the proper subject of things, are also not yet nobbled by the myopia, which is surely one of the worser side effects (intended or not), of taxonomy.

The epigraph that opens Akhenaten seems like common sense, ‘to speak the name of the dead/is to make them live again’, an Egyptian funerary inscription, which strikes me as both truthful and ordinary, although as I reread Porter’s poems all the hairs on my cheeks stand on end as she evokes a heavily pregnant Nefertiti, in ill-advised sandals, slipping by the river (and headstrong, later, limping to dinner in the same – because Nefertiti will not be told, according, at least, to Akhenaten). Both Nefertiti and Medusa-like masks (as I’ve mentioned) can be viewed in Berlin and although Porter does not say where Nefertiti is held during her Cold War visit, today she may be seen in the Neues Museum (and replica images purchased on items like bookmarks and fridge magnets). Not far from the Neues is the Pergamon which houses the awesome (but apparently smaller) Ishtar gate, the eighth to the inner city of Babylon, and I have read that these walls are made famous by Herodotus (towards the end of Book 1 – and also that Herodotus exaggerates, or at the least conflates, the dimensions of Babylon with Thebes – and scholars have sought to establish if Herodotus did in fact visit the city after doubts were raised in the late 19th century on this question).

Whether Herodotus is guilty of conflation with Thebes, he is not I don’t think, confused about the symbolic difference with Babylon, and it is at least clear that it is not to Babylon that Perseus drags (or triumphantly bears) the Gorgon’s head. To the contrary, Herdotus records that it was brought from Libya (by Perseus) to Egypt and more particularly to Khemmis as the Greeks called it, (but Akhmim in the local language), and Herodotus recounts there is a certain disdain among the Egyptians for Greek customs (and all other customs that are not their own, although in saying this, Herodotus, at least in translation, uses the Greek name where he should rightly use the Egyptian). And although this is a very wide point it is also true that there is a certain disdain among those who share familial links for outsiders, and yet this is the premise on which genealogies are built, dependent on the acquisition of new lines to propel the whole forward.

If a deceased relative, who appears as some gruesome harbinger in dreams, can teach us anything about the vilification of women, it is perhaps that quite separately to any individual attributes, they are prone to vilification. And while I have no deep or lasting impression of this relative – beyond the intimations that always preceded her in life, beyond the chilly air that attended her entrance to any room we shared, beyond the trickle of anecdotes and apocryphal stories with a spirit of truth about them – it is that whatever her faults, it is no small thing to walk through ones adult life as a woman who married out, and who it would seem, did not particularly aspire to being gathered in. And I am conscious also of Harrison’s observation on ritual objects (which come first) and for which the monster is later invented (to account for it), such that the monstrous also offers a kind of life to a mask, and in so doing extends a mortal permanence to (for instance) the Medusa as face, yawning across millennia.