Cultural Reflections of Medusa

The Shadow in the Glass

Jennifer Hedgecock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429590481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

This project studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today, correlating portrayals in ancient Greek myth, nineteenth- century Symbolist painting, and new, controversial, visions of women in contemporary art.

The myth of the Medusa has long been the ultimate symbol of woman as monster. With her roots in classical mythology, Medusa has appeared time and again throughout history and culture and this book studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today. Hedgecock presents an interdisciplinary and broad historical "cultural reflections" of the modern Medusa, including the work of Maria Callas, Nan Goldin, the Symbolist painters and twentieth-century poets.

This timely and necessary work will be key reading for students and researchers specializing in mythology or gender studies across a variety of fields, touching on interdisciplinary research in feminist theory, art history and theory, cultural studies, and psychology.

Part I

The myth

1 The modern Medusa

“Casta Diva (Chaste Goddess)”

Who casts silver upon these sacred plants

Turn your beautiful face upon us

Without shadows and without veils

Yes, without shadows and without veils

Temper, O Goddess

You must temper burning hearts

Strengthen again the bold zeal

Strew o’er the earth, ah, that peace

Strew o’er the earth that peace

Which you make reign in heaven.

(Vincenzo Bellini)

In Act I of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, the Druid priestess prays to the moon goddess, who is an instrument of power and a blessing of light that reveals truth, soothes pain, and strengthens character. Norma sings “Casta Diva,” praying for peace, declaring that now is not the time for war against the Romans. Her declaration is also meant to protect the life of Pollione, her lover, the Roman proconsul, for whom she broke her vow of chastity and bore two children. But in the following scene, Pollione confesses that he no longer loves Norma. Instead he has fallen for Adalgisa. When Norma discovers this news, she wants to murder her own children to punish Pollione. But she cannot carry out her revenge because she loves her children too much. While considering such a brutally violent act, the moon’s silver light is cast upon sacred plants alluding to the afterwards, the effect of Norma’s stony gaze on all living things. In this context the moon, itself, has a dual purpose. While it is perceived as feminine, and therefore passive, the receiver of the sun’s light, the moon, also affects the emotions and is believed to influence events on earth. Norma’s spirits darken when she thinks of murdering her own children to strike revenge against Pollione. Because her love for her children supersedes her desire for revenge, she offers them to Adalgisa. But Pollione can only keep the children under the condition that he return to Norma. When he refuses, Norma is enraged, urging war against the Romans. Oroveso demands a human sacrifice to the gods which will lead the Druids to victory. Pollione is captured, and Oroveso declares that he will be their sacrifice. But still unwilling to part with Pollione, Norma stalls the ceremony and speaks to Pollione in private, promising him freedom as long as he gives up Adalgisa. When he refuses, Norma finally relents, offering herself as a sacrifice and confessing her sins to her father. Overcome with disbelief, Pollione falls in love with Norma again and joins her in the pyre.

Norma protects Pollione against his enemies because she cannot help loving him, even though Pollione desires someone else. She is full of rage and wants revenge. But when it comes down to acting on her passionate emotions, she resists, incapable of harming anyone. She recoils and instead saves the life of the man she loves, though he tells her he cannot reciprocate her affection. Love can only be found in death, and ecstasy seems to always be followed by despair. There is a constant transaction that must prove love exists, a transaction, a dramatic exchange by sacrifice, when two lovers voluntarily embrace each other in death, which means that Pollione can love her again but only when Norma is willing to die for him on the altar. Throughout the opera, Norma makes many threats spurred by anger, betrayal, and jealousy. But she does not have the capacity to act on any of these warnings.

Beginning early in her career, opera singer Maria Callas performed the role of Norma more times than any other living soprano, and she later admitted that it was emotionally and vocally draining. The piece demands perfect pitch, clear and clean chords. However, what appealed to Callas about the lead role were these very dramatic demands, a woman internalizing her rage though she must appear calm among her followers, who are savage and ruthless. Norma attempts to avoid war with the Romans while ruling a most treacherous group who do not realize that she has broken her vows and is no longer that chaste diva, having borne two children by Pollione, her Roman lover. When Callas first performed the role on November 30, 1948, critics celebrated her “vocal color” as unusual (Kesting 34). She was rich and subtle, outshining most sopranos attempting to execute this same part. As a result, Maria Callas made Norma her own. But there is a price that goes along with such notoriety, an expectation that never seems to be quite settled, and that is the incongruity of a woman appearing tough on the outside, yet inwardly sensitive and vulnerable. It seems to be the very thing that so often leads to a crucial misunderstanding about women. Callas was very suitable for the role of Norma, not only for her vocal expression, but for the common unseen threads that bind certain women together. Whether it be Callas, whose private life became as equally notorious as the character she played, the tempestuous, self-sacrificing Druid priestess, Norma, or the central study of this project, the beautiful yet monstrous, chaste yet defiled Medusa, these tormented women are hard to place in common patriarchal archetypes that otherwise limit them to being either good or bad. Maria Callas is a struggling young woman transformed by the media into a diva that creates a public perception beyond Callas’ control. To understand the complexities of Callas, or of any other contemporary woman for that matter, is to know that there are many retellings and interpretations of a woman’s story, and to start with, there are many different definitions and explanations of Medusa. This exotic and mythical creature has been all sorts of things: beautiful victim, femme fatale, frightening monster. The reader, however, is denied a reliable truth. More or less, Medusa becomes a mirror of other women’s experience and stories.

In retrospect, it is possible that like the moon goddess to whom Norma prays, Medusa tempers anguished hearts, and even more appropriately the broken hearts of lost women identifying with her melancholy, an image that late nineteenth-century Symbolist painters attempt to convey in images of her. Ancient beliefs identify the moon with Medusa. For example, Clement of Alexandria “says Orpheus called the moon ‘Gorgonios’ because of the face inscribed on its surface” (Stafford 9). The later Greeks, according to Konrad Levezow, declare that the Gorgon head personifies the moon (25). In addition, Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher claims that Athena is the moon goddess (123). So if Medusa represents the moon, and Athena is the moon goddess, together the women are manifestations of nature. They are the divine feminine joined to one another. Athena’s aegis symbolizes storm clouds, linking the two women to thunderstorms, who let loose floods and tempests when the earth is separated from the moon. But in another reading Medusa is mother earth, her snake hair attesting to this personification, representing also temptation that actually brings forth new life. She is specifically representative of the feminine. Awakening a woman’s passion to prevail, to boost her eagerness for life, Medusa is of the earth and the moon, symbolic of fertility, a life-force. She is a physical and mystic entity. The moon goddess, Athena, reigns in the heavens. Medusa reigns here on earth, creating her own unique community, that while it does not last, is forever immortalized by storytelling and various interpretations of that mortal woman, that warrior, that once chaste diva.

When we consider artistic images of Medusa from Symbolist painters Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, Edvard Munch, and Jean Delville, Medusa is always alone; she appears burdened by her curse, with an expression of deep melancholy sometimes combined with fear. Her eyes might be dramatized as large and opaque or simply vacant, but regardless she draws our attention in artistic interpretations of her, as we study or connect to some kind of feeling for, or of Medusa. There is a certain hidden beauty that the artist attempts to reveal, and a profound sadness that she is lost. Sometimes Symbolist painters emphasize Medusa’s head, a woman without a body after Perseus slays her, the eyes gazing at us, not in an attempt to turn onlookers to stone, but to evoke empathy from the viewer. Medusa is beguiling even in her changed form, unlike ancient Greek sixth century bce paintings of Medusa on terra-cotta vases or cups depicting a full-frontal face with bulging eyes, a large simian nose, a mouth with bared teeth, protruding tongue, two pairs of tusks, and a full beard (Stand). In comparison, Böcklin’s portrait, “Medusa’s Head” (1878), portrays a young woman whose perfect symmetrical features express shock and sorrow, the snakes atop her head appearing to be a heavy burden, more dead than alive, Medusa succumbing to her own death in grey pallor, her half-closed blue eyes yearning and reflective. Franz von Stuck creates a more haunting impression: her skin is porcelain, her eyes a hypnotic, glowing yellow, making it impossible for the spectator to look away. Medusa’s countenance paralyzes the spectator while she too seems transfixed by the onlooker as if she sees something of her own face among those who are watching. The emotions that these artists convey in the Medusa figure are complex. Her beautiful face emerges from a dark background of coarser textures in grays or browns. Still the artist conjures up a resemblance of what she once was before the curse. The snakes curl or slither across her forehead, seemingly indifferent from the very face we see.

At one time, she had been that “Chaste Goddess,” virginal and naive, pure and innocent, poets recalling her forgotten past, and artists combining her beauty and ugliness together in an expression of sadness. But Medusa was a mortal, and it was not until after Homer wrote The Iliad in the eighth century bce that other narratives emerge, depicting her as a goddess or monster of all sorts of things. We seem almost obsessed with her, as if re-creating her image, designing our own Medusa, reflecting our own beliefs, can in some way help us to recover Medusa from the past. These Symbolist artists inscribe and interpret old myths, that identify more with the patriarchal definitions of women. This obsession among Symbolist painters with the Medusa figure lead to a reconsideration of her myth. They emphasize the seductive, dangerous nature of the cursed woman. The curse becomes very central to the way in which she is portrayed particularly by Symbolist painters, to show that she is now a knowledgeable and experienced woman who becomes a figurative threshold figure to the hero whose virtue must be tested. In the late nineteenth century, the roles of women are changing from the patriarchal dichotomy of the fallen woman or chaste woman (Angel of the House, as it was frequently put in the mid-nineteenth century) to women struggling for more autonomy. I argue that Symbolist painters express both fear and a fascination with these fluctuating identities of women. It is therefore important to understand how Medusa becomes emblematic of women’s political and social rebellion as she is portrayed in Symbolist art.

I was inspired to write about Medusa when I attended the Spring 2013 Ange Du Bizarre Exhibition at the D’Orsay Museum in Paris featuring the theme of Dark Romanticism. Based on The Romantic Agony (1930) by Italian writer and art historian, Mario Praz, the exhibit explored eighteenth-century through twentieth-century artistic creations that revive myths, exploit enigmatic landscapes, confront man—his terrors and contradictions—and reveal the strangeness of everyday life. These works not only made visible the sexual idiosyncrasies of artists and writers, tormented by their obsessions, but also reflected sensual fantasies, both disturbing and cruel, shared by a universal human population, especially in the late nineteenth century. Noticeably at this exhibit was the reaction among artists to a stifling hypocrisy of bourgeois moral and artistic conventions. Noticeably at this exhibit, the Symbolist painters, beginning with Böcklin, tried to get at the deep mysteries of life, clearly avoiding scientific analysis or an imitation of external forms, and repeatedly drawing upon inspiration from the Medusa figure. A commentary of this part of the exhibition keenly observes that “Satan and other princes of evil” are now more prominently embodied by the image of Medusa, “teeming with snakes” while she luridly gazes at the spectator. Traditional beliefs about Medusa who “petrifies those who cross eyes with her” are in fact subtly modified by these artists in their work. In these portraits, the spectator does not fear staring at her, but rather it is hard to pull one’s gaze away from her. She is an odd paradox of beauty combined with horror, though these paintings reveal more of her splendor and less of her frightfulness. Artists von Stuck, Böcklin, Delville, and Munch paint her as a romantic figure that builds a new aesthetic model, fascinated by the taboo of looking at Medusa.

By being a romantic figure, the image of Medusa signifies a poetical paradise that is lost, seeking divine contemplation in her seclusion at Athena’s temple, then suddenly cast out, and turned into a ravaged and cursed woman banished to the arid North African desert. In his comparison, Diodorus Siculus explains in The Gorgons and the Amazons how these women fought valiantly but were inevitably defeated by Hercules, a loss suggesting that women should not be leaders of large armies and nations. Her courage and leadership is seldom discussed. Instead Symbolist artists paint Medusa in the romantic style, which hints at the wanderings of the imagination that the artist does not always translate well into actual life. The romantic figure is sensual, and these paintings of Medusa attempt to gratify the sensibilities of the spectator with an inner unity at work here. The Medusa figure cultivates the ideal presence, a waking dream, a virtual state of mind, a higher reality, which directly conflicts with reality. Shelley, in his poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci,” recalls: “’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror” (line 33). To be both lovely and terrifying at the same time makes Medusa fascinating to see, triggering both anticipation and titillation that comes with being frightened by a beautiful woman. Gazing at her is irresistible. But she is also a conservative symbol of revolutionary violence. The Medusa head articulates the political dilemma coupled with a complicated aesthetic one: how does the spectator identify with her, without speaking for her, the oppressed? It’s actually impossible. That would suggest that any individual can represent the oppressed without having shared their experience, yet the truth of the matter is that they are silencing the voice of the oppressed by claiming that they are in a position to speak on their behalf. This would mean that anyone can flippantly use the Medusa symbol for their own cause, though it may not be representative of its intended purpose, to stand for those who are denied agency, to speak for themselves. The victimized woman in Shelley’s poem requires a careful balance. In other words, to represent the oppressed by the figure of a female victim (Medusa) poses problems. This is to be read in light of fixed gender politics. Medusa as a symbol reveals that the gendered ground upon which political conflicts and aesthetic desires are articulated is itself at stake in Shelley’s work: “And from its head as from one body grow” (line 17). According to Barbara Judson in “The Politics of Medusa: Shelley’s Physiognomy of Revolution”:

During the 1790s the Medusa functioned fetishistically: as a horrific image of castration, she emblematized the establishment’s fear of losing its political and social privileges to the fury of women and the unpropertied classes demanding enfranchisement; but, at the same time, by virtue of the condensation and displacement intrinsic to symbolization, her snaky tresses extrude an apotropaic effect-constellating the male organ’s petrifaction upon encountering this image-a stiffening that reassured the masculine establishment of its undiminished authority.

(135)

Judson suggests that Medusa is an object of sexual desire that ironically threatens men’s masculinity. Because she has been artistically represented as seductive, the femme fatale, a Salome figure, she compels the male gaze, but she renders man immobile, unable to act, and more so, she undermines their power over the existing political and social state of affairs. On a more social level, women are struggling and resist against male power. They wish to have the same social privileges equal to men, but this will throw off the status quo. But two images are fused together, and that is the threat of the Medusa, and her power to protect one from their enemies. Instead men can use her power to protect themselves, and that is by demonizing the threat posed by women. Her “snaky hair” comes to represent the power of the phallus. The stiffening of the phallus guarantees male subjectivity in response to danger, though at first, the fear of looking and identifying with figuratively castrated penises jeopardizes male authority, as Freud explains the reaction to Medusa’s serpentine locks.

In “‘What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed’: George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819,” Ashley J. Cross explains that Shelley’s poem reveals a different revolutionary significance of Medusa. She comes to define what a revolution transforms into, beginning with an aesthetic ideal, transitioning into potential, and then eventual terror. Emblematically, the Medusa image warns about the wreckage of reform movements that result in violence over a struggle for power. The role in which the feminine operates is to consolidate power with all parties which is symbolized by the Medusean knot. On the contrary, Linda Shires clarifies that during late eighteenth century, the affiliation between radicalism and sensibility led conservatives to demonize both male and female revolutionaries “as disfigured by passion into beasts, furies, offal,” who share beliefs that at the time were very pivotal (Judson 137).

By portraying Medusa, artists struggle with this paradox of a lovely woman transformed into a terrifying creature. Medusa’s oppressor, Athena, represents the new order of the gods from the heavens and is put into a position where she must take action against the Gorgon who originates from the previous rulers, the sea gods. But Athena’s action must be aligned with patriarchal authority that punishes rebellious women. While her punishment is signified by Medusa’s physical change, this transformation is unsettling as if writing about her or painting Medusa can make sense of a tragic and complex outcome. Furthermore, the patriarchal, canonical myth of Medusa relies on a dichotomy of women (good and bad, pure and fallen, lovely and terrifying). As David Leeming in Medusa in the Mirror of Time puts it, this “makes no sense” (97)—that a beautiful woman can be suddenly transfigured into a horrifying monster; he implicitly questions the reliability of the myth. The myth implicitly suggests that if a woman loses her physical beauty that she is of no value. Her value is determined by being gazed upon by other men. On the other hand, Praz notes that “pleasure and pain are combined in one single impression” (26), a fusion reflected by the Medusa image. Two polarities that mix together as a single unity result in the “ideal presence.” Though it may seem unrealistic, Medusa is a desirable object for the very reason that her figure causes the spectator to be frozen by his prurient looking as if he is caught, like a peeping tom. The purpose for looking in this case is the hedonistic pleasure gratified by the very image he sees. From the poet’s perspective, by gazing at Medusa, the linear structure of time must be considered by understanding how time fits harmoniously together. Within a Romantic framework, a linear flow is also an illusion, discontinuous of any time-ordered structure. E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The shadow in the glass
• Part I The myth
• Part II Symbolist interpretations of Medusa
• Part III Medusa in the twenty-first century: Identifying the woman in the mirror
• Index