The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology

Author(s): Jerome J. McGann

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter, 1972), pp. 3-25
Published by: Boston University
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The Beauty of theMedusa:

A Study inRomantic Literary Iconology
JEROME

J.McGANN

the introductory chapter of his famous study, The Romantic

Praz
"The Beauty of the Medusa,"
Mario
Agony,
lays the
learned and dem
foundations for the entire work that follows?a
onstrative complaint against the radically aberrant quality of much
Romantic art. Praz is a compelling critic of his subject, not because
are the same as Eliot's
his moral
(though they are), but
judgments
collect and compare the images, themes
because his methodology?to
and motifs which preoccupied Romantic minds?is both unimpeach
able and
The genius of his book is in its categories,
highly suggestive.
the chapter headings.
tend to avoid the
theorizers on things Romantic
Sympathetic
uncomfortable revelations of the Italian professor, who
constantly
records suicidal, sadistic, and otherwise perverted aspects of Roman
ticism. Even the most respected writers of the period do not escape
his severe and meticulous
scrutiny. Thus Praz's thesis poses certain
fundamental difficulties for most current estimates of the Romantic
Revival, which is now commonly regarded in a distinctly less critical
light. Since Praz's discussion of the Romantic Medusa
epitomizes
what he has to say about the movement as a whole, we shall take his
own
as the framework for the
present analysis.
initiating category
as a
we must
to
Given the Medusa
key Romantic
iconograph,
try
understand precisely how and why this should be.
The
easiest place to begin is with Praz himself, who opens his
discussion of Romanticism with passages from Shelley and Goethe
that illustrate his Medusan
theme. Romanticism
is the fascination
with the abominable:

IN

severed female head, this horrible,

was
to
glassy-eyed,
fascinating Medusa,
be the object of the dark loves of the Romantics
and the Decadents
throughout
the whole
of the century.1

This

The

fact of this statement is quite

true; the problem arises in the

Praz
contemptuous
wonderfully
judgments.
a
the issue
that
the
Medusa
is
complicates
universally
by implying
no means the case. Classical writers, for
This
is
of
horror.
symbol
by
were
in their
themselves divided
example,
opinions about her
most
the
that
horror
of her looks turned
petrifying powers,
holding
the viewer into stone, but some that her
trans
beauty caused the
rhetoric and all those

i. The

Romantic

Agony

(Meridian

Books:

New

York,

i960),

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pp.

26-27.

JEROME

J.McGANN

formation.2 As Ovid tells us through Perseus, Medusa was originally

her
a famous
beauty eagerly pursued by numbers of suitors. Indeed,
was the cause of her sad fate.3
beauty
has to be
Even the attitude of Romantic
artists to the Medusa
we
and
Swinburne
In
Goethe, Shelley, Pater,
carefully interpreted.
can see Praz's idea best illustrated: Pater finds "the fascination of
the Medusa
in the
ascribed to Leonardo,
corruption"
painting of
"the tempestuous loveliness of terror." Goethe also picks up
Shelley
as "a wonderful
this theme when he describes the Rondanini Medusa
work which, expressing the discord between death and life, between
over us as no
exerts an
inexplicable fascination
pain and pleasure,
other ambiguous figure does." 4Unlike Praz, however, none of these
in their fascination with this represen
writers saw anything wicked
tation of equivocal beauty. In a real sense, by preserving the double
were
the
aspect of the Medusa's
appearance,
they
keeping alive
In addition, although
the
ancient
of
equivocal mythology
figure.
Romantic artists were all aware that she was, in some sense, a focus
of evil,
that she was innocent of the horror
they generally agreed
she
and that their own fascination was with her betrayed
generated,
power and innocence. Finally, they all respected her power when it
was manifested;
in it they saw a
of cultural, sometimes
symbol
revolutionary,

change.

But if one might call the Medusas

of Shelley, Goethe, Pater, and
Swinburne "dark loves," other Medusas
of the period clearly will
not
for the title. One of the finest sections of The Earthly
qualify
as his black
Paradise finds William
Morris not pursuing Medusa
art's ideal, but treating her history to a subtle Romantic reinterpreta
our
tion that is entirely
Apollonian. Minerva herself, who initiated
and Medusa's
the
into
hair
famous
problems by turning
girl's
golden
a swarm of monsters, could not have been more
with the
pleased
Morris'
of
story.
morality
I
But if it is important to realize that theMedusa's
is a much
beauty
more
we should
than
Praz
has
complicated phenomenon
suggested,
also see that her various transformations in Romantic
and post
Romantic
literature make up a set of coherent and interrelated
notions about art and its function in the world.
cele
Shelley's justly
2. John
"The

that

iv. 539, fr. 1, 8), says

for example
(Frag. Hist.
Graec,
a beautiful
so astonished
was
courtesan
whose
loveliness
Gorgon
saw her that
to be turned to stone."
who
they seemed
of Antioch,

everyone
iv and v.
Books
3. See Ovid, Metamorphoses,
4. Italienische
Reise, Pt. n, April
1788. Quoted

in Praz,

p. 46.

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THE

OF THE

BEAUTY

MEDUSA

in the
of Leonardo
da Vinci
brated fragment "On the Medusa
5 is
in an
the best
Florentine Gallery"
of
point
departure
probably
sort.
of
this
investigation
I
on the
It lieth,
sky,
gazing
midnight
the cloudy
Upon
mountain-peak
supine;
far lands are seen tremblingly;
Below,
are divine.
Its horror and its
beauty

its lips and eyelids seems to lie

Upon
Loveliness
like a shadow, from which
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The
agonies of anguish and of death.

shine,

II
Yet

it is less the horror

than the grace

turns the
gazer's spirit into stone,
the lineaments of that dead face

Which
Whereon
Are

be grown
graven, till the characters
can trace;
itself, and thought no more
'Tis the melodious
hue of beauty thrown

Into

Athwart
Which

the darkness

humanize

and the glare of pain,

and harmonize
the strain.

Ill
And

from

its head

as from one

body grow,
As grass out of a watery
rock,
are
Hairs which
vipers, and they curl and flow
And
their long
in each other lock,
tangles
And with
involutions
show
unending
as itwere
to mock
radiance,
and the death within,
and saw
a
solid air with many
jaw.
ragged

Their

The
The

mailed

torture

IV
from a stone beside, a
eft
poisonous
eyes;
Peeps
idly into those Gorgonian

And,

in the air a
ghastly bat, bereft
sense, has flitted with a mad
surprise
Out of the cave this hideous
had cleft,
light
And he comes
like a moth that hies
hastening
After a taper; and the
midnight
sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

Whilst
Of

V
'Tis the tempestuous
loveliness of terror;
a brazen
For from the serpents
gleams
glare
Kindled
error,
by that inextricable
a
Which
makes
thrilling vapour of the air
5. The
Hutchinson

Poetical

Complete
(London:

Oxford

Works
Univ.

of Percy
Press,

Bysshe

1956), pp.

Shelley,

582-83.

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ed. Thomas

JEROME

J.McGANN

a
and
mirror
ever-shifting
all the beauty and the terror there?
A woman's
with serpent-locks,
countenance,
in death on Heaven
from those wet rocks.
Gazing
Become
Of

to be
seminal fragment explains, in a somewhat
enigmatic way
fascination with the
sure, one important reason for the Romantic
Medusa. Praz might have found the lines somewhat less
objectionable
had he been aware of the
poem's additional stanza, unpublished
until recently:6
This

It is a woman's

countenance

divine

With

there
everlasting beauty breathing
Which
from a stormy mountain's
peak, supine
Gazes
into the
night's trembling air.
It is a trunkless head, and on its feature
Death
has met life, but there is life in death,
The
The

is frozen?but

blood

Seems

Nature

unconquered
to the last?without

struggling
of an uncreated

fragment

a breath

creature.

The entire fragment was composed in the autumn of 1819, justwhen

was also written.
the "Ode to theWest Wind"
Fundamentally both
poems treat "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" and the intimate
connection in nature of death and life. The West Wind
of the ode
the wind is a
brings death and the chill of winter. Like theMedusa,

terrifying apparition, implicitly striking fear into the lazy palaces of

a summer life.When we read how
wind to a
Shelley compares his
Maenad we can hardly avoid the recollection of theMedusa's
similar
of "tempestuous loveliness":
quality
On

the blue

there are spread

of thine aery

surface

surge,

Like thebrighthair uplifted fromthehead

Of

some

Of

the horizon

The

even
fierce Maenad,
to the zenith's

locks of the
approaching

from the dim verge

height,
storm.

(18-23)

In one sense, then, both of these poems are about the terrible vigor
7which can
life out of death, spring
of "unconquered Nature,"
bring
nor the ode is
out of winter. But neither theMedusa
merely
fragment
a
natural
Both
of
processes.
poems are terrible,
symbolic transcription
which
ode is "the trumpet of a prophecy"
threatening. The
uttered on a grand scale in Prometheus Unbound:
the death
Shelley
12 (1961),
10.
and the Visual Arts," KSMB,
Rogers,
"Shelley
to
Of
refers
the
Medusa's
character.
But
course,
7.
Shelley's
phrase
directly
or natural
he believed
human
that all transcendent
had their analogues,
qualities
in the world
of seasonal flux.
metaphors,
6. Neville

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THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

of tyranny and the rebirth of freedom. In the autumn of 1819 his

were
very much occupied with English political tyranny.
thoughts
The Peterloo Massacre
had triggered a series of
fiery political
to both the ode and theMedusa
whose
relation
prophecies
fragment
is highlighted by the
concluding couplet of his "Sonnet: England in
1819," composed about the same time. For twelve lines the sonnet
lists a series of horrible
are
images of political repression, which
a
called
from
which
Phantom
ultimately
may /
"graves,
glorious
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day."
on theMedusa's head is, like the ode, an
Shelley's fragment
allegory
about the prophetic office of the poet and the
humanizing power of
to other
poetry. The
fragment's evident similarities
poems with
these themes suggest this, of course, but the
the Medusa
in
symbols
are
so rare
somewhat
the
because
central
poem
enigmatic
image is
in
The
to
which
he
attached
this
classical
Shelley.
significance
myth
becomes more clear when we recall certain facts about Medusa's
a beautiful maiden, she was
in
history. Originally
raped by Neptune
the
of
Minerva.
That
out
of
culture
and
temple
goddess
society,
famous golden hair into a nest of
raged, transformed Medusa's
serpents and decreed that anyone looking on her would be turned
to stone. Medusa was then banished to an
ambiguous place in the
where
went
to
later
en
Perseus
her
with the
west,
slay
help and
of
Minerva
Perseus
couragement
especially.
gained immortality from
and the other
Minerva
grateful gods for killing the Medusa while
shewas
sleeping.
a poet inclined to
a radical
Now,
clearly, for
way,
interpret, in
certain traditional
like
the
fall
of
the
and
the
myths
angels
binding
of Prometheus, this
story of Medusa was likely to ignite a series of
unusual reactions.
would not have been able to see her as
Shelley
a victim of the
but
anything
tyranny and cowardice of established
Moreover?and
the
power.
again
parallel with the Promethus myth
is evident?certain received facts in the
myth of Medusa
suggest her
association with
and
the
Some
traditions
poetry
earthly paradise.
assert thatwhen shewas cursed
Minerva she became the
by
guardian
of the golden
the fabulous western islands
apples of the Hesperides,
of the
earthly paradise. All the legends agree, moreover, that at her
death the
winged horse Pegasus, traditional symbol of poetic inspira
tion and energy, sprang forth from her
body.
In the
seventeenth-century Flemish painting which inspired Shelley
and which he (like many others)
mistakenly thought the work of
the head of the Medusa
is inverted and hence the mass
Leonardo,
of writhing snakes is in the
foreground. The eyes, half-closed, gaze
the
and
head
is
a mist in which can be
surrounded
upwards,
by

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JEROME

J.McGANN

more
seen a
ambiguous and
variety of bats, mice, and other
faintly
sinister creatures. Several other bats and toads are clearly delineated,
at the
head from the ground or the air. Out of the
looking
Gorgon
a whitish cloud of breath, the
mouth
issues
"thrilling
half-open
to
referred
vapour"
by Shelley.
Before we
in terms of the
mythological
interpret these details
we should look
own inter
at some of
background,
again
Shelley's
as the second
in the poem. This unusual Medusa,
assertions
pretative
stanza tells us, is not murderous but
humanizing. The fascination she
arouses has been translated into a
sympathetic process because she
is the symbol of victimization, of a beauty cursed through no fault of
or the poem.
her own anywhere evident in the
the
myth,
painting,
she
forever
the
Moreover,
upon
impresses
sympathetic observer
the very essence and source of her
dazzling beauty: her image is
on the
is
turned to
which
sculptured
gazer's soul,
receptive stone; or,
the
her
musical
the
hues of
of
alternatively,
melody
painted
beauty,
her
rendered
both
become
the
of
likeness,
part
exquisitely
gazer's
now humanized and harmonized
stanza asserts, in other
life. The
words, the transference of the creative power of the imagination
to the
from theMedusa
sympathizing gazer.
source of
The
of
is her most
the
Medusa
"grace"
important
astonishment. But her "horror" is also important, and not only
because it emphasizes her victimization. The
second time Medusa's
are evoked is in stanza four, where
petrifying energies
Shelley
suggests the imminent destruction of a "ghastly bat" and a "poisonous
eft." Such creatures appear elsewhere in
as
Shelley's poetry
symbols
of corrupted forms of civilization. This aspect of the Medusan
gaze
is not a grace or
as the
beauty but death and destruction,
image of
the moth and the taper reminds us.8 In fact, if her
gaze is in one
sense beneficent, a
it
also
represents the complementary
"preserver,"
destructive aspect of all creative energy. Such a
in the
duality
was
a fundamental
of
imagination's function
part
always
Shelley's
thought in both politics and art, and he must have been pleased to
find that classical authorities sanctioned a similar view of theMedusa.
tells us that she had two blood systems and that the
Apollodorus
some of each after her death. The one
physician Asclepius collected
he used to revive the dead, the other to
destroy his enemies. What
theMedusa does, then, at least in its destructive
aspect, is to represent
the horror which has been laid upon man and his world as a curse.
Prometheus will not curse the tyrant who has
put him in chains; to

was
8.
Shelley
probably
large and gruesome moth

inspired
hovering

to this

image by the painting,

in the mist above Medusa.

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which

shows

THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

to the
to perpetuate the initial curse denounced
does iswhat Prometheus does:
the Medusa
world
What
by Jupiter.
an
which is the reflex of the
of
horror
and
present
suffering
image
cursed heart which has caused that suffering. Swinburne will tell us
later that she is another divinity grown diabolic in ages that would
a
not accept her as divine. To
corruption has invaded the
Shelley,
his poem turns her death
of the Medusa's
but
form;
original
beauty
event
into an
and
apocalyptic
distinguishing the forces of light
a
at
once
is
darkness. Her
heaven
triumphant
impassive gaze upon
rebuke of the powers of the air, an image of the
of
undying vitality
her
and
and
defiant
Nature,"
"unconquered
definitively petrifying
gesture: the gods of death will not survive this stony glance.
Thus the "mailed radiance" and "brazen glare" of the serpents,
forces alike "Of all the
and the terror there," are meant to
beauty
tone
we see
the
of
defiance
which
full
suggest
again in theMedusa's
our
to
and
calls
which
attention
in
the
addi
face,
Shelley explicitly
tional fragment. Further, the swarm of snakes as well as theMedusa's
whole
attitude derive their power (are "kindled")
from
threatening
an "inextricable error."Whatever
else Shelley may have had inmind,9
it seems clear
enough that this phrase refers to Medusa's
original
"sin," punished so harshly by Minerva
(a powerful if complicated
a fatal
trope, the words
suggest
entrapment in snaky coils). All
these details
to the central
subordinates
in
Shelley properly
image
the painting: the weird
which
issues from the
"thrilling vapour"
Medusa's beautiful dead mouth.
This too is a powerful if
complex image, for Shelley clearly wishes
to suggest both the soul
at death and the con
escaping the body
densed vapour of breath in cold air.
sets the head
on
high up
(Shelley
a mountain and
refers to its "frozen" blood.) The
specifically
strange
vapour truly mirrors the entire scene since it captures at once a
whole set of
ambiguities related to cold and warmth, death and life.
The vapour is a central
image because it suggests that "Death has met
but
there
is
life
in
death."
life,
do so would

be

Anne
out to me that
Pippin Burnett has pointed
Shelley's descrip
tion of the Medusa
seems a deliberate recollection of a famous
passage in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, where Prometheus
expresses his sympathy for another snaky figure, Typhon, who was
confined beneath a mountain after
being struck with the thunder
bolts of Zeus.
to breathe out defiance and
continued
Typhon
resistance.

Shelley's description of the head and the vapour it is

exhaling particularly recalls lines 372-74. It might also be remarked
9. Neville

Rogers,

op. cit., p.

16, discusses

the

Virgilian

echo

in the

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phrase.

10

JEROME

J.McGANN

an
of Shelley's vapour that he is
analogue for
deliberately making it
us in the
the mirror of Perseus, thus
Athena's
placing
position of
champion.
In any case, this breath is the
in
equivalent of the "Phantom"
sonnet
in
the
the
tradi
Shelley's political
Pegasus
(quoted above),
some
tional legend, the new life
prophesied in the ode. It represents
an
was
to
in
force
the
which
able
Perseus
Medusa,
energy
undying
count on later to
of
win
numbers
his enemies and
his love-ideal,
slay
Andromeda. Minerva aswell
this
deathless
Medusan
force
recognized
and sought to
for
the
it
her
herself:
of
power
appropriate
aegis
on her famous shield, is the Medusa's
head. Thus,
represented
to suggest that even in death the Medusa
turns
aims
poem
Shelley's
or fear.
to stone?attracts or
with
Medusa
slays
Shelley's
beauty
seeks to terrorize whatever in the observer is still committed to evil
and to invigorate in him
that strives for life.
everything
In either case the aim is sensational,
To say
literally, "thrilling."
this is not to suggest a subordination of didactic purposes to mere
nervous titillation.
a
a severe moral
poet with
Shelley is always
an
The
is
that
like
number
of writers
he,
program.
point
increasing
to
come
since the
had
century,
mid-eighteenth
glimpse the truth
inherent in the aggressive maxim of Antonin Artaud: "In our present
must
state of
degeneration, it is through the skin that metaphysics
not refine
be made to re-enter the mind." 10
does
of
course,
Shelley,
this method the way Artaud, or many other artists influenced by
surrealist ideas, have done. A member of the earlier movement which
did much to generate surrealism, the Romantic Shelley yet anticipates
Artaud's position, as Mario Praz clearly recognizes when he de
nounces at
and days of Romantic
anarchism,
length the works
anti-rationalism.

and

sensuality,

and Swinburne, for example, who, though both professed

a
Apollonians, become through Praz's glasses
pair of sybaritic threats
to
order. Both writers were marked with
good
Shelley's influence,
so we should not be
to find them
after him to
surprised
trailing
Florence and theUffizi Medusa.
Pater

II
is dispersed in various
The English inheritance of Shelley's Medusa
directions. The prophetic power of fear and horror is Swinburne's
as we shall see in a moment, but Pater follows
special province,
to the Uifizi Medusa
and
for purposes more
equivocal
Shelley
io. "The
and

Theatre

Its Double

(New

of Cruelty
(First Manifesto),"
York: Grove
Press, Evergreen

in

7 of The
chapter
Books,
1958).

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Theatre

THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

11

MEDUSA

none of the
searching. Pater's description of the painting has
definitiveness we find in the
the
latter is a
Shelley passage, though
an
most
Pater's
translation
and
of
the
fragment
example
exquisitely
finished prose. Yet we see Pater's essential
point very clearly. He
a
praises the picture for uniting, in series of tense collisions, various
of
and
transience.
permanence
symbols
The

alone cuts to its centre;

subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo
he alone realises it as the head of a
its powers
corpse, exercising
through all the
of death. What
circumstances
be called
the fascination
of
may
corruption
in every touch its
finished
About
the
lines
penetrates
exquisitely
beauty.
dainty
of the cheek the bat flits unheeded.
The
delicate
snakes seem
literally strangling
each other in terrified
to escape from the Medusa
brain. The
hue which
struggle
violent death
it is in the features:
features singularly massive
always brings with
as we
and
catch them inverted,
in a dexterous
grand,
fore-shortening,
sloping
almost
down upon us, crown
like a great calm stone
foremost,
upwards,
sliding
the wave
of serpents breaks.
against which
left to the beautiful verses of
Shelley."xl

But

it is a
subject

that may

well

be

a
once the basic
Shelley's poem is, in way, enigmatic;
symbol system
one
is clearly
has no
the
apprehended, however,
difficulty putting
to
a criticism will not exhaust
such
Needless
pieces together.
say,
the poem's beauties; it
us to
more
merely allows
respond
precisely
to their
resonances.
on the
This
passage from The Renaissance,
large
other hand, ismuch more
elusive than the Shelley poem.
radically
What
from
is its lack of bold
distinguishes Pater's Medusa
Shelley's
ness. Pater's
like his mind, is much more sensitive and
writing,
nuanced than Shelley's poetry and intellectual ideals. Pater's
response
to the
painting is exceedingly self-conscious, whereas Shelley seizes
it and forces it to express what it stirsmost
deeply in himself. Their
Medusas
a contem
reflect the difference between an
aggressive and
a
a
between
Romantic who believed that
was
plative mind,
struggle
engaged to purge the world of its evils, and one who saw the same
as its own end.
struggle
is another attempt to
Shelley's Medusa
symbolize that central
to
experience brought
perfection in Prometheus Unbound. Equally
central to his own
thought, Pater's translation of the Uffizi painting
is an alternative
rendering of that key Paterian experience, La
Gioconda.
In the Medusa Pater sees that "fascination of
corruption
...
in every touch [of] its
exquisitely finished beauty," while of
La Gioconda
he can say: "like the
vampire, she has been dead many
times, and learned the secrets of the grave" (125). These women
emanate an odor of death and
alike. But ifneither theMedusa
nobility
ii. The

Renaissance

to this volume

(London:
Macmillan,
and appear in the text, unless

1900), p. 106. All Pater

otherwise
indicated.

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citations

are

12

JEROME

J.McGANN

nor La Gioconda

possesses the intellectual aggressiveness of Shelley's

are not mere appear
in
Pater
key symbols?if
corruption and death
ances, but realities as strong as beauty and life?his images do not
asserts of them.
reflect the sort of moral enervation Praz
constantly
to the
behind
of
both
these
is
commitment
Pater's
Lying
images
intense life, to the sort of
it is so
because
experience which, precisely
own end.
transient and
its
remains
corruptible,
La Gioconda,
for
example, illustrates the communion of ultimate
and
transience
which Pater calls for in his famous
permanence
to The Renaissance.
"Conclusion"
Leonardo's
ancient lady sits "at
the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their
purest energy" (236), as Pater tells us in his interpretative remarks
on the
painting.
Hers

is the head

are
eyelids
have etched
make

are come,"
all "the ends of the world
and the
upon which
. . .All
a little
the thoughts
of the world
and
weary.
experience
and moulded
to refine and
there, in that which
they have of power

the outward
form,
expressive
the reverie of the middle
age with

of Greece,
the lust of Rome,
its spiritual ambition
and imaginative
loves,
the return of the
the sins of the Borgias.
She
is older
than the
Pagan world,
a
to
she sits. . . .The
rocks among which
life, sweeping
fancy of
perpetual
ten thousand
con
is an old one; and modern
gether
thought has
experiences,
as
the idea of
ceived
upon by, and summing up in itself, all
humanity
wrought
modes
of thought and life. Certainly
stand as the embodiment
Lady Lisa might
of the old

fancy,

the symbol

the animalism

of the modern

idea.

(125-26)

nexus of eternal death and

sums
unending life, La Gioconda
in
as
her
the
man's
well
entire
of
world
up
enigmatic posture
history
as the full range of modern
consciousness. Thus
(that is, Paterian)
not
she
the
of
world
eternal
process, but the
symbolizes
only
at
Paterian mood which both confronts that
spectacle and subsists

The

its heart.

The

Medusa
It
is Pater's anticipatory symbol of La Gioconda.
nexus
two
that
is
moment.
which
the
intense
The
essential
represents
features are the head and the snakes, and in Pater's final,
striking
to each other we see the
between
portrait of their relation
struggle
the dark, animal, "Chthonic"
forces12 (the snakes) and the cool,
smooth stone of the Apollonian
head. The snakes burst
that
against
12. Pater

this favorite

of his, in Hellenic
terms, in the
opposition
or
note of the medieval
church
melancholy
What
should we
have
thought of
by Greek
anticipated
polytheism!
. . .The Dorian
at the very centre of Greek
the vertiginous
prophetess
religion?
. . ,
of
to the sad Christian
is the
divinities,
worship
always opposed
Apollo.
Greek
itself.
sublimes
element, by force and spring of which
aspiring
religion
...
It was
to be able to transform
the privilege
of Greek
itself into
religion
an artistic ideal"
(203-04).
following
but was

expressed

way:

"Scarcely

a wild

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THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

13

of intellectual control like waves on a rocky coast, an image

is
meant to suggest
perduring struggle. This basic paradox
clearly
if the fascination of corruption
in a number of ways:
repeated
permeates the refined features of the face, the bat?another figure of
to
noticeable effect on "the dainty
produce any
"corruption"?fails
broken in upon
lines of the cheek." Apollonian
prerogatives, though
do not
maintain
their
place, though they
energies, yet
by Dionysiac
subdue the action of those anarchic forces. So, while "the hue which
violent death always brings with it" pervades the Medusa's
features,
massive and grand." The final image presents
they remain "singularly
these tensions, but its complex force will
the
enduring perfection of
be missed ifwe fail to appreciate the central detail in the picture:
"The delicate snakes seem literally strangling each other to escape
from the Medusa brain." The sentence is a brilliant reassignment of
snakes mix
and terror while the calm,
symbolic values: the
delicacy
smooth head is now also seen as the receptacle of an animal "brain."
is a god of death as well as Dionysius. These
snakes, like all
Apollo
as their
to
their
energic life, aspire
peculiar Apollonian
perfection,
a
but
it
in
frantic
seek
from
the
cool
delicacy shows,
they
flight
forms which first generated their rebellious life. That the Medusa's
head has a chthonic brain reminds us of her wild origins. For Pater,
this painting asserts the exercise of power "through all the circum
stances of death." Such power is neither
nor
Apollonian
Dionysian,
are
the
when
but
deathless energy released
held in
they
perfect
equipoise.
are nega
The eft, the toad, heaven, and all that
they imply?these
tive forces which Shelley's Medusa
threatens with extinction. In
can be conceived absent
Pater's view, nothing in the same
painting
without
the world's
All
forces are creative in
destroying
reality.
sensa
that third,
Pater's Medusa.
higher energy: the
They produce
tional recognition in the observer of the endurance of the
colliding
and
in one's self and in the world. But
refining passions
Shelley's
is based upon a
Medusa
struggle which destroys something in order
to preserve what is vital. The balance
at is destruction
Shelley aims
on
and
Pater
the
other
hand, that life exhibits
suggests,
preservation.
no real entropy, that all is conserved. The ancient
gods go under
women
idea that
prove the "modern"
ground. Pater's Medusan
nothing is really destroyed, that humanity preserves its entire past
in one form or another. His Medusa
symbolizes not only the per
a
of
but
its
inevitable
life,
upsurge
petual
possession of perfect form.
Both of these Medusas
assertion that her attrac
support Goethe's
tion lies in the radical
expression of certain paradoxes in life and art.
Pater's Medusa represents a tense doubleness even
though its energies
symbol

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14

JEROME

J.McGANN

one toward what

as a wholly
constantly direct
Shelley would regard
In this respect Swinburne
is Pater's Shelleyan
preservative goal.
how to hate, insists upon the
complement, for Swinburne knows
truth and vitality of real defiance and destruction.
But
woman's,
sketched
words;

a
there is more
head
than in these:
tragic attraction
divine
and subtle care;
sketched
and re
studied, with
in
and cruel beyond
and age, beautiful
desire
beyond
youth
always
and
fairer than heaven
and more
terrible than hell; pale with
pride

in one

three

separate
times

a silent
with
and man burns, white
and
anger against God
wrong-doing;
a head-dress
In one
her clear features.
she wears
of
repressed,
drawing
through
out of the artist's mind
eastern fashion rather than western,
but in effect made
in the likeness of
scales as of a chrysalid
serpent,
only; plaited
closely-welded
In some
in the likeness of a sea-shell.
raised and waved
and rounded
inexplicable

weary

seem to
all her ornaments
them
of her fatal nature, to bear upon
way
partake
her brand of
of
fresh from hell; and this through no vulgar machinery
beauty
no
or otherwise
bracelets
bestial
emblem:
the
and
symbolism,
rings
serpentine
are innocent
her flesh they
but in touching
in shape and workmanship;
enough
Broad
bracelets
have become
infected with
and malignant
deadly
meaning.
divide
of her firm and
the
of her arms; over the nakedness
shapely
splendour
a band
as of metal. Her
the neck, there is passed
luminous
breasts,
just below
are full of
lust after gold and blood;
her hair, close
and passionless
eyes
proud
seems
to shudder
into snakes. Her
in sunder
and divide
and curled,
ready
and arms, is
and hard to the eye as her bosom
throat, full and fresh, round
or
erect and stately, the head set firm on itwithout
of the chin;
lift
any droop
her mouth

woman's.

crueller

She

than a tiger's,
Venus

is the deadlier

colder

than

a snake's,

and beautiful

beyond

incarnate;

Bed
7T0\\17fl V OeOKTLKOVK CLVWVVflOS
for upon earth also many names might be found for her: Lamia
re-transformed,
not
a fuller
of all feminine
attributes
but divested
invested now with
beauty,
to
loveless and unassailable
Lamia
native to the snake?a
by the sophist, readier
drain life out of her lover than to fade for his sake at his side.18

know that Pater studied Swinburne's "Notes on the Designs of

We
the Old Masters at Florence" when he was writing The Renaissance
owes to this passage.
and we can surmise how much the La Gioconda
Pater removed the peculiarly Swinburnian quality of savagery and
defiance, however, which is one reason why the Swinburne portrait
is so important, aswe shall see.
besides the
Yet Swinburne's
lady evokes other ophidian images
names
be found
as
earth
also
he
Medusa,
many
might
says ("for upon
for her"). Thus, to consider her in a context so specifically Medusan
limits of the analysis. Yet
may seem an arbitrary extension of the
she cannot be omitted, if only because she illustrates one of Praz's
can
main ideas: that a specific image (for example, the Medusa)
set of further analogues and relations (snake
a
generate
complex
all
ladies as a dominant form of La Belle Dame Sans Merci). Nearly
13. Essays

and Studies

(London:

Chatto

andWindus,

1911), pp.

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319-20.

THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

15

in one way or another: the Venus

of Swinburne's ladies are Medusan
lovers "sleeping with her
for example, whose
of "Laus Veneris"
across her hair."
/
sudden
their
Heard
serpents hiss
eyes,
lips upon
element in all such portraits which aston
It is, in fact, the Medusan
ishes us (like Tannhaiiser) with "all the beauty and the terror there."
influenced
Indeed, it is not unlikely that Shelley's Medusa
specifically
Swinburne's portrait of Venus, and that both were again recalled
when he composed the portrait in his prose "Notes." The analogues,
in

any

case,

are

quite

clear.

himself underlines the importance of the Medusan

in his portrait
the other key
by explicitly recalling
iconography
snake ladies. His "deadlier Venus
incarnate"
tradition of Romantic
her origins back through a host of Romantic
traced
have
might
as
lamias, undines, and melusines
except that such figures were,
Swinburne reminds us, universally sympathetic toman in the Roman
tic tradition up to Swinburne's time. But if thiswoman is a lamia, she
transformed under the less benevolent influence
has been
radically
of the Romantic Medusa.
Indeed, here is Shelley's destroyer resurrected with a vengeance.
"Not gratitude, not delight, not sympathy, is the first sense excited
in one" by such a vision; "fear, rather, oppressive reverence, and
intolerable adoration." This frightfulMedusan
presence is
well-nigh
not
in
that
diabolic
would
another Venus "grown
ages
accept her as
no
benevolent and sympathetic Christian deity or
divine." She is
a
come to exorcise theworld of its
Pieta, but
pale Chris
rough beast
cruel maxim is
in
Artaud's
tian phantoms.
fully expressed
England
for the first time by Swinburne, the true English inheritor of the
father of all such Romantic ideas, de Sade.
But itwould be wrong to regard Swinburne's position as nihilistic
or anarchic, at least ifwe mean
terms.
something negative by those
is a didactic poet, even in the notorious
Like Shelley, Swinburne
Poems and Ballads, First Series. His Medusan women
rise up to
the morals of society; their
and
radical
cruelty
challenge
disrespect
us with fear. His
assures us that
entertain
portraiture
petrify
they
or indifference for all human and divine
but
contempt
nothing
values: even that most sacred of all western civilized values, love, is
Let de la Motte
dismissed by this
Medusa.
extraordinary
casually
and Keats's Lamia meekly offer their devotion to
Undine
Fouque's
cruel and unworthy lovers, and in the end fade away when their
men abandon their faith and lose their nerve. Swinburne's
despicable
scorns the weakness
that will submit to such moral
Medusa
hypoc
as
her
"lust
after
risy. Similarly,
gold and blood" is
severely "proud
and passionless" as her love is deadly. Just as she
acquires lovers in
Swinburne

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16

JEROME

J.McGANN

order to expose the

the love contract, so she exercises
degeneracy of
a cruel
those other social
and
lusts?money getting
exploitation?with
most
candour
the
Sadean
Thus
of
hero.
entirely worthy
apocalyptic
or
or
she annihilates all possible
gratitude
delight
sympathy, those
sanction the continuance of every sort of
social emotions which

human and divine wickedness.

Instead she produces, first, fear, a natural enough response

given
the fundamental character of her refusals. She will serve none of
the gods, not one. But if one's own moral character can survive this
Swinburne suggests a further insight and
radically consuming fire,
reverence.
her
the
response:
Partly, this acknowledges
honesty of
not sanction
their
the
the
of
Medusa
will
negations,
purity
logic:
are
the world's corruptions even though she may know that
they
nature
that
will
heart
that
her.
the
loves
ineradicable,
always betray
But to respect those refusals is to respect the
energies which made
them possible. At this
the reverence
point
begins to shade into "well
waste the entire
nigh intolerable adoration," for the Medusa
lays
a
natural and civilized world. She demands
total contemptus mundi
and insists that we

our faith in that unknown

our own
god,
buried lives.
on this demand
us
Nor will she
compromise
by encouraging
us in a
toward it,
of
her,
position
dependency upon
thereby placing
a
can
position that
only generate cycles of exploitation. Our respect
is for her solitary splendour, her absolute self-possession.
Worship
intolerable because
it demands that we never
of her is well-nigh
swerve in our faith,
though the goal of that faith is singularly fearful
and

barren.

We

can

place

only

trust

to

ourselves,

even

in our

adoration

to remain
and reverence. To worship
such a woman,
unceasingly
faithful to her despite her absence and indifference, is the
only way
to make ourselves
we
worthy of what she represents. In the end
a
must become what she is?noble,
stone
impassive, cold,
image self
own fearful
her
and
self-created
her lonely
petrified by
energies
by
faith in the hidden human
god.
one of the aspects which
Pater and Swinburne each
emphasize
sees in the Florentine Medusa. Moreover,
Shelley
they each drive the
extreme. We
to a
may not realize?
Shelleyan position
clarifying
not
have
how
much
realized?just
Shelley may
preserving energy
was
generated by his tempestuous Medusa. Pater does, just as Swin
burne calls back the deep truths in
Shelley's passion for destruction
case because out
and death. Swinburne's is a
particularly interesting
of his attachment to the Medusa's
horror comes,
fatally it would
which
seem, the very real Medusan
Shelley announced.
beauty
The natural extension of Swinburne's attitudes occurs not in
Eng

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THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

17

a Medusan
d'Annunzio
land but in Italy, where Gabriele
develops
ideal of sensuous and aesthetic intoxication. The confessed apostle
inherits the two paradoxical
of Swinburne's position, d'Annunzio
bases of the Englishman's poetic credo: an extreme care for matters
of poetic craft, and an emphatic commitment to irrational, or per
haps supra-rational, goals. On these grounds Praz will pronounce
him
damned?as both a Decadent
and a Barbarian.14
doubly
an extreme
for
Swinburne
Meanwhile,
became,
English poetry,
was
to
which
it
line from
The
beyond
scarcely possible
proceed.
to C. G.
to d'Annunzio
Swinburne
Medusan
Jung's fascinating
speculations is in fact direct,15 but in England that direction would
be refused for a Romantic
conclusion and summing up. Thus, the
we have to consider, William
next
the
Morris, approaches
figure
a Romantic
whole matter of Medusan
with
and
imagery
stability
seen before. The fact that he is
self-consciousness we have
scarcely
the first of our poets to present a Medusa who will
actually speak
for herself illustrates very well the sort of
change involved here.We
are no
is not
longer dealing with beautiful severed heads. Morris
a
poet who throws open the doors of an imprisoned perception but
an artist who
to an
what pre
explains
already visionary company
the new revelations entail.
so much
in
his work
cisely
Despite
which is fantastic, even surreal, his is a Romanticism not of
surprise
but of calculation.

Ill
Morris'

Medusa
is the
center of "The Doom
of King
symbolic
one
of
the
finest
of
the
narratives
in The Earthly Paradise.
Acrisius,"
The theme of this
states
long and neglected Romantic
epic Morris
in his
"Epilogue."
What
Whate'er
Their
Since
And

further

the tale may

lives henceforth
each

we men

tale's

then? Meseems
know
I would

of what

befell

not have

must
ending needs
call itDeath. Howe'er

it tell;
be the same:
it came

To

bitter
has made
this book,
those, whose
hope
With
other eyes, I think,
must look
they needs
as a
achievement
14. Praz, op cit., p. 387. The
neglect of d'Annunzio's
poet?
a very great one?is
to Praz's
famous
him
largely attributable
upon
judgments
a set of
in The
Romantic
attitudes
excusable
Agony,
negative
partisan
only
because
the poet was
the critic's countryman.
The
real basis for Praz's
animus
one to
is not a
set out at
is
but
pleasant
385-86.
contemplate,
pp.
clearly
crucial texts are d'Annunzio's
and Jung's Aion
15. The
great poem "Gorgon"
and Kegan
(London:
Paul,
1959), pp. 126-37.
Routledge

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18

JEROME

J.McGANN

so
On
its real face, than when
long agone
would
They
thought that every good thing
If they might win a refuge from it.16

be won,

and the
reference here is to the Wanderers
of The
tales
tell
those
the
who
Elders of the city,
twenty-four
own
illustrate
like
their
whose
and
Paradise
stories,
lives,
Earthly
Medieval
"the bitter hope [that] made this book." The Wanderers,
to find
set
out
homeland
from their plague-ridden
had
Norsemen,
a
western
island populated
discover instead
the
earthly paradise; they
a remnant of ancient Greece,
of a group
the
descendants
clearly
by
of Greek heroes (Odysseus on his last voyage?) who had, centuries
before, set out on a similar adventure. The vain quest to conquer
death is
illustrated in the two groups of stories told by the
variously
and the islanders: thus is reinforced the idea that "each
Norsemen
Morris'

most

direct

tale's ending needs must be the same."

the passage is extended somewhat when we
The
significance of
and the Elders are changed by their
realize that both theWanderers
stories. As the
and
of
hearing these
paradisal
telling
experience
and the Elders were chastened during
Wanderers
the
of
expectations
their own laborious voyagings, so after the experience of the twenty
four stories
needs must look" on the "real face" of Death with
"they
a new
that death is now made to
understanding altogether. Not
seem beautiful or even
the poem we never
acceptable?throughout
doubt that death and misery are outrageous, even if they are human
in the end no one is able to believe "that
and necessary as well?but
free of his
be won"
ifman were
[could]
every good thing
only
The Earthly Paradise suggests
is?and
Whatever
happiness
mortality.
realize
that there are indefinite varieties of this precious bane?we
that it in no way depends upon being free of misery or death.
finally
is
in
in The Earthly Paradise
This central meaning
epitomized
"The Doom of King Acrisius," and specifically inMorris' treatment
of the Medusa. The
argument prefixed to the poem outlines the
the myth of Perseus. Unlike
action of a story which is
essentially
a
out
balanced
consecutive narrative whose
Morris
and
Ovid,
spins
moral dimensions are clearly articulated. The genesis of the story is
one man's vain
attempt to avoid his mortal fate.
Now
Who,
Did

The

shall ye hear,
of the King Acrisius
he could free his life from fear,
thinking
but death on him at last.17
that which
brought

double-meaning

16. The
17. Ibid.,

Earthly Paradise
1, 142.

in a later remark
(Boston:

Roberts

by

Danae

Brothers,

1871),

emphasizes
in,

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393.

one

THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

19

the king's fear: Acrisius is, she says, "Of thine

important aspect of
own flesh and blood too much afraid."
Like other Romantic writers, Morris
is attracted to Medusa

because
she is beautiful and she is suffering. Poe speaks for all
Romantics when he says that "the death of a beautiful woman
is,
18Medusa's
the most poetical topic in the world."
unquestionably,
at the
center of the narrative because of its
misery stands
symbolic
character:
peculiar
to take
it not
O, was
away
enough
The
and the light of day?
flowery meadows
to take away from me
Or not enough
The
once-loved
faces that I used to see;
...
To
take away sweet sounds and melodies
And wrap my soul in shadowy
hollow
peace,

not for me!

of
longing? Ah, no,
those who
die your friends this rest shall be;
For me no rest from shame and sore distress,
of forgetfulness;
For me no moment

Devoid
For

For me
Shut

a soul that still

love and hate,
might
land and desolate,
to horror and to stone;
by mine eyes

in this fearful

Changed
For me

perpetual

anguish

all alone,

a
many
tormenting misery,
I know not if I e'er shall die.19
Because

Midst

in Morris'
version of the story, not Medusa
herself but
Thus,
circumstances are the focus of our horror. She is in no
Medusa's
an
sense whatsoever
object of loathing; quite the contrary, in fact,
aswe see from Perseus' reluctance to
slay her.
unseen did Perseus
stand,
softening heart, and doubtful
trembling hand
on his sword-hilt,
"Would
that she
muttering,
never turned her woful
face to me!"

there awhile

So
With
Laid
Had

Yet the woefulness of her undying face is the image not of her
own heart?her
wish is for death?but of all those who see
deepest
fear in a handful of dust. Like the other Romantic Medusas we have
is not suffering a moral death but, as in
met, Morris' wretched
lady
the very meaning of such an event.
Shelley especially, revealing
All her passion is hurled against the unmeaning of her fate, which is,
has been cursed with
in her case, her immortality. Morris' Medusa
an eternal, inhuman lifewhose
been ensured, para
has
persistence
18. "The Philosophy of Composition," in The Works

ed. E.

C.

Stedman

and G.

E. Woodberry

(New

York:

of Edgar Allen Poe,

Scribner's,

39
19. The

Earthly

Paradise,

ed. cit., 1, 168-69.

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1927),

vi,

20

JEROME

J.McGANN

one will release her from her

tresses. No
doxically, by her lethal
death-in-life because all men are, like Acrisius, themselves afraid of
dying.
All men

except Perseus, that is.Yet the most prominent sign of his

virtue?the pity he feels forMedusa?is
the occasion of his essential
own indiscriminate
heroic
For
whereas
his
struggle.
feelings would
save Medusa,
to
he must
choose
her
the
she most
finally
give
gift
wants: death. Perseus is, for Morris, Medusa's
first real lover who,
instead of raping her with a cruel selfishness, like
kills her
Neptune,
out of a wonderful love.
The Medusa
ofWilliam
Morris
is, then, in a purely descriptive
a
threaten
sense, sentimental figure. All the earlier Romantic Medusas
in one way or another, are hostile to
which
something
they presup
does not threaten us
pose in their observing audience. This Medusa
with a death, she begs for her own. But her defenseless posture is
a moral revolution in her audience
as
intended to
produce
just much
are.
as Swinburne's or
Perseus
Medusas
Medusa
Shelley's
By killing
our
act
the
and
for
his
that
fear
of
reifies
death,
conquers
sympathy
an
in
To
kill
is
the
the
audience.
conquest
enemy
relatively simple:
our fear of the act. To be
blunts
of
the
relationship
impersonality
to kill what we love, however, is to have removed
any sub
ready
servience to the instinctive possessiveness which all these Romantics
are

attacking.

It also raises
the central question for which the Romantic
again
Medusa
is a persistent
the
symbolic focus: what should be
precise
relation of death and life, indeed, what are the meanings of death
and life? Just as Shelley's
and the poetic prose of
fragmentary lyric
had aimed to distinguish these ideas and
Pater and Swinburne
so Morris
is aiming to reveal how life and death can
experiences,
be made either a blessing or a curse. Specifically, Morris' story forces
the reader to see that human values are not a function of life or death
a life and
as such, indeed, that value and
are not
happiness
strictly
death issue at all. Acrisius, among others in the story, conceives
in such terms, but because the
happiness and the earthly paradise
tale forces us to see that the love of life can be evil and the love of
death just and necessary, we are driven to throw aside commonplace
evaluations of these ideas. A tale like "The Doom of King Acrisius"
reminds us that life and death should not be the objects of men's
desire on the one hand and fear on the other. In this story and the
whole of The Earthly Paradise, death and life are presented as the
are
terms within which
all human adventures take place. They
existential postulates, not values, and hence neither can nor should
or
In Morris'
be the object of
story, when Perseus
flight.
pursuit

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THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

21

a hero is born who,

sets
the Medusa
disdaining these futilities,
slays
his highest desires within the framework of his own human creativ
civilization. Like all Romantic
heroes, Morris'
ity: love, integrity,

Perseus

aims

to create

own

his

values.

IV

all but finishes the

English history
of that unfortunate lady. She appears again in a few novels and
poems, but by the time Morris has told her story the Romantic
themes which she incorporated have been thoroughly worked
out,
at least in one direction. D'Annunzio
and Jung represent an exten
sion of thought which will be received, but not developed, in Eng
and Shelley
land. The terrible head which first threatened Goethe
becomes, inWilliam Morris, romantically domesticated, which only
had been assumed into the
shows how completely Romanticism
that time. In Morris,
the
culture
poetic
fury is benevolently
by
transformed, even if she isn't given a new name. Death has lost its
The Medusa

ofWilliam

Morris

sting.
Yet Rossetti's brief treatment of theMedusa
what is lost through this taming of the shrew.
ANDROMEDA,

graphically

illustrates

by Perseus saved andwed,

to see the
head:
day
Gorgon's
a fount he held it, bade her lean,

Hankered

each

Till

o'er

And

mirrored

in the wave

That

death

she lived by.

Let not

was

seen

safely

thine eyes know

Any forbidden thing itself,although

It once

should

Its shadow

upon

save as well

life enough

as kill:

but be

for thee.20

insistence here upon the double aspect of the Medusa?for

the specific allusion to her two types of blood which
example, in
a thor
in his vials?is very
important. Rossetti,
Asclepius preserved
even atavistic, Romantic, knows
something that Morris has
ough,
uncovers
secrets and
forbidden
almost forgotten. The Medusa
are not to be won with the
but
hidden
such
gifts
powerful,
spells,
sort of effortlessness Morris' poem
new
suggests. The
occasionally
lifewhich she offers to those who dare to approach her is, and must
was among
she offers is, as
be, fearful, for the knowledge
Shelley
the first to suggest, a self-knowledge most men do not want to face.
This fact about her meaning Rossetti will not have us
forget, and it
The

20.
ed.W.

in The
Collected
"Aspecta Medusa,"
M. Rossetti
(London,
1890), 1, 357.

Works

of Dante

Gabriel

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Rossetti,

22

JEROME

J.McGANN

revival. Rossetti suggests

is, indeed, a key element in her Romantic
an even further
in the pursuit of the
that
however:
possibility,
is inevitable. After such knowledge, what
ideal some sort of
betrayal
isRossetti's
theme.
forgiveness? This
cautionary
But Morris does not worry about mankind having to bear too
much reality. In contrast to Rossetti's
Morris'
personal approach,
treatment of the
that
is
matched
generalized
subject
by Pater, except
the latter is able to maintain a strong sense of the emotional ambi
valences involved. A man does not revolutionize his consciousness
without great fear and trembling, or at least without a sense of awe
in the face of his
selves. Pater registers the
terrifying, undiscovered
turns
sense of awe, Rossetti the fear and
trembling. Thus, ifRossetti
in
the
his
from
clear
which
away
insights
Shelley, Swinburne, and,
own
more
in
refusal
is
insist
his
certain
way, Pater,
upon,
respects
than Morris' assent. Rossetti reminds us again, as Morris
significant
does not, of the stakes involved.
to
these several treatments of the
Perhaps the best way
bring
a
to the
into
Romantic Medusa
single focus is by returning
begin
a
passage in Faust finely trans
ning of the nineteenth century and
lated
by Shelley.
Faust.

Seest

thou

not

girl, standing alone, far, far away?

She drags herself now forward with slow

Fair
And

seems

I cannot

as if she moved

overcome

Is like poor Margaret.

with

the thought

shackled

steps,
feet:

that she

Let it
Mephistopheles.
be?pass
can come of it?it is not well
No
good
it?it is an enchanted
To meet
phantom,
A lifeless idol; with
its
look,
numbing
and they
It freezes up the blood of man;

Who

Like

meet

its

those who

pale,

stare are turned

ghasdy
saw Medusa.

on?

to stone,

too true!
Faust. Oh,
eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse
no beloved
hand has closed, alas!
Which
to me?
is the breast which Margaret
That
yielded
Her

Those are the lovely limbswhich I enjoyed!ai

horrors
and Medusan
Praz begins his study of Romantic
agonies
we
have
with these lines from Goethe and the Shelley poem
already
discussed. For Praz, both excerpts suggest only a Romantic delight
in sadness, pain, and abnormality. As in the case of the Shelley
refused to apprehend the meaning
passage, however, Praz has clearly
21. Complete

Poetical

Works,

ed. cit., p. 761.

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THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

23

does
of the Faust passage at itsmost manifest level. Mephistopheles
lest he
not want Faust to look upon thisMedusan
of
betrayal
image
see in it the form of his own
But Faust cannot turn
betrayed love.
is
away from the awful figure of his lost love, and his compulsion
the sign that he has not abandoned his inspiration. To record the act
of primal betrayal, and to offer a means of redemption, Romantic
artists took the Medusa
for their muse, that they might be driven
toward their better selves. Her horror and her beauty are alike
divine because each focuses a demand made upon every man seeking
seen
woman
Faust is doppelganger,
to
by
change his life.Thus, the
an
"A lifeless idol" and his own Margaret,
of
simultaneously
image
the image of his persistent
because Faust must be at once terrified
by
evil and consoled with the figure of his essential love.
Indeed, in the Romantic treatment of the legend the mirror borne
Perseus becomes the manifest symbol of the equivalence between
by
is not only herself
the hero and his victim. For the Romantic Medusa
a doppelganger,
she is a recurrent figura of that other pervasive
Romantic
theme. Each man kills the thing he loves, but since his
attachments are divided between his highest goals and his merest
must
clear about his intentions. In this
possessions, he
keep himself
matter the Medusa
becomes his guide, coming to him in various
as his
guises. In Goethe, Shelley, Pater, and Swinburne she appears
now grown terrible, or diabolic, in the eyes
dispossessed emanation
of her
She accuses in order to reveal what has been
betrayer.
buried away, and thus makes possible a new life. InWilliam Morris'
explicit presentation of the full story, the death of the Medusa
life with Andromeda.
Not
accident does
generates Perseus'
by
Morris' poem enforce an identification between Medusa
and the
bride of Perseus: the new Romantic
is
mythology
inevitably driven
to assert that Andromeda
now released from her
is the Medusa
a world
ruled in Acrisius,
the spectre of the
imprisonment in
Romantic
hero. The Romantic
inclination to see avatars of the
in a
Medusa
variety of unexpected persons and places is already
and Pater, but it will become a
apparent in Swinburne
regular
device in poets like d'Annunzio
and mythologists
like Jung.
reason
is a peculiarly Romantic figura
Finally, the
why theMedusa
is helpfully elucidated in the
modern
poem.
following
Tableau
Perseus

Vivant

on an ornamental

charger,
sixteenth century,
work,
above the
Hovering
slumbering Medusa
or a
Like a
buzzing
fly
mosquito
On beaten,
His head averted
golden wings.
German

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24
From
A

JEROME

J.McGANN

In his
her agate gaze.
right hand
in his left a mirror.

sword,

Helmeted
by night, slipshod by darkness.
to strike.
where
She looks
Wondering
asleep
As if dreaming
of petrified forests,
stone leaves, stone limbs,
Monumental
dryads,
Or of the mate that she will never meet
Who

will

look

into her eyes and

live.22

is, among other things, a brief allegory about what has

towestern art between the sixteenth century and our own
happened
two hundred years before
would have con
day. No one,
Shelley,
a
Medusa.
All
her
lover
for
all
ceived
romances, were
that,
possible
in
the
time
before
the
Athena.
But Roman
old
ages gone,
justice of
ticism came to break such laws, and as the nineteenth century was
the first to take seriously so unthinkable an event as the salvation of
Satan, so it raised up, against the doom assigned by Athena, a new
lover for the beautiful Medusa. This was the new artistwho would,
if he dared, "look into her eyes and live." But as this fine poem by
the enemies of Medusa, Athena's
Daryl Hine shows, only
champions,
will regard her as horrible or her lovers as either impossible or
decadent. Thus Hine's poem says to us: pictured here is the moment
monstrous
just before the hero Perseus will strike dead the
offspring
one way to tell the
artist knew
of Phorcys and Ceto. The
only
it all
ancient story, but we now can see how equivocal
might be,
how much he is able to suggest of which he could not have been
aware and would never have
approved.
over
out in the ornamental world
Hammered
presided
by Athena's
can
a
if
dream of
he is awake and
lover. But
Perseus, Medusa
only
and
and her
threatening, she is asleep
dreaming;
sleeping visions, all
with the worked metal asso
in sculpted stone, balance
perfectly
ciated here with Perseus. Besides, if she is asleep, he is a mere insect
come to disturb her rest; and even that
suggestion is equivocal, for
the most he can do, as insect, is to wake her up, which may mean
that her impending death will become a true awakening into a real
inheritor of
life. But the poem permits (indeed, as a conscious
it evokes)
endless
this sort
of
speculation
symbolist technique,
in
because it asserts perpetual equivocations
balance.
No
perpetual
are observed in this
matter how
are
and
Medusa
Perseus
poem,
they
to each other.
cannot exist apart, it is a standoff, and if
equal
They
is still
in this new and
the theme of the doppelganger
working here
as
subtle way, we are almost as far from
Shelley is from the
Shelley
This

22.

poem

Daryl

Hine,

Minutes

(New

York:

Atheneum,

1968), p. 45.

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THE

BEAUTY

OF THE

MEDUSA

25

sixteenth century. Symbolism and aestheticism have clearly inter

vened. For, in Hine's
poem, all life is art, whether dreamed into
or beaten into
and if a metal hero can triumph
stone
gold,
images
over aMedusa whose death he will accomplish, she can dream herself
immortal in the petrified world where she is queen forever.

University

of Chicago

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