Snaky Women Chat

Review of the Medusa Gaze
by Misty Urban, Ph.D

Published on Femmeliterature.com
11 february 2018

In The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive,  Gillian M.E. Alban continues the application of mythological lenses to contemporary literature that she established in her first book, Melusine the Serpant Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology (Lexington Books, 2003). The Medusa Gaze explores the aspects of the snaky-haired figure from Greek myth as she appears in the novels and stories of nine women writers: Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, A. S. Byatt, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, and Iris Murdoch. The works of these powerful and popular writers span several decades and multiple genres, from romance and realism to modernism and magical realism, but Alban unites them by finding their various engagements with the Medusa figure, an archetype which in her usage transcends historical roots and cultural periods to resonate in our present moment with “an illuminating picture of women’s struggles” [13].

The premises of the book rest on several seeming contradictions which the reader must be able to hold in tension in order to properly appreciate Alban’s assertions. First, though she stakes out her primary texts among female authors writing primarily in the second half of the twentieth century, the reward of pursuing Medusa through their pages rests on the reader’s inclination to find relevance and inspiration in this remnant of “goddess mythology” [7] and one’s ability, through these fictional works, “to re-envision established mindsets” and find “fresh approaches to the lives of women in today’s world” [12]. The power of the Medusa gaze, Alban suggests, is as apparatus of female agency: Medusa’s functions are destructive, maternal, and protective [6-7], and hers is the power to “break free of assigned patriarchal roles” [13] to “form herself and survive through her own gaze” [15]. Alban finds a triumphal interpretation in the original myth in which Medusa, raped by Poseidon, is given her snake hair and death-dealing stare by the pitiless Athena, who later adopts the Gorgon’s head as her aegis. This end, Alban argues, gives Medusa a multidirectional and redemptive power to either protect or destroy as she wishes, and for support she refers to Susan Bowers in “Medusa and the Female Gaze,” who reads Medusa as “an electrifying force representing the dynamic power of the female gaze . . . enabling women to rise above oppression through her inspiration” [qtd. on 2], and Hélène Cixous, who depicts Medusa as beautiful and laughing [23-24].

Following an introduction that “asserts the multifaceted power of women, whether positive or negative, in literature as well as life” [7], the book is structured according to Medusa’s various aspects. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate “the Medusa gaze as a female force” [4] that can empower, objectify, destroy, or—most slippery of all—be refracted by its supposed object back onto its subject and originator, paralyzing and obliterating. Building on Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage in psychological development, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s use of the Look (le regard) and its power to destroy the Other [20], Alban turns to her primary texts to study how female characters’ use of the gaze in ego formation leads in some examples to an independent sense of self but, in most cases, is ultimately petrifying and destructive to those who wish the gazer harm.

While Chapter 1 identifies instances of “the petrifying gaze of Medusa as exerted by women,” proving “both men and women as objects of a Medusa gaze that destroys through its powerful female agency” [58], Chapter 2 examines instances of “the individual reflected back through the mirror of the Other” [109], the doppelgänger or shadow-self [94]. This chapter, though wide-ranging and entertaining in its observance of mirror-moments, folding Jane Eyre and The Picture of Dorian Gray along with William Thackeray, T. S. Eliot, and J. K. Rowling into the discussion, begins to show the flaws that attend its theoretical underpinnings. Psychoanalytic theory, as a model of mind, can fail to persuasively explain real ruptures in psychic wholeness in terms that correspond to what we know medically about mental health and illness, leaving gaps in the literary interpretation. For instance, the hypothesis, offered here, that a “white model of beauty [is] impressed upon her as normative” [75] seems inadequate to account either for the psychic dissolution of Esther Greenwood in Plath’s The Bell Jar or the violent mental and physical trauma that dismantle the fragile Pecola in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Chapters 3 and 4 of the book “evaluate the joys and perils of mothering” [124]. The connection of maternity and Medusa rests on Sigmund Freud’s speculation that sight of the female genitalia freezes a man in horror, but for the rest of the chapter and in fact the book, the titular figure and her memorable gaze fade into the background of the discussion. Instead, Chapter 3 focuses on “the hazards of the mother-daughter relationship,” finding the dangers “considerable on both sides” [159], and reaches the conclusion that “the trials of mothering are not lightly to be undertaken” [160] from such examples as Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (where the mother character might better be described as intractable, even fanatical, rather than “devouring” [125]), mother absence in Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and Plath’s poetry, where the discussion veers into the poet’s biography more than her writings.

Chapter 4 draws the maternal goddesses Gaia and Demeter into consideration but continues to explore motherhood as a choice between devouring and abandonment. Those readers who do not already share the assumption that literary characters effectively play out psychological realities, just as mythological figures do, are unlikely to be converted to the psychoanalytic camp by this chapter’s tendency to sketch out fairly broad, universalizing assumptions from the theory and then sift through the literature for support. Alban’s conclusion that the “glorification of the maternal function” doesn’t actually empower women [196] might feel like less a discovery than a statement of fact confirmed by much feminist criticism, but her generous tendency to see most vilified, monstrous mothers as simply overwhelmed by their monumental task strikes a note of compassion and kindness.

Chapters 5 and 6 expand the Medusa archetype even further to include, in the first instance, “a perspective on the female divine as imagined by women writers” [203] and, in the second, “the common view of woman seen as a predatory, monstrous Medusa” [239]. Alban suggests that veneration of the female divine “creates a paradigm shift in our thinking and changes the way we regard women” [204], offering women readers a process of “symbolization” [207] that can serve as an “inspirational force” [237] in their own lives. Readers might be able to cite counter-examples in which veneration of the female force has not led to appreciable advances in legal, political, or even cultural latitude for women—all of the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, as one example, or contemporary U.S. culture, where women still lack equal protections under the law—but the suggestion is an intriguing one as it applies to fictional role models, especially in these works, where the female protagonists, like Medusa herself, rarely come to happy, healthy ends.

Chapter 6 takes a risk in envisioning Medusa, a figure who in her origin myth is brutally raped and then punished for it, as a femme fatale, but Alban explores “the erotic aura of the magnetic Medusa force” [255] in figures such as Morrison’s Sula, “a monstrous, outlaw woman” [247], flirting with the established belief that female sexual self-expression is perforce predatory or damaging. The real problem with female power as imagined here is that it is only ever reactionary, characterizing women as “opposing male patriarchal power, attempting to empower themselves against the men who oppress them” [243] in a gesture of self-defense and survival. The conclusion reiterates the suggestion that modern readers can find something instructive in these fictional illustrations of “the plight of women, whether aggrandized or diminished, in all their helpless glory” [262], and emphasizes again that “[t]he Medusa force elaborated here presents the ongoing determination of women to claim their rights and assert their will against considerable obstacles, refusing to abjectly submit to the hostile forces that threaten to overwhelm them” [263]. What the conclusion might explain, to further the subject’s relevance to the modern reader’s life, is to elaborate how exactly a woman wields the Medusa stare to her desired effect, whether it be destructive, maternal, redemptive, or apotropaic, deflecting evil intentions back on the perpetrator. Even more useful than the gaze’s function in ego formation would be a stony stare that could, say, repel would-be attackers, cut down cat-callers, or procure a salary offer that equals a man’s.

Alban moves knowledgeably among her several texts and rarely finds it necessary to introduce them with summary, which might pose some disadvantage to readers not familiar with all the texts under discussion. The general lack of transitions can at times lead to a sense of accretion rather than development, an effect unfortunately amplified by the layout of the print copy, which, with its line breaks between each paragraph, suggests continual section breaks in a way that tends to distract from the argument’s evolution. Alban’s habit throughout is to resist analysis or interpretation of any single work, rather letting a text speak for itself through her method of close reading or, in some cases, thick description. While this leaves the reader the interesting task of comparing patterns or drawing conclusions about what any particular work might suggest about self-formation, female relationships, or female agency, certain readers may long for authorial analysis that connects and develops these varied and intriguing works. Throughout, this treatment of primary sources can feel like surveys or extended forays of parallel-finding or pattern-hunting rather than a compelling discovery or developing argument about what exactly these uses of the Medusa gaze might mean, individually or collectively, for the archetype, for the text, or for the reader.

Filled with beautiful original artwork, The Medusa Gaze threads together several marvelous and diverse women authors, providing a sustained and attentive close reading of the female characters’ lives and psyches as girls, friends, lovers, and mothers. In so doing, the book invites a wholesale re-evaluation of the power and beauty of the ancient Medusa myth. If some of the works examined seem to beg for further analysis or investigation into the function or purpose of this mythical figure in contemporary literature, this leaves the door open to future scholars to take up the lens Alban has offered and see what insights about the feminine it may reveal. 

Gillian's Response to Misty

Dear Misty,

I have appreciated our interactions over the past few months, and now your thoughtful reading of The Medusa Gaze, offering a detailed response to my book, brightened with stunning Medusa illustrations. I hope you don’t object if I share my reactions to your writing.

My goddess research and mythic view of the snake appears as way-out to you, as Freudian-obsessed discussion of female castration and penis envy have always appeared to me, never really having been able to understand either. Long before the snakes that fascinate us both were declared phallic, they represented the life force renewing itself in shedding its skin, symbols of the procreative female. Miriam Robbins Dexter cites the Egyptian hieroglyph for the word goddess, “Netreit,” as including symbols of deity and serpent (cited in my Melusine the Serpent Goddess 3). Much remains murky in mythic reflections of women, and without adopting a naive view of women’s position in pre-history, the case for women as once revered as a life force appears overwhelming to me—there is just too much research in this area to discard. I have always regarded women as strong, albeit in an unequal world. My sympathies go with quirkily feminist writers like Angela Carter, who describes the instinctive feminism of the women around her in their “deep, ingrained conviction of the moral superiority of women and the tyrannical economic power of men” (Gordon 95). I therefore refuse victimhood, in common with such as Carter, Atwood, and Morrison. I cite Irigaray’s Speculum in dismissing such self-abjection: why boost male morale by perpetuating fetishization of the male organ? (Medusa Gaze 118). 
 
I really wonder how feminism is advanced by perpetuating the outdated theories of Freud who confessed he didn’t understand women? Feminist theory climbs out of this pit in one generation, only to sink into it yet again in the next. I realize such convictions won’t readily change, and I express my ideas as you retain yours. Aside from that, might I respond to a couple of remarks in your review? You indicate that my argument of “the white model of beauty […] as normative” is inadequate to explain the breakdown of Morrison’s Pecola of The Bluest Eye, as well as for Plath’s Esther. Actually, The Bluest Eye makes a strong attack on the destructive myth of physical beauty which creates gorgeous dolls of suitable women, as I discuss in “Beautified Marionette Dolls,” citing Morrison: “the concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious ideas [… coming from] envy, thriving in insecurity and ending in disillusion” (76, 72) as the sight of the more gorgeous other erodes one’s confidence under their negative gaze” (Medusa Gaze 72). Far better minds than mine have stumbled over Sylvia Plath’s personal traumas (including her own mind) and whatever part of her psyche she may have voiced in Esther of The Bell Jar. In attempting to understand Plath, I access a variety of texts, including poetry and journals, to gain insight into the plight of both the character and the woman writing her; how far I succeed is for you and other readers to say, but the torturous pursuit was utterly fascinating to me.

In a second response, regarding a woman’s questionable ability to repel a rapist’s attack through a Medusa Gaze, I offer Emily Culpepper’s account of how she appropriated the Medusa identity in order to withstand the attack of a rapist: “Seeing her Gorgon self in the mirror, she understands how she managed to gain the power to petrify and beat off her attacker” (256, also page 239, in my “Medusa Fury”). I’m sure it wouldn’t always be effective, but she offers an incident where it clearly helps her. I present such examples in my reading of contemporary women writers in order to indicate the powerful morale women may access when they grasp their own powers, rather than lying down in victimhood. I’m sure my writing won’t enable women to increase their rights or salaries (the part of the world I inhabit is probably far worse than the USA in this respect), but effective ideals may encourage women to grasp what opportunities they can in an unequal world. You’ve done a fantastic job reading my work, and I’m quite sure you could have been a lot harsher on me; I may cede some of your points! I do aspire to reach the common reader, as well as the academic, and I’d go along with making my case through an accretion of evidence. I would be very happy if, as you suggest, further scholars would take up the lens I have offered in continuing studies of the feminine. I appreciate your response, and I’d be really glad if we can continue in collegiality, despite our various differences, with my heartfelt good wishes, Gillian.

Book Review
byAngela Giallongo
Università di Urbino Carlo Bo

Published in Rivista di Storia dell‘Educazione ('Italian Journal of the History of Education')
November 2018

Gillian M. E. Alban, Melusine The Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2003,
& Gillian M. E. Alban, The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017

“Gillian Alban’s works are not only fascinating, especially for those who, like Virginia Woolf, cannot live without books, they are also supporting scholarly research. Indeed, if we are to effectively deconstruct the patriarchal imaginary, a continuous, coordinated and symbiotic interaction needs to be established between author and reader. It also essential that we have faith in this type of investigation. In this regard, a book can be much more successful than a host of other publications, and this is the case with Melusine The Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology (Lexington, 2003)…

On a similar note, Alban’s The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) examines the interaction between ideas, images and narration in light of the perspective provided by feminist literature, as well as psychological and psycho-analytical theories. She explores the way in which two complex symbols, the gaze and the mirror, became inseparable from the dreaded Gorgon in Ancient Greece, and how, since then, these attributes have shaped and distorted communication between men and women. In the first two chapters of The Medusa Gaze, Alban reveals how Lacanian psycoanalysis, Sartre’s phenomenology, and Freudian theory reassess and reinterpret the gaze, showing how the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. Phenomenological interpretation of an encounter with the Other via a look deprives women of voice and identity. Thus a person—a ‘subject’—is ‘objectified’ by the gaze of another. According to Vernant, the petrifying Medusa—one of the most powerful images of women from Greco-Roman patricentric mythology—is emblematic of this dualistic and hierarchical process.

Alban’s approach is particularly interesting when she collocates the relationship between mother and daughter in the network of visual exchanges from the perspective that “the forceful agency of women [...] is also returned against them through their Other or alter ego” (111). This is the case of contemporary women writers, who, through literature, make creative use of the powerful gaze of Medusa as an instrument of empowerment and an icon of the female gaze.

This stimulating window onto the construction of identity and alterity guides the reader away from the historical view of the female monster’s trap. At the same time, it focuses their attention on the possibility of creating other images. The force for change liberated by a series of feminist authors of English, French and American contemporary fiction (from Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Plath to Hélène Cixous, Margaret Atwood and Amy Clampitt) has had the cumulative effect of transforming Medusa in a way in which no-one had imagined or desired, although Christine de Pizan would have heartily approved. Indeed, this extraordinary Medieval author dreamed up and, in her City of Ladies (1405), promoted a very special Medusa; in de Pizan’s account, Medusa is, for the first time, the best personification of Beauty, Benevolence and Peace. As a consequence, the reader understands that the masculine myths on Medusa are more powerful than it would have been possible to imagine. Alban shows how they erected insurmountable psychological barriers that promoted the passive acceptance of oppression and violence; the entire social apparatus was based on the conviction that the Gorgon’s Otherness in the Greek myths presupposed male supremacy.

The collapse of patriarchal narration began with those who ceased to identify with this type of imagination. Indeed, why would female writers, poets, novelists and literary scholars maintain an imaginary that they did not believe in? Hence the female voices of contemporary fiction incorporate—in the fabric of their daily lives and through their fairy tales, accounts, novels, poems, stories and images—a different imaginary order. In particular, the third and fourth chapters of Alban’s book bring into focus the effects of the representations of the malign powers of Medusa on the experiences of maternity, nurture, and relationships between mother and child. The Freudian association between femininity and danger/death has gradually snuffed out the vital spark that conferred value and meaning on this relationship, and generations of daughters have failed, and still fail, to understand their real value. According to Alban, this misunderstanding has the following effect: “The daughter’s journey from loving intimacy with her mother to maturity and independence may cause her to dislike her mother, even while the mother remains or retains a significant influence over her daughter into adult life” (116).

Indeed, the mother proposed by traditional psychoanalysis is, herself, the daughter of a monster, Medusa. To understand this psychological archetype is to discover that the destructive side of the Great Mother is the phantasmic Devouring Mother. Therefore, the mother–daughter relationship—another mirror of the experiences of the Self and Other—is marked by personal and collective traumas and lack of feeling. Alban urges her readers to look again at this process in order to comprehend the intrinsic meanings behind the deadly gaze of Medusa (an intricate matter that led me too to investigate the multifold forces responsible for the invention of the snake woman).

The final two chapters of The Medusa Gaze (the fifth and sixth) reinterpret destructive or protective goddess myths through contemporary women writers who embrace the female divine as a force of inspiration for women. In them, Alban investigates the textual strategies that are employed by women writers in order to subvert and revise the patriarchal ideology in ancient and Classical myths, and to come up with alternative definitions of female identity and their own, gynocentric, myths. By these means, Alban managers to free her readers from the chains of the established imaginary, convincing them of the necessity of revisiting the myths, and in this specific case, to leave behind the lethal gaze of the first female monster in Western history—the Medusa, symbol of a series of oppositions which slowly but surely became cornerstones of male-centered thought and emotions. She reveals how investigation into alternative routes in feminist literature (narrative construction of reality, symbolism, metaphor, myth, novels and autobiographies, etc.) is a fundamental tool for creating new potential worlds (in the meaning proposed by Bruner)—other realities, other identities and other possibilities for action.

These female narrative voices teach us how to modify the past, and Alban’s book, a highly successful reconstruction of such a complex reality, provides an important contribution in this regard. It has also achieved a strategic milestone: to make us desire the return of the vital force of the Gorgon in order to breathe life into an alternative imaginary with a different very different impact on our lives, to change our mental and emotional models. Indeed, thanks to authors such as Alban, we are able see that there is no further need for the world to be divided up into that which belongs to “us” and that which belongs to “them”. “

Angela Giallongo
Università di Urbino Carlo Bo
giallongo.angela@uniur

Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth
Editors: Misty Urban, Deva F. Kemmis and Melissa Ridley Elmes
Leiden/ Boston: Brill

A RESPONSE BY GILLIAN M.E. ALBAN

THIS MAGNIFICENT BOOK COMBINES the extensive researches of nineteen interdisciplinary scholars who meticulously investigate the eponymous footprint of Melusine, from a wide variety of literary as well as artistic approaches. It illustrates how richly this theriomorphic monstrous snake woman has contributed to the culture   of so many European countries, including Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, not to mention France and England. Pairet describes how certain Spanish versions of Melusine’s narrative emphasize her liminality in attempting to silence her sighs and erase “the metonymy of the humanity the flying snake has left behind” (51). Alberghini discusses Coudrette’s The Romans of Partenay as a “quasi-historical/mythological text” (155), presenting Melusine as an ancestor of Elizabeth Woodville, , “a daughter of the[British] Isles”, the wife of Edward IV, alongside her son, the Scottish Geoffrey of the Great Tooth(155). Melusine’s parallel in “serpentine metamorphoses” (282) extends as far afield as China, where Zhao presents Madam White as an Eve-like monstrous femme fatale, in opposition to Nü Wa, a “goddess [who] is possibly the earliest combination of woman and snake in Chinese literature….Nü Wa has a positive and even savior-like image among the Chinese (293). One merely wonders why Zhao prefers to see Mrs White as a Melusine figure,rather than Nü Wa, in the light of considerable research indicating Melusine’s divine force.

Melusine’s footprint reverberates in her romantic love story with her benevolence and Christian piety, despite her being dreaded and feared by patriarchy. She is represented in her powerfully protective motherhood, which continued beyond her enforced parting as a dragon brought about through male betrayal, leaving her distinctive banshee cri du Mélusine as she stamped  her foot in  pain and distress. Insights  into  German  scholarship reverberate in this study, such as Schellenberg’s discussion of Goethe’s Die Neue Melusine as a Kunstmärchen, to which Goethe compulsively returned throughout his life.  Goethe shows Melusine as a victim of betrayal and diminution, a Urphänomen or archetype which he saw as “predicatedon visibility…and interconnectedness of disparate phenomena in the natural world” (320). Ridley Elmes elaborates how Paracelsus placed Melusine as an   archetype within his alchemical wedding as a “half-human hybrid Melusine figure for the human Aphrodite-Venusform” (100), a transformative figure unifying humanity with nature. 

Kemmis investigates Bachmann’s “Undine Geht,” alongside the German nixie of the Niebelungenlied and Fouqué’s Undine, also in reference to Grendel’s mother in Beowulf. Presenting the liquid, wave-like elements of Bachmann’s Undine, as the nymph’s “call of pain evokes Melusine’s…cri du Mélusine”(337), she cites the creature circling the castle with her uncanny utterance: “I will never come again, never say Yes again and You and Yes” (334). Kemmis also reflects on Kafka’s The Silence of the Sirens, showing the “sirens’ silence [to be] more powerful and deadly a weapon than their singing”(342). Classen’s chapter illustrates various Melusine sirens, fairies and pixies, some of them transformed into chandeliers in Germany. Baumeister develops the Kristevan aspect of Melusine as an abject object of the gaze, also as theorized by Mulvey, showing her “under the gaze of a secret spectator, transform[ed] into a monstrous animal” (362). Melusine’s parentage and her punishment of her father Elinas, resulting in her mother Pressine’s curse, which affords her a certain power even as it curses, are extensively evaluated here, together with this liminal creature’s desire to humanize herself through marriage into the chivalric, religious order of her age. Bain describes Melusine as a siren bird-woman while also fish-woman (24), connecting her with Sheela-na-gigs, lamias, and even the Ichthus or fish symbol of “Jesus Christ, son of God, savior” (34), uniting such women within the aquatic. Prud’Homme evaluates Thüring von Ringoltingen’s view of Melusine as both a fair and fairy hybrid, while also an uncanny monster, demonstrated in the odd marks on her sons. Pfleger interprets Thüringen in offering a queer analysis of Melusine’s hebdominal transformations. Hahn unusually processes the tale as exemplifying adolescent insubordination, sibling rivalry and generational discord showing the violence contained in Melusine’s sons’ chivalrous reach, which needed to be socially contained. Cole shows her as a “Humayn Woman” (240)whose status is secured through her social contributions as she nearly, but not quite, achieved her desired humanity. Enstone points out the fay’s connections with Arthurian   legend, developing Harf-Lancner’s parallel study of Morgane and Mélusine together with Nymue, while reworking their Otherness into an ultimately more Christian version.  

Considerable discussion presents Melusine as a metaphor for transgressive feminine prowess, as represented in her powerful snake aspect, here presented as phallic and therefore oddly as entirely male. This extensive study clearly indicates the continuing fascination of this most enchanting and threatening seducer. Urban considers Melusine’s Othered femininity, the immense power of this “aerially equipped supernatural female figure who can rule, guide, instruct, build, fight wars, and expand kingdoms” (386). While indicating the absence of many English works on Melusine in the past, she picks out Spenser’s Errour and Milton’s Sin (both an inspiration toA.S. Byatt), together with Keats’ dubious “Lamia,” in her discussion. She illustrates how Byatt’s  Possession, and  Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, have  revived contemporary interest in Melusine, as a figure who clearly continues to escape prescribed boundaries. Weisl discusses Byatt’s presentation of Melusine’s doubleness as suggesting men’s desires and fears,as seen in the terrifying vagina dentate. Overstepping human boundaries, Melusine becomes a“Scylla, Weird Sister, Lilith (“die erste Eva,” “la mère obscure”), Bertha Mason, or a Gorgon(236), functioning as a monstrous Other in the mirror of romance. Urban similarly connects Melusine with Medusa, this composite figure launching into the future through her appearance in recent films. In Beowulf, Grendel’s mother appears like Melusine, as does the dragon in Maleficent, while in The Clash of the Titans the powerful serpent woman Medusa is shown like Melusine.

In sum, this  enthralling work  contributes  extensively  to Melusinia, offering devotion to the fairy serpentine hybrid monstrous creature or symbolic force who ultimately never remains contained within any boundaries that may attempt to inscribe her..

The Historical Enigma of the Snake Woman from Antiquity to the 21st Century
Angela Giallongo, translated by Anna C. Forster,
Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017

REFLECTIONS BY GILLIAN M.E. ALBAN

ANGELA GIALLONGO’S BOOK, The Historical Enigma of the Snake Woman offers an excitingly thought-provoking evaluation of the snake woman coursing through history, particularly the Gorgon Medusa, while encapsulating hybrid creatures like Mélusine, Echidna, the Furies or Erinyes, the Hydra and the Basilisk. Giallongo draws her readers through a captivating trail of history, mythology, philosophy, literature and narrative to show how such creatures came to represent woman as the Other, through her deathly gaze and serpentine locks. The first sentence sets the scene: “A fatal stare, a protruding tongue, a horde of slithering snakes and a rivulet of blood among petrified bodies,” such images representing the collective nightmares of the patriarchal psyche.

As Giallongo traces women’s thrilling association with theriomorphic creatures (reptiles and snakes), we see how female status was reduced from parthenogenetic goddesses and the snake women of Crete, to petrifyingly blood-cooling hybrids. Once the devil was connected with the fallen Eve, all women were indomitably condemned through fear as women came to represent the mother, castration, and death. Giallongo traces the connection between the eye symbol and the vulva of the procreative goddess, showing the evil eye debased into a site of death and destruction through the menstrual taboo, which, cold, damp, and maybe noxious, yet offers fertility and renewal, as does the snake.

Journeying through ancient and Medieval reflections of Medusa, on to contemporary monstrous women in film and elsewhere, Giallongo presents dazzling Medusas and her avatars. Surpassing the limitations ofFreudian theory, she smartly reflects writers like Barbara Creed to shed insight on male fantasies about Medusa. This fascinating contribution to mythology and gender studies enables us to appreciate the curiously sinister enigma of gaze, menstruation and serpent. The final statement on Christine de Pizan offers her subversion of fiction thus: beyond “that odious snake-woman who heralded the return of chaos and the black primordial abyss [… Medusa] was a luminous, serene, liberating, beneficial and entirely human creature” (261).