Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze. Hers is the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves.
As with the figure of the Wolfman and other monsters which embody the hostile and threatening aspects of the forces of nature, the figure of Medusa tells us how we relate to our natural selves and to nature, and to the essential wildness and chaos of both.
We may also regard them as dyadic idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty, animus and anima archetypes in Jungian terms, though all mythic figures can be assigned positional and qualitative values in this way, and if you are a primary or native Romance language speaker you will construct meaning so that the whole material universe and everything in it is either masculine or feminine, though these things are truly ambiguous, conflicted, relative, and shifting as protean transformations of meaning, value, and identity which change with our history.
Identity and its dimensions as identities of sex and gender are prochronisms, a history in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation over time and through our interdependence with others, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
What is most useful to me in the figure of Medusa is what we can learn from her myth about the purpose of Patriarchy as control of nature, a theme which Camille Paglia has fully explored in her foundational work Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, the role of Medusa as tragic heroine and avenger of a violated natural wildness typifies the conflicts inherent within our society as systemic patriarchy, misogyny, and control.
It can also tell us why we burn down rainforests to plant palm oil crops, poison ourselves with fossil fuels, and other travesties of capitalist plunder and colonial exploitation, why our oceans are dying, and why the extinction of humankind may be inevitable.
We are addicted to power, and cannot bear that which is beyond our absolute control. Here is the origin of our dominion and subjugation of nature and of one another; fear. Fear of wildness, chaos, disorder, unpredictability, and loss of control; fear of standing naked before the endless chasms of night and the emptiness of the infinite cosmos without our armor of lies and illusions conferred by submission to authority, fear of embracing our darkness and our inchoate passions which threaten to sublime and enrapture, to defile and exalt us beyond our limits and reveal to us our true selves and truths written in our flesh.
This is why seizures of power and revolutionary struggle for ownership of identity and autonomy as a process of becoming human and free self-created beings as emergence from authorized identities, including those of sex and gender, is primary in terms of developmental stages of growth and history for both persons and whole societies.
It is also why the struggles for liberty and equality and against patriarchy and racism and for ecological sustainability and against capitalism and extinction are parallel and interdependent; for their origins are in the same disparity and disconnectedness of humankind from nature, and in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
As I wrote in my post of December 10 2019 Human Rights Day
Today we mark Human Rights Day with the beginning of a series of actions throughout the world in hope of making real for all peoples this most precious and tenuous gift of our civilization.
As described on the United Nations website; ”Human Rights Day is observed every year on 10 December — the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): a milestone document proclaiming the inalienable rights which everyone is inherently entitled to as a human being regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Our world is filled with injustices and a plethora of windmills that might be giants at which one may tilt; a host of genocides and state terrors, pervasive slavery, identity driven divisions of race, faith, language, and nationality, and those attendant upon the economics and class ravages of plutocracy and environmental plunder and extinction.
Upon reflection I return to the one dehumanization and power asymmetry which has been with us since the dawn of agriculture and city-states ruled by priest-kings and the enforcers who drive the slaves in the fields; patriarchy and its key factor, the silencing of women. Remove this one keystone and the whole poisonous structure which shapes us into monsters and slaves begins to fall.
The dynamic which divides half of humanity against the other half is brilliantly described in a short video by the eminent classical scholar Mary Beard; I was captivated by her use of the myth of Medusa as a controlling metaphor of maladaptive male-female relationships and the legacy of disfigured masculinity.
Medusa herself is a compelling archetype; goddess and monster, like the beautiful and terrible jellyfish which is among her images and forms, and whose power appropriates the toxicity of the male gaze, her myth describes the history of the emergence of the Patriarchy and its seizure of power over our civilization, and the consequences of its primary values inversion which assigns the yin or death force to the female half of the human dyad.
Of all the many inequalities we must redress to liberate ourselves, among those most crucial to our identity and our freedom are the silencing of women, and the denial of the feminine unconscious in men, and their transmutation into figures not of birth and life but of death, with all its attendant witch hunts in their many forms.
Let us revoice and revision our ideals and relationships of masculinity and femininity as a fulcrum of identity, and change the balance of power in the world.
As written by Cody Delistraty in an article entitled What If We’ve Been Misunderstanding Monsters? Fictional evil creatures might be more nuanced—and have more to teach us—than has long seemed; “Medusa is pure wickedness: an angry misandrist with venomous snakes for hair and the ability to turn a man to stone with only a look. That is, at least, how she is depicted in Thomas Bulfinch’s influential nineteenth-century text, Mythology. So too in Edith Hamilton’s updated Mythology, from 1942, and, as such, in much of contemporary popular culture.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published around 8 CE, however, Medusa had a backstory that’s often elided in modern retellings. She was attractive and innocent when Poseidon (Neptune) lured her into Athena’s (Minerva’s) temple and raped her. When Athena found out, she turned Medusa’s hair into snakes, erasing her beauty.
Though Freud posited that Medusa’s hair represented sexual repression, a symbol of castrated genitalia and the madness to which that might lead a person, the poet Ann Stanford, in her “Women of Perseus,” unpacks the more nuanced psychological effects of Medusa’s rape and the complications it adds to understanding her. Commenting on Stanford’s work, the poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker notes in her article “The Thieves of Language” that “the trauma ‘imprisons’ Medusa in a self-dividing anger and a will to revenge that she can never escape, though she yearns to.”
Consumed by this vengeful desire, Medusa might be not so much a monster as a tragic figure. Given the way her story as a “monster” has been told over the last few centuries, however, you’d be hard-pressed to know it.
The Light Side of the Force or the Dark Side. Mount Olympus or Hades. The idea is that though we must choose a direction, it’s a straight and clear path.
When depicted as wholly and unchangeably evil, the classic monsters of literature and myth help make sense of a complex world, often with Biblical clarity and simplicity. The existence of pure evil implies the existence of pure good. Heaven or Hell. The Light Side of the Force or the Dark Side. Mount Olympus or Hades. The idea is that though we must choose a direction, it’s a straight and clear path.
Until the Enlightenment, this one-sided view of monsters was rampant. The word “monster” is likely derived from the Latin “monere,” which means “to warn,” writes the scholar Stephen Fox in Rutgers University’s The Scarlet Review—as in a warning from God that to deviate a little from norms is to deviate entirely into the realm of evil. The notion of total evil is an inherently Old Testament one: you either adhere wholly to the commandments of God and make the correct sacrifices and go to Heaven; or you do not, and you go to Hell.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—an overtly Biblical epic that seemingly takes place in the Middle Ages—made little room for nuance between good and evil. Orcs and Trolls and Sauron—these are absolute monsters with no redeeming values. “Tolkien was very clear about his monsters being intended as embodiments of pure malice and corruption, with no effort made to show any humanizing or empathetic aspects to them,” writes Fox.
The trap is to think of all literary and mythical monsters in these Biblical terms. Though God and Tolkien may have had certain ideas about evil… well, #NotAllMonsters. To look at even the most classic of fictional monsters is to see complications to this reductive version of evil. Grendel, for instance, the villain of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, might seem a clear-cut brute. He’s depicted as a giant and is said to be a descendent of Cain, from the Book of Genesis, adding to his essential evilness.
But upon a closer read one sees that the ostensible hero and Grendel have much in common. Both are characterized throughout the poem as having the “strength of 30 men in their arms,” as noted by the Old English literary scholar Andy Orchard in his book Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript.
When Beowulf fights, he’s depicted as doing so in a “distinctly inhuman way,” Fox writes, matching the style of Grendel. Even Grendel’s home, which seems to be in a bog or swamp of some kind, forces Beowulf to come down to the monster’s level to battle with him. A fair inference is that Beowulf is not so different from Grendel; they are literally on the same level. Apparent good and apparent evil often mix and meld, complicating their boundaries.
Post-Enlightenment, literary monsters began largely to reflect social deviance. Intrinsic evil as a driving idea began to fall away. On the face of it, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is about the atrocity of Victor Frankenstein’s creation—no man has any business doing God’s work of creation. But to go deeper is to see that the central conflict of Frankenstein is not so much the relationship between creator and monster as it is the relationship between family and society. When Frankenstein’s mother is on her deathbed, she tells him that his fiancée, Elizabeth, “must supply my place,” mixing the role of mother and lover in Frankenstein’s mind. (To mix even further: his mother dies of the scarlet fever that Elizabeth had passed to her.) But Frankenstein puts off marrying Elizabeth, even at his father’s insistence. Instead of marrying and having a baby with her, as society would deem appropriate, Frankenstein “collected the instruments of life around [him] that [he] might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at [his] feet,” writes Shelley.
By choosing to forego his social responsibilities to marry and procreate, he inflicts “a wound upon the social body,” as Shelley writes. It’s his social choices that are deemed monstrous. Frankenstein’s actual monster becomes a symbol for the creator’s deviance. Only upon realizing that he has departed too far from social norms does Frankenstein decide that his creature must die. His last words: “[seek] happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition.” On his own deathbed, Frankenstein has finally learned his lesson: don’t mess with social norms.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula ends with the vampire’s execution, the monster’s death similarly restoring health to the community, as it represents the achievement of social cohesion following the threat of an outsider. Depicted as sexually suspect, Dracula, like Frankenstein and his monster, is a loner who foregoes his social duties. “Horror novels are often structured around conflict between the safety of a middle-class family home and queer-coded loners who seek its disruption,” writes the literary scholar Evan Hayles Gledhill in “Deviant Subjectivities: Monstrosity and Kinship in the Gothic Imagination.” “The ability to live as one chooses outside the constraints of the traditional pater familias is consistently presented as either a corruption… or a moral failing.”
Because norms have shifted significantly through recent history, many of the monsters of the past now seem like jokes. Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film performance as Dracula, for example, is no longer frightening to contemporary audiences because his overt queerness has been coopted as camp; his operatic black cape has become a kind of cultural gag. His social threat has been mostly neutered—and with it his capacity to frighten.
Today’s most ubiquitous monsters match contemporary moral panics. With Slender Man, a monster that originated as an online meme, his scariness is based on his supposed realness. Reified by the Internet’s echo chamber, young, very-online people post realistic-but-Photoshopped images of him and share supposed stories of encounters. When two teenagers stabbed a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin in 2014, later telling authorities they were told to do so by Slender Man, the fictional became, for a moment, too real—adding to Slender Man’s perceived reality and thus his ability to scare.
Similarly, last year’s The Invisible Man movie remake with Elisabeth Moss turned the late-nineteenth century literary monster into a domestically abusive tech billionaire, playing in part on the idea that near-unlimited money might turn a man evil. As a critique of billionaire culture and a particular flavor of masculinity, this kind of monster legitimately scares because a version of it exists.
How might we view these contemporary monsters in a hundred years?
To play (literal) devil’s advocate, perhaps in an increasingly virtual world, Slender Man will seem tame, even funny, like Dracula does now. Perhaps the current version of the Invisible Man will be viewed as a victim of capitalism, ambition culture, and toxic masculinity. One might still wonder whether Medusa is an incorrigibly wicked monster. But if deep down she’s also an abused and traumatized person desperately trying to take matters into her own hands, is she even really a monster at all?”
As written by Lorna Marie Kirkby in her thesis The Rape of Medusa: Feminist Revision of Medusa in Stanford and DuPlessis; “Medusa, the snake-haired, stony-gazed Gorgon first appeared in her monstrous guise in Greek mythology. In the Greek myth Medusa was transformed into the petrifying monster that we know today by the goddess Athena as a punishment for ‘coupling’ with Poseidon in her temple. She has since been used in the modern world as a means for silencing women through the stigmatisation of female sexuality in art, psychology (particularly Freudian) and as a means for controlling and creating negative images of women that are to be avoided under the conditions of the modern patriarchal society. In reaction to misogynistic appropriations of the myth, many feminists have turned to Medusa in acts of revisionist mythmaking to transform Medusa into a source of power as an icon of the female gaze, sexuality, and power. The two poems that I have chosen for this essay, both entitled Medusa, constitute particularly unique revisions of the Medusa myth by focusing not on aspects of the Greek myth, but on Ovid’s retelling of the Medusa story in his Metamorphoses where Medusa is not punished for having sexual relations with the God Poseidon, but for being the victim of a rape by the sea God. Whereas most appropriations, misogynist and feminist, focus primarily on the result of Medusa’s transformation – the petrifying gaze and the serpent-hair – Medusa by Ann Stanford, published in 1970, and Medusa by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, published in 1980, address the rape that triggered the transformation, bringing the Medusa myth into modern feminist discourses on rape and the representation of rape in literature. In this essay I am going to assess Stanford and DuPlessis’ revisions of the Medusa myth in terms of how the two poems fit into the tradition of feminist revisionist mythmaking. In order to do so I will first consider the relationship between mythology, the oppression of women and how revising Ovid’s Medusa
myth has made it possible for Stanford and DuPlessis to subvert existing, patriarchal representations of both rape and women. I will then move on to explore in more detail the issues involved with representing rape in literature and the role of trauma in the two poems; and finally I will analyse in more detail the questions of voice that are necessarily brought tothe surface in feminist revisionist literature, and how these questions are expressed through the tropes of silence, the female gaze and female creativity in Stanford and DuPlessis’ poems.
The question of violence against women became a key part of feminist agendas first in the late1960s with multiple campaigns to change the way in which society perceives rape and its victims. The anti-rape movement of second wave feminism came about in the late 1960s and early 70s and addressed both legal and political aspects of rape, including laws and the difficulties in prosecuting rapists, and attitudes such as victim- -hatred as a response to rape.
modern understandings of rape and sexual violence, is against the tradition of viewing rape from a patriarchal perspective which either normalises rape, or punishes the victim. This perspective is particularly clear in mythology, where sexual assault is often glossed over, seen as fate at the hands of the Gods
or seen as the crime of the victim: Ovid’ s Medusa myth is no exception. The inscription of rape as part of the classic mythological narrative acts to minimize the element of human suffering in the victim of sexual assault and it is this gap in the mythological narrative that has allowed feminist revisionist mythmakers to readdress and change popular perceptions of rape by rewriting the original myths from a feminine perspective. Moniza Alvi explains her motivation for choosing the Europa myth in her work as an approach to writing about rape:
“I hoped that using the myth would be a helpful universalising strategy, representing rape emblematically. The poem could then be dream-like and surreal, with a focus on feelings, rather than morality, and a ‘whose fault was it?’ scenario, which often leads to the woman being blamed.” (Alvi in Gunne and Thompson,2010: xii) Thus using mythology provides feminist revisionists not only the opportunity to challenge the overriding male viewpoint from which myths are written, but also to convey messages that take on a universal effect from the mythological status of the original. Alicia Ostriker explains the effect that feminist writers can gain from revisionist mythmaking as originating from the ‘double power’ of literature that bears a mythic status:
“It exists or appears to exist objectively, in the public sphere, and consequently confers on the writer the sort of authority unavailable to someone who writes ‘merely’ of the private sel. Myth belongs to ‘high’ culture and is handed ‘down’ through the ages by religious, literary, and educational authority. At the same time, myth is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation everything in the psyche that to rational consciousness is unreal, crazed, or abominable” (Ostriker, 1982: 72)
From this, therefore, we can see why feminists have chosen to use myths to re-evaluate traditional perceptions of women. Feminine voices are few and far between in the classical narratives that have formed the foundations of our literary traditions, so by using myths women writers have been able to give the feminine voice an element of authority that is equated, as Alvi used The Rape of Europa, where Europa is raped by Zeus in the guise of a Bull in her poem
Europa and the Bull that forms the centrepiece of her collection
Europa. (Alvi, 2008: 24-38) Ostriker has explained, with so-called ‘high culture’, putting them on an even playing field with the male voices that have oppressed and silenced them for so long. Once on an even playing field, these women writers are in prime position to be able to question, destabilise and ultimately change the traditional narratives that have been so instrumental in defining and silencing women. Ann Stanford and Rachel Blau DuPlessis fit into this tradition of women revisionist writers and have used the mythological figure of Medusa as a vehicle for the previously oppressed feminine voice. Ovid’s description of Medusa’s rape at the hands of Poseidon is extremely brief, and played out over the course of just two lines of his Metamorphoses:
“They say that Neptune, Lord of the sea, Violated her in a temple of Minerva.” (Ovid,2011: 76)
In a narrative where the action is dominated by the acts of Gods (Poseidon’s rape and Athena’s punishment), the assault upon Medusa and her subsequent punishment despite being a victim is effectively accepted as the result of external, divine forces; her fate as a mortal woman. The brevity of Ovid’s description of the rape eliminates Medusa’s own perspective of the event and
any thoughts, feelings, or trauma that may arise as a result of the assault. The question of Medusa’s punishment at the hands of Athena is also key to feminist readings of Ovid’s work, for how can a punishment asigned by a woman represent the male oppression of the rape victim? Joplin explains:
“[Athene] is no real female but sprang, motherless, from her father’s head, as enfleshed fantasy. (…) Athene is like the murderous angel in Virginia Woolf’s house, a male fantasy of what a woman ought to be, who strangles the real woman writer’s voice.” (Joplin in Higgins and Silver, 2013: 51) So Athena and the punishment she confers upon Medusa is ultimately an extension of the power of the patriarchy.
The unanswered question of Medusa’s perspective is then further discouraged through her transformation into a monstrous creature to be feared. This has meant that Medusa’s own suffering has been largely ignored until the recent surge of feminist revisionism since the late 1960s.
In their poems both Stanford and DuPlessis give first person accounts of Medusa’s suffering and the lasting trauma left by sexual violence, thus providing the perspective that had been missing from the Medusa myth, rewriting it to include and indeed promote the female voice. At the same time they have reduced the role of the Gods by attributing the transformation of their Medusas not to fate or to divine forces, but to the trauma of the rape, so that the petrification and the sprouting of snakes for hair is something intimate and personal that comes from Medusa herself. The transformation of Stanford’s Medusa seems more like a metaphor for the psychological change that takes place after experiencing rape: “My hair coiled in fury; my mind held hate
alone./ I thought of revenge, began to live on it./ My hair turned to serpents, my eyes saw the world in stone.” (Stanford, 2001: 114). Removing the mythical powers of the Gods from Medusa’s transformation thus emphasises the personal, human suffering that is missing from Ovid’s telling of the myth and
reduces Poseidon’s assault to a human act of violence which brings the rape into the realms of the political and the social. Stanford’s description of Poseidon also belittles the God, making him seem repulsive “the old man” (Ibid.), “the stinking breath, the sweaty weight” (Ibid.: 115) – the effect of which is that Stanford is able to criticise rape as a form of oppression over women, as in real life, rather than allowing the sexual assault to remain as the tragic fate of a mythological figure. DuPlessis takes a slightly different approach, yet her poem
Medusa, like Stanford’s also leaves the realm of the mythic to constitute a wider criticism of the normalised violence and oppression against women. She achieves this through an amalgamation first of the three Graeae into one mother figure, and secondly of her rapist and her killer into one masculine, oppressive force. The mother figure, though unnamed, is identified as the three Graeae in the fifth section “Stole/ they/ eye of my mother,/ stole they teeth,/ mother.” (DuPlessis, 1980: 39) Referencing multiple victims of
male oppression in the poem allows DuPlessis’ critique to transcend the individual suffering of Medusa and to work as a demonstration of women’s
suffering at the hands of men. This is also highlighted later in the fifth section where the reader is reminded of another mythological rape victim, Philomela
: “she weave a woven/ to webble The Graeae were three powerful, mystical hags, (Deino, Enyo and Pemphredo) who shared one eye and one tooth between them. In his quest for the head of Medusa Perseus steals their single eye (and in some versions the tooth too), holding it to ransom for information on where to find the magical objects that will help him.
Philomela was raped by King Tereus of Thrace, who cut out her tongue and imprisoned her to prevent her from telling anybody about the assault. Philomela then wove her story into a tapestry to send to her sister Procne Tereus’ wife
who then killed her son by Tereus and served him as a meal to Tereus. Fleeing from the angered Tereus, Procne and Philomela prayed to the Gods to be turned to birds. Their wishes were granted with Procne transformed into a Swallow, and Philomela into a Nightingale, the female of which is naturally mute. For further critical analysis of the myth, see Geoffrey Hartman’s The Voice of the Shuttle (Hartman, 1969) and Joplin’s feminist response to Hartman, The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours (Joplin in Higgins and Silver, 2013). “the wobble words.”, “the shuttle eye”, “her loopy threads” (Ibid.). The male perpetrators of violence or oppression are never mentioned by name or specifically as Gods or heroes, in fact aside from ‘he’ or ‘they’, the only other word used to refer to the male oppressor is ‘Man’: “Everywhere/ I see/ inside me/ Man poised” (DuPlessis, 1980: 36). Her use of capitalisation being scant, the fact that DuPlessis has chosen to use a capital letter for ‘Man’ seems to institutionalise the male sex and makes it clear that the Medusa of the poem is not talking about just one man, nor even Poseidon and Perseus together, but rather the ever-present patriarchy as a whole. The ominous presence of the ‘poised’ patriarchy, ready to exert oppression over women appears again in the following stanza “on my eye/ a knife/ ceaselessly/ on a whetstone.” (Ibid.)
Here, whilst symbolically recalling Medusa’s rape, DuPlessis also refers to
the continued and constant oppression of women through violence. Using the Medusa myth has therefore made it possible for Stanford and DuPlessis to simultaneously present an intimate view of the psychological repercussions of rape and auniversal indictment of violence and oppression of women as a historical notion. There is however the continued question of representing rape in poetry.
I reference again Avi’s explanation of the concerns she faced when writing
Europa and the Bull:“I envisaged the narrative in a series of
short sections, each presenting a bright image, each one hitting home, while the beauty of setting and the magical elements, would, I hoped, ensure that the tale was not too start. In the rape scene, I was able to employ the ambiguous image of the plunging bull in which much could be left to the readers’ imagination. I considered this approach preferable to a graphic animal/ human rape depiction which would sensationalize the tale and might turn off reader as well as writer.” (Alvi in Gunne and Thompson, 2010: xii) The problem of portraying rape with vivid and violent images in a form known for aesthetics is a problem faced by all who choose to use sexual violence in their work. In our comparison between Stanford and DuPlessis’ poems we can see two different approaches to the representation of rape. DuPlessis uses a similar technique to that of Alvi, by shrouding the violence in a kind of secrecy and metaphor where the word ‘rape’ is never used, nor the name of the perpetrator, nor is there a graphic depiction of the sexual assault or the murder. Instead the physical acts are concealed behind a complex system of language filled with symbolism
and fragmented by the protagonist’s trauma that prevents a direct retelling of the assault as such.
The fragmentary nature and emphasis on sounds in DuPlessis’ language suggests a psychological regression to a purer language such as that of a child, yet the infantile perspective simultaneously allows DuPlessis to incorporate numerous metaphors and symbols for violence.
DuPessis’ use of metaphor for violence – “a knife/ ceaselessly/ on a whetstone” (DuPlessis,1980: 36), “forcing the branch/ ripping the tree” (Ibid.: 37), “Broke the moon box”, (Ibid.: 39) – has the same effect as Alvi’s plunging bull, by avoiding the disturbing direct description of rape and violence, yet allowing images to build up in the reader’s mind through aesthetic and poetic language. Myth and metaphor allows DuPlessis to address what has largely remained a taboo or stigmatised subject matter using existing, accepted forms of rape narrative, yet doing so through a first person narrative something that Alvi avoided in her poetry in order to prevent her poetry from straying into the ‘survivor discourse’ that is prevalent in rape narratives. DuPlessis’ avoidance of direct engagement with violent acts could be an expression of the trauma undergone by the victim who is not yet prepared for the cathartic act of ‘telling’ the rape, yet by the end of the poem, DuPlessis expresses an empowerment through creativity as the head of Medusa changes from its identification as a victim to become an icon for female creativity.
Stanford’s engagement with the telling of trauma is much more direct. Unlike DuPlessis and Alvi, Stanford’s first person account of Medusa’s rape is direct, plain-spoken and faces the violence encountered by the protagonist head-on. Not only does Stanford use the word rape, as is often avoided in the aesthetic form of poetry, but she avoids the use of euphemism to ‘soften’ the theme of rape, openly subverting the status of rape as taboo. Instead the language employed by Stanford is straightforward and basic, painting an exact picture of the assault suffered by Medusa. The first mention of the sexual assault seems to mimic Ovid’s matter -of-fact and essentialist description in Metamorphoses,
“He seized and raped me before Athena’s altar.” (Stanford, 2001: 114) yet later in the poem, when expressing the lasting effects of trauma and the rage that ensues, Stanford gives a much fuller and more vivid image of the rape
“but there recur/ thoughts of the god and his misdeed always – / the iron arm, the marble floor/the stinking breath, the sweaty weight, the pain/ the quickening thrust.” (Ibid.: 115). This straightforward telling of the event shocks the reader, forcing them to face the taboo of sexual violence. The logical cause-and-
effect style of Stanford’s first person narrative leads the reader
to question the status that rape has had in literature historically, where the rape of mythical women has been accepted as part of historical narrative without a consideration of the feelings of individual women who undergo the same process in reality.
The structure and tone of the poem in its simplicity and focus on the cause and effects of Medusa’s rage following her sexual assault brings to mind the survivor discourse as is common in autobiographical trauma narratives:
“To return fully to the self as socially defined, to establish a relationship again with the world, the survivor must tell what happened. This is the function of narrative. The task then is to render the memories tellable, which means to order and arrange them in the form of a story, linking emotion with event, event with event, and so on.” (Culbertson,1995: 179) Through a variation on survivor discourse, Stanford has brought the Medusa myth into the modern concern of psychological trauma in rape victims where Medusa’s transformation into
the serpent-haired monster with a petrifying gaze is equated with a victim’s dev
elopment of rage as a response to trauma, directed not only at the perpetrator of the sexual crime but at all men. This anger against the world, however, leaves her isolated: “My furious glance destroyed all live things there./ I was alone. I am alone. My ways/ divide me from the world, imprison me in a stare” (Stanford, 2001: 115) The rage that separates her from the world thus enacts a kind of petrification on the protagonist herself too, making her impenetrable to the world and alienated, unable to make human connections. Trauma
in Duplessis’ Medusa on the other hand is played out through the protagonist’s
inability to express herself, as is reflected in the fragmented and infantile language used throughout the poem. Whereas Stanford’s Medusa work
s finds a kind of therapy through the act of ‘telling’, DuPlessis’ poem is a battle for the self-expression that has long been denied to women. The silencing of women is emphasised by the large blank spaces, and the way that DuPlessis has used short phrases rather than complete sentences that together hint at something left untold. In the first section of Duplessis’ poem there are multiple explicit references toman’s voice and ability to define women,“he held the meanings up” (DuPlessis, 1980: 35),fixing them as objects in patriarchal discourses “showing which/ is object, which subject,/ the discourse/ faceting her.” (Ibid.), whilst the women, the victims of discursive as well as sexual
violence remain “crosst tongue” (Ibid.) and oppressed into their definitions
“Her he can and as he can/ he ken and names the/ knowing;/ breaks her/ in/ to being ridden,/ over the half spoken,/over the forgotten.” (Ibid.) In this li
ne in particular we can account for the fragmented and broken language of the poem, the ‘half spoken’ which can be seen to refer to Medusa’s perspective of her story which has been ‘forgotten’ by mythology.
DuPlessis also uses language and references consistent with mutilation, such as the theft of the three Graeae’s eye, the reference to Philomela who has her tongue removed by Tereus. Mutilation is a theme that has been used by many women to explain the oppression of their voices, Joplin states: “Our muteness is our mutilation, not a natural loss, but a cultural one” (Joplin in Higgins and Silver, 2013: 39).
Joplin likens women’s mutilation of voice, into silence, to the manx cat (a species without a tail) observed by Virginia Woolf:
“The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed, by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence, the emotional light for me. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different.” (Woolf, 2000: 13)
The absence of the tail of Woolf’s Manx cat is like the absence of the tale of women. The tail/tale is conspicuous in its absence and leads the reader to question the universe that has been created to omit the female voice. DuPlessis’ poem essentially plays out Medusa’s battle to regain her ability to speak and to recover her mutilated ‘tale’ as she battles for her creative power. Stanford, on the other hand, rather than engaging with the historical aspect of the silencing of women, focusses on the image of Medusa as a mythical monster that has since been maintained and supported by other largely misogynist readings of the Medusa myth in order to maintain the silence of women. Freud, for example, created a theory based on the Medusa myth that relies on his earlier theories of castration. In his theory, Medusa’s head represents at once the castrated female genitals and the dangers of female sexuality: “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact. (…) Since the Greeks were in the main strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should find among them a representation of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated” (Freud, 1963: 202-203)
For Freud, then, Medusa is a monster, representing man’s fear of the castrated genitals of the mother and of becoming castrated himself. Stigmatising Medusa as a monster of castrated genitals or of snake-hair and petrifying gaze – devalues her voice. In subverting this view,
Stanford gives Medusa’s voice worth. She does this by deflecting the monstrosity that was traditionally hers onto the god that raped her and his offspring that are growing inside of her: “his monster seed beneath my heart” (Stanford, 2001: 115). Stanford’s reversal of the monster identification is completed by language consistent with human emotion and human reactions to describe Medusa’s perspective, such as “anger”, “hate”, “alone”, “thoughts”, “pain”, “blood” and “heart”.
In rendering the monster human, Stanford is giving her the voice that was ignored or feared in the monster, allowing the victim her opportunity to give her testimony to the crime committed and express her trauma through language. The ability to express oneself through language and the triumph of the female creative voice is key also to understanding DuPlessis’ Medusa.
In the final two sections of her poem, DuPlessis demonstrates the triumph of the female creative voice, as the Medusa head comes to signify something other than the monster of mythology and Freudian psychology: female creativity. In order to unite the Medusa myth with creative power, DuPlessis resurrects the romantic symbols of rocks, stones and nature as representative of poetry and creativity: “O voice seed./ Listen root./ Spring sprout./ Head web.// From the eye jet/ from the tooth debt/ rock and reck/ rock and reckon” DuPlessis, 1980: 41). In these two stanzas we can see the reappearance of the female voice and of the gaze. Whereas before it was the male gaze fixing the female into her objectification, now it is the female eye that ‘jets’ and the female voice that ‘seeds’.
Many feminist scholars have claimed that it was the female gaze that posed the greatest threat of the Medusa myth and that the underlying meaning of the theories of castration complex that have evolved around the myth, were in fact the dangers of the female gaze (to the patriarchy). Hazel Barnes stated that,
similarly to Sartre’s theory in Being and Nothingness,“It was not the
horror of the object looked at which destroyed the victim but the fact that his eyes met those of Medusa looking at him” (Barnes, 1974: 13). Thus, the female gaze holds a power, but not amystical one. Simply put, the female gaze is the greatest threat to the dominating male gaze.
The female gaze in DuPlessis’ poem triumphs over the male gaze,
and the female voice is free to express itself “in sight, my netted reach/ in voice, my knotted speech” (DuPlessis, 1980: 42)
As opposed to DuPlessis ’ empowerment and revitalisation of the female gaze, the gaze of Stanford’s Medusa loses its vitality and freshness as her erotic power is crushed by the sexual assault. “Whatever I looked at became wasteland” (Stanford, 2001: 114), “my furious glance
Sartre theorised that when we are looked at we are frozen into the role of an object, objectified by our function as defined by the subject of the gaze. As though being turned to stone by that gaze. (apud.Sartre, 1956) destroyed all live things there” (Ibid.: 115). With a semantic field consistent with death, Stanford portrays a woman who has been emotionally mutilated as well as physically attacked.
Stanford emphasises Medusa’s victimisation and lack of control over her own destiny “twisted by fury that I did not choose” (Ibid.). The language of the poem is oppressive, as is her own gaze: “The prisoner of myself” (Ibid.). This language, relatively plain, using logical sentences, structured like the language of man, is restrictive and does not allow her the freedom that DuPlessis’ Medusa finds in her reappropriation of the power of creativity. Stanford’s Medusa remains the victim of male oppression, as is revealed in the final stanza where the cycle of violence against women continues with her pregnancy “And now the start,/ the rude circling blood-tide not my own/ that squirms and writhes, steals from me bone by bone”(Ibid.). In the final lines of the poem it becomes clear that Stanford’s protagonist has not escaped the objectification of the male gaze, but that she remains oppressed “prisoned withinmy prison, left alone,/ despised, uncalled for, turning my blood to stone.” (Ibid.)
This imprisonment inside the androcentric narrative, objectified by the male gaze, is the complete opposite of Hélène Cixous’ Medusa who uses language and creativity to escape the constraints of literary tradition that silence women.
“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. She’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” (Cixous, 1976:885) Used by Cixous to theorise the creation of a unique écriture féminine, the stigmatised and oppressed Medusa woman is neither a threat to humanity, nor an ugly monster, nor silent. She is beautiful and she is laughing. She has transcended the status conferred upon her by patriarchal mythic tradition and expresses herself in a unique language: La rire de la Méduse.
This is what emerges in DuPlessis’ unique and subversive language. The female gaze and feminine voice that is oppressed and imprisoned in Stanford’s poem is freed and embraced in DuPlessis’. Through an exploration of Medusa’s victimisation, Stanford and DuPlessis have broken Medusa free from her status as a snake-haired monstrosity. Uncovering a long tradition patriarchal oppression, they have turned the popular myth on its head, transforming Medusa into an exemplification of the violence with which male literary tradition has objectified woman and silenced her voice. Prompting readers to take a second look at the way women have been portrayed in male-dominated narratives, DuPlessis and Stanford have unsilenced the voice that the rape (sexual and textual) had suppressed. Stanford unveils a world of oppression and of male forces victimising women, and DuPlessis has empowered the female voice, bringing back the female gaze, and ending optimistically with a celebration of female creativity. The rape of Medusa, that which has been used by myth and patriarchy to imprison Medusa, has been subverted and used by women revisionist writers to free Medusa.
Medusa is beautiful, and Medusa is laughing.”
https://www.un.org/en/observances/human-rights-day
Mary Beard on Medusa
What If We’ve Been Misunderstanding Monsters?, Cody Delistraty
The Rape of Medusa: Feminist Revision of Medusa in Stanford and DuPlessis
The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous
Medusa Must Die! The Virgin and the Defiled in Greco-Roman Medusa and Andromeda Myths, By Sharon Khalifa-Gueta
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,
by Camille Paglia
Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript,
by Andy Orchard
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/616487.Pride_and_Prodigies
Deviant Subjectivities: Monstrosity and Kinship in the Gothic Imagination, Evan Hayles Gledhill
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12296.The_Scarlet_Letter?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_19
Books by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/80992.Rachel_Blau_DuPlessis
Holding Our Own: The Selected Poetry of Ann Stanford, Ann Stanford, Maxine Scates (Introduction), David Trinidad (Editor)
Torch of Liberty 