The Beauty of the Medusa: The Twentieth Century

Abstract

T H E B E A U T Y O F T H E M E D U S A : T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y JOAN COLDWELL McMaster University a rr~i -Lhe Beauty of the Medusa” is the paradoxical title Mario Praz gave to the first chapter of his book The Romantic Agony,1 where he used the phrase as metaphor for a nineteenth-century cult of finding the erotic in the horrible. There is a modem version of this motif in a Medusa poem by the Irish poet John Montague: Again she appears The putrid fleshed woman whose breath is ashes Hair a writhing net of snakes! Her presence strikes gashes Of light into the skull Rears the genitals Tears away all I had so carefully built — 2 It is hard to see anything appealing, let alone erotic, in so monstrous an image: a Gorgon whose head seethes with snakes and whose gaze turns the beholder to stone. More surprising still is the fact that many contemporary women writers present either themselves or their characters as Medusae. Contrast with Montague’s Gorgon this one, for example, looked at by a woman poet, May Sarton: I turn your face around! It is my face. That frozen rage is what I must explore — Oh secret, self-enclosed and ravaged place! This is the gift I thank Medusa for.3 This vision represents a departure from the tradition explored by Praz, who showed the earlier fascination with the figure to be exclusively male; it demonstrates the process of revisionist myth-making, whereby women attempt to correct the gender stereotypes embodied in the old stories.4 E n g l i s h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x i, 4, December 1985 Interpretation of a myth in any period reflects the concerns and interests of its time; women’s adaptations of the Medusa image in this century mirror the prevailing ideologies and reflect changing attitudes to women and their role in society. Under the impact of feminism, a negative horror image of woman as a literally petrifying monster has been triumphantly embraced as an emblem not of abasement but of exaltation. The beauty of the Medusa is now seen as an image, not of decadent eroticism, but of spiritual power, in a process that seems to take one back to the origins of the myth in the early thirteenth century B.G. In that beginning there was a ritual mask. It was dreadfully ugly and its purpose was to scare off men, and demons, from the religious rituals con­ ducted by women in honour of the great Triple Goddess, matriarch of the upper air, earth and underworld in her moon-like phases of maiden, nymph and crone.5 Then, so we are told by modem archeological and anthropo­ logical research, the patriarchal Hellenes invaded Greece; they wrecked the goddess’s shrines and tore off the masks from the priest-women, an episode in that crucial moment of western civilization when female powers were replaced by gods and heroes, when the “warrior principle of the great deed of the individual who matters flung its bolt”6 against the worship of the earth and the powers of fertility. The story-making Greeks perpetuated this historical moment as the tale of a hero, Perseus (representing the Hellenes), who cunningly cut off the head of a threatening Gorgon; the stylized mark­ ings of the masks were transformed into serpents who writhed on her head instead of hair, and the sacred power of the early cult became Medusa’s ability to turn all who looked at her to stone, an ability long afterwards invoked by bakers in Greece, who inscribed a Gorgon head on their oven doors to protect the bread.7 Perhaps it was a lingering touch of guilt that caused elaboration of the myth to include the idea, mentioned by Ovid,8 that Medusa was once a beautiful maiden, put into her horrifying form as punishment — punishment for her having been raped by Neptune — and also that the drops of blood from her severed head...