The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women's Fiction:
Petryifying, Maternal and Redemptive
Gillian M.E. Alban, ©2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishers

Book Review

Füsun Elioğlu

Hi Gill ! Just finished The Medusa Gaze.

First of all I'd like to tell you how much I appreciate the amount of work you put into it. All the analyses, the reading, research, cross-referencing that you have done is incredible and I can see the blood, sweat and tears that you must have put into it. Also, congrats on getting it to a calibre which has enabled it to be published by such a prestigious publisher.

Although I am familiar with the Medusa tale, your interpretation of her powers was intriguing. I had a rather superficial idea of her capabilities (even though I was familiar with the sexual connotations of her tale as they apply to psychology) so the dualities you have presented in her gaze (destroyer and creator; the me and me-in-the-eyes-of-the other, the object and the objectifier etc.) I found to be fresh and very interesting. I was familiar with some of the works you have focused on and was happy that you have provided enough info on others so as to enable me (the reader) to understand your point. Knowing that you are a feminist, I can see how the – excuse the usage of a rather masculine term for want of less sexist one – the castration of women is an issue dear to your heart. It is very difficult not to agree with much of your basic premise as someone who has lived her life in a part of the world where misogyny is rampant. We are the "aggrandising mirrors" to men, as Woolf put it so cleverly. How many times have our endeavours to find ourselves led to us getting lost between becoming – in your words – the witch or the doormat? And worse – schizophrenically ending up a bit of both? Also the book was of significance to me personally cause maybe – come to think of it – my mother was a bit of a medusa too.

I think the best non-fiction books are those that want to make you read further. Your Medusa has made me go back to my mythology 101, Lacan and Freud; look up Melusine and even try to find a new reading of the Şahmeran tale. And I must find copies of Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye.

This is quite demanding a read. I see that you want to present a scholarly work that places you in the academic realm and I think you have accomplished that; it is a scholarly book. And a very good one at that. (I think I have managed to understand most of it, thanks to being a former lit. teacher!) A reader interested in women's fiction who might be enticed by the wonderful cover, might get something far more intellectual than she/he bargains for. But as I said before, that is not entirely the reader you are aiming at, so I guess it is O.K. My one criticism would be the last part of the book about the redemptive quality of the gaze. I think there you fall back on myth more than its manifestations in women's literature.

All I can say is: What's the title of your next book? Really and honestly looking forward to it.

Afterthought: Sadly though, I can fully empathize with most the characters you dissect-including Medusa herself! My only consolation is – thank God – I'm not one of those women growing increasingly haggard with passing time, any woman who can only express herself through her appearance is doomed to defeat and failure.

Füsun Elioğlu, with much admiration.

Book Review

by Glenys Livingstone PH.D
Published on magopoolcircle.net, 4.10.2017
 

Gillian M. E. Alban’s The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Beginning with some quotes from this ovarian book The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive by Gillian M.E. Alban:

“Alban reflects throughout this book on the myriad ways women and girls are gazed upon within patriarchal cultures as well as examples of how women assert their right to look, stare, or claim an apotropaic gaze of power and anger…”. from the Foreword by Margaret Merisante, Ph.D., Feminist Comparative Mythologist.

“Women are by no means merely the passive object of the other’s gaze; these writings show them asserting agency…I thus reclaim the gaze for women as active agents in their own right.” page 6.

“…women are now defiantly asserting their independent scopic force under the banner of Medusa, staring down any attempts to diminish them.” page 22.

“The dominant social gaze in our societies is male … which objectifies them as sexual beings, whether admired, or dismissed as unworthy of observation and lacking the dignity of complete human beings. Objectified through such looks, women are evaluated as merely female rather than appreciated as human.” page 24.

“Devouring mothers cause their daughters trauma, as do those who abandon and fail to care for their child, leaving the child longing for her mother…Most mothers fall between these two extremes. They are neither devouring or monstrous, nor abandoning or negligent, but as fallible humans, they often fall short of the high standards required in the task of mothering remaining condemned as not-enough for their demanding task. Mothers may embody the monstrosity of Medusa, or they may simply be inadequate in fulfilling their arduous mothering role, however desperately they do their utmost…” page 201

Some decades ago I reflected on my childhood experience of being observed:

A strong part of the cultural milieu in which I grew, was that I felt identified as sex object…with no subjectivity, no space to Be. Pornographic magazines of the day depicted women being constantly pursued by salivating men – either there was an assumption that she desired this, or they did not care to ask her. And Christian cosmology appeared to condone the imposition of a dominant will upon another – at the very heart of it is “the sacrifice of the lamb”. Women have been especially vulnerable, with their submission openly advocated.

“Marilyn”, they sometimes called me, simply because of my babyhood waved platinum hair…Marilyn was suggested to me by this naming, as someone I could model myself after.…I don’t remember any other significant famous women in the first decade of my life. As a child I was very conscious of being looked at, and perhaps on reflection, it was because I was female. I felt transparent and vacuous. I remember believing that others (particularly adults) could see my thoughts. The Great Male Metaphors of the day – God and Santa – knew everything about me. The male humans imitated the Deity with constant Gazing, in magazines, movies, wall calendars. I could only hope to be chosen to be worthy of his desire, yet at the same time it was known that he could be dangerous.

I felt acutely the identification of myself with the “inanimate” world, as it was understood to be – dead and inert.[1]

I remember the first time that I consciously felt being seen/heard as human rather than sex object. I was forty-two years old, and speaking on the phone to the organiser of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Australia, about volunteering to assist; I got off the phone and contemplated this novel vision of myself…human being.

I love the Table of Contents of this book: this table in itself could bend a few brains, give cause for pause. Here is just a sample, though you may select others as alluring.[2]

The Self in the Petrifying Gaze of the Other
The Gaze of the Double in the Mirror–My Sister!
Mother as Monstrous
Medea: the Mother’s Devouring Love.
Gaia and Demeter: Mother Earth
Sacrifice in Mothering
Birth and Mothering: The Thing Itself
Matriarchal Survivors
Demeter/Persephone; Mother-Daughter Longing
Medusa’s Redemptive Evil Eye

This book offers many insights as the reader is taken through multiple literary works. It could be a journey through hellish places you have been, or quandaries you have known, and how your spirit intuitively coped, put strategies in place to ensure your survival. In the section “Medusa’s Redemptive Evil Eye”, the author describes how Elaine in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye “creates a Madonna for herself in the shape of an apotropaic Medusa eye in her moment of direst need, and this force rescues her by fortifying her against the hostility of so-called friends.”[3] The journey could also be into the hellish places of other women you may have heard about in popular press and opinion, who have been harshly judged; and there may be evocation of another vision from within her frame, and compassion – a rethinking of popular judgements. In “Devouring Clytemnestra and Electra”, Alban notes: “Domineering, interfering, or infanticidal mothers do suggest the monstrosity inherent in mothering. The commonest cause of maternal infanticide has been illegitimacy; …”[4] wherein a woman remains “helplessly trapped within sexual and moral mores, …”.[5]And another wherein the mother is “caught in the terrible dilemma of exerting Medea power over her daughter by killing her in order to prevent her return to slavery.”[6]

In a patriarchal, androcentric context, even everyday choices for women, such as, about how to raise a child in a hostile environment, whether it is safe to go out, how to dress, how to exercise authority, take the lead – have had to be considered more carefully and strategically, often defensively. As woman (again) cloaks herself, situates herself,[7] regains vision of herself from within her own skin, she is able to take action with greater clarity and integrity, and confidence that she can hold her own. This book The Medusa Gaze is an empowering reflection on the complexities of woman’s situation, across diverse cultural experiences and personal particularities, gazing as it is from within female eyes, thus speaking a truth – which could change the world, as small particles may.

Gillian M.E.(dusa) Alban is a contributor to the anthology Re-visioning Medusa: From Monster to Divine Wisdom

NOTES
[1] Glenys Livingstone. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, p. 74-75.
[2] The full Table of Contents as well as an excerpt is available at
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/64006
[3] Gillian M.E. Alban, The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 221-222.
[4] Gillian M.E. Alban, The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 121.
[5] Gillian M.E. Alban, The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 122.
[6] Gillian M.E. Alban, The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 121.
[7] As Luce Irigaray says woman must, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p.10-11.

REFERENCES
Alban, Gillian M.E., The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive.
UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. (trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill)
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion.
Lincoln NE: iUniverse, 2005.

Foreword

Margaret merisante PH.D
feminist comparative mythologist

In The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women's Fiction, Gillian Alban once again becomes a multidisciplinary detective who utilizes both a magnifying glass and a telescope to look intently into certain enduring stories that we Westerners have told and continue to tell ourselves. Through the symbols of Medusa and mirrors within the mediums of feminist literary fiction and psychoanalysis, Alban examines the often harsh gaze of the Other toward the self as well as the self toward the Other. Readers will find that her passion as well as her academic knowledge ignites a bright light of feminist analysis within these pages.

The two symbols of Medusa and mirrors are especially apropos. As an ancient Mediterranean goddess of Fate, Medusa has had an exceptionally enduring vibrancy throughout the ages in our collective consciousness. Furthermore, her mythology is rich and deep. Alban employs one form of Medusa in particular—the Gorgoneion (the visual depiction of Medusa’s head—either beautiful or repellant, fierce or simply otherworldly) to serve her overarching examination into both patriarchal and feminist gazes. The word “mirror” derives from the Latin mirari meaning “to wonder at.” On the surface, mirrors seem to be a particularly female object that appears to point only towards attraction, self-reflection, physical examination, or vanity. However, in numerous cultures worldwide, women have also used mirrors for significant purposes such as prophecy, visions, protection, and as a potent representation of the sun. Here in The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women's Fiction, Alban takes these two symbols and deftly uses them to give the reader a timely investigation into how we look at ourselves and others.

Currently we are subjected to increasing and pervasive voyeuristic surveillance, narrowed perspectives, and visual profiling. Alban reflects throughout this book on the myriad ways women and girls are gazed upon within patriarchal cultures as well as examples of how women assert their right to look, stare, or claim an apotropaic gaze of power and anger as a way of asserting female or feminist agency. In patriarchies, women’s anger or defiance is typically disallowed publicly and privately. Emotionally, anger can serve as movement toward action and change. Suppressed or thwarted anger can result in deep depression or, in certain cases, madness. Oftentimes when a woman displays any righteous defiance, protective fierceness, sharp anger, flaming fury, or steamy venting of suppressed frustration arising from oppression, she is labeled monstrous, mad, hysterical, or dangerous.As a remedy to this common state of affairs, Alban comments in chapter one that “In societies that commonly place women under the power of a panoptic gaze, the Medusa gaze is an inspiring force available for women to claim for themselves [… in order to] remain strong against assault under the public eye, which values women as more or less attractive objects.”

Within this detailed, scholarly, yet accessible investigation of “the power of the gaze” on and by women (which may empower, alienate, protect, or destroy), Alban offers insights gleaned from the novels, short stories, and poetry of several female feminist writers. Additionally, she pulls in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic “mirror-gaze theory” of human development as yet another lens in which to scrutinize, deconstruct, critique, and re-imagine this social “power of the gaze.” As a reader, I found that the psychological and psychoanalytic gazes of Lacan, Sartre, Freud on the topics of looking, subject, object, ego, and self to feel, at times, as if I was caught in a carnival hall of mirrors because of these men’s twisty visions and privileged blindness to their own sexism, classism and racism. Turning her own powerful gaze back onto these theorists, Alban offers keen insight into common psychoanalytic and therapeutic biases against mothers.

Helping the reader find her way out from the fragmented and restrictive mirroring that women endure, Alban wisely introduces a chorus of female voices through her feminist literary selections. By doing so, Alban also exposes the gaze of patriarchy that distorts and freezes human sexuality and violence as concretized forms of interlaced intimacy. Chief among these literary selections are many works by Angela Carter (Heroes and Villains, The Sadeian Woman, Nights at the Circus, The Magic Toyshop, The Bloody Chamber, and The Passion of New Eve). Carter specialized in writing original and revised folktales and fairytales, often paired with mythic elements. Additionally, Alban gives the reader a rich smorgasbord of authors who directly reject, adopt, or reframe Medusa’s or the mirror’s gaze. These include Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head, The Time of the Angels); A. S. Byatt (Possession, “Medusa’s Ankles” in The Matisse Stories); Toni Morrison (Beloved, Sula); Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea); Sylvia Plath (“Medusa,” The Bell Jar, Journals), and Margaret Atwood (Cat’s Eye).

All of these writers engage strongly, smartly, and honestly with the painful social restrictions placed upon women. This particular collection of authors showcase noteworthy female protagonists who struggle to obtain empowerment either against or within patriarchal strictures. Ultimately however, these female battles offer the reader no shattered glass ceilings and certainly no revised paradise. Rather, through the power of literature, we stand as witnesses to these protagonists using their bodies and sexuality as deliberate weapons that break, destroy, or demolish the objectifying patriarchal mirrors they are caught in and as power tools to construct new images of self, autonomy, and agency amongst rubble. As any woman alive can attest, these narratives reflect shared intense yet redeeming struggles toward freedom and agency. Thankfully, as Alban shows us, just to be able to steadily look upon oneself as a Self who determines her own fate may be the most powerful Medusa gaze of all.”

Short Notice

Margaret J-M Sonmez
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

The introduction clearly and cogently sets out the book’s focus, which is “to reflect four aspects of the Medusa archetype within the contemporary fiction of nine women writers” (2). These four aspects being, however, themselves wide-ranging and also identified in very many literary representations of women, the book may be seen as operating within the much broader remit of exploring how women are treated within and by life and literature, as indicated by many statements relating to “the strengths and weaknesses of women in fictional interactions” (5)—and indeed, as many times stated, in social interactions outside of the world of fiction. There is an emphasis on Mothers in the third and fourth chapters.

The first chapter presents the major theoretical background to the study, and very clearly introduces the many and interacting issues involved in this subject, presenting and analysing older and more contemporary discussions regarding the Medusa archetype, the gaze, psychological and feminist theories related to these issues. This introductory analysis provides the framework for the concepts that underlie the readings, while additional work on female psychology or feminist theories is provided where necessary in the following chapters, also in the context of extensive readings of novels and stories. As a result, the chapters present the literary texts under inspection as complexes of literary, biographically experiential and theorized elements, supporting the underlying perspective which is to find and explore the ambivalent but always strong message, implications and even function of the female figure in twentieth century fiction by women.

The six mirroring chapters of literary investigation are presented under titles reflecting the four aspects of Medusa that were previously introduced: “The Self in the Petrifying Gaze of the Other,” “the Gaze of the Double in the Mirror: My Sister!” “Devouring Clytemnestra and Electra,” “Gaia and Demeter: Mother Earth,” “The Female Divine as Talisman” and “Rivals and Monstrous Femmes Fatales.” Each chapter presents detailed readings of a large selection of English and American literature written by women, not entirely confined to but particularly commenting on works by Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, A. S. Byatt, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts and Iris Murdoch (9). The readings in these chapters incorporate, illuminate and often take issue with the concepts that were introduced in Chapter 1. This book thus demonstrates how a focus on the various interpretations of what one is tempted to call, in formalist terms, the Medusa function, can be applied to enrich our readings of literary works. In such discussions one may find a woman character who is presented as, for example, a producer of the Medusa gaze, as a “monstrous and terrifying Medusa” (260), or as an “icon of worship” (261). The topics and materials of the chapters, being both multi-theoretical and including examinations of many fictional texts, are  organised into further subsections as, for instance, “The Look of the Medusa Head—Reverted with Laughter” (21), “Objectified Puppets” (75), “Mother as Monstrous” (121), “Matriarchal Survivors” (177), “Medusa’s Redemptive Evil eye” (216) or “Predator and Her Victims” (240). 

In summary, this book introduces, explores and persuasively argues about the significance of the conflicting, troubling, powerful and fascinating Medusa roles of women in modern and contemporary fiction.

Melusine the Serpant Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology
Gillian M.E. Alban, ©2003
Lexington Books

Foreword

Thelma shinn richard
professor of english and women's studies, arizona state university

I was surprised to receive a request early in 2002 from Gillian Alban to read and comment on her manuscript, Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology, since I had had no previous contact with the author. I was impressed, however, that she was seeking critiques even after her work had been accepted and was scheduled for publication in 2003. Because I appreciated such scholarly humility and dedication, I agreed to read the manuscript and sent her my comments.

I was even more surprised to hear from Gillian again with a request to read her revised manuscript prior to publication and, if I agreed, write a foreword. My earlier critique had been, I felt, somewhat harsh, suggesting extensive revisions. I knew she had consulted other scholars as well, so I was curious to see what revisions she could have made in the few months between our contacts.

After completing that second reading, I am delighted to welcome readers to a fascinating study of myth and literature about Melusine. I have greatly admired Gillian’s diligence in further research and revising the manuscript. Not only has she expanded and clarified the presentation of mythological sources, but she has also very effectively woven through these sources golden threads of literature, seeking to repair the intricate tapestry of goddess tales that had been persistently unraveled and altered by subsequent patriarchal revisions. As the biblical curse in Genesis condemned the serpent to crawling on its belly, so too have other versions dragged the ophidian goddess through the dirt, reducing her to elemental status or defining her splendor as evil and monstrous. Alban rescues her and returns her to the times and tales that loved her so that readers can better appreciate what she represents.

Gillian’s reconstruction of the female images of divinity helps re- establish the balance lost through the hierarchical dualism of patriarchal societies. I am particularly impressed by her presentation of what Eisler has called the “gylanic” character of goddess cultures. Such “partnership societies,” both Eisler and Gimbutas have argued, eschew the hierarchy, dualism, and exclusivity of later patriarchies. Worship of the goddess did not demand denigration of the male; rather, the female superiority of the Melusine mythologem reflects these gylanic communities as registering humanity’s appreciation for the immanence rather than the transcendence of the spiritual. In and of our lives, not after and above our lives, weaves the threads of these cultural and biological foremothers. Later patriarchal revisions of goddess tales that define Melusine and her sisters as seeking souls by marrying human men clearly reflect the dualism that divides body and soul as female and male, evil and good, devil and god, enemy and friend. Unlike the serpent that sheds its skin to be born again in the flesh, the ophidian goddess was destined in these tales to be cut to pieces, her wings clipped, her gifts stolen, and her message of immanence obliterated from the pages of life.

Storytelling, however, has been as much a province of women as of men, although women’s versions have been dismissed as “old wives’ tales” or demoted to folklore, just as their divinity has been denied and their goddesses shrunk to fit a fantasy world of fairies. Inspired by A. S. Byatt’s reclamation of the Fairy Melusina in her novel Possession, Gillian tracked this alternative literary tradition as well as the mythology of the goddess. As she explains in her introduction, “Byatt actually creates a circle of repossession by telling this tale . . . of the dispossession of the female, and the restoration of her force through knowledge of her ancient dignity.” Alluding to this and other “wonder tales” through which Byatt has revived goddess traditions and balanced gender issues in her fiction, Gillian turned first to various literary versions of Melusine and then to the many writers, male and female, who have also paid homage to these reviled female images of divinity.

This book is the result of Alban’s successful quest into myth and literature to resurrect the immanence of the spiritual in human life and, with that resurrection, to help free us of crippling “dualism, restoring us to our full heritage and liberating us at the start of this new century. Thus the mythic dissociation or split of sensibility across the limen or threshold of body and spirit, male and female, is restored and made whole.”

The way we tell the tale, as Byatt and Alban show, can change the ways we see the world, although the ingredients in the recipe remain the same—“the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent.” Gillian’s study identifies the two weapons, language and image, that can most completely destroy our acceptance of ourselves and of others. What destroys our souls is when we are seen and named by someone we love as beastly, as in Raimondin’s naming of Melusine. How do we retain our souls in our mysterious bodies as we try to survive within the larger mysteries of life? While patriarchal tales have denied women souls, men too have lost their souls in Faustian quests for truth and the resultant despair when possessed or dispossessed of such truth. Not surprisingly, therefore, myths establish interdictions to protect fallen goddesses, while writers like Byatt turn to art, to language and image, to reclaim lost souls and forgotten tales of immanence.

The mystery of myth is in its recognizable truths, but when the agenda of the storyteller distorts the art of myth and twists it into shapes that make us strangers to ourselves, myth then becomes a hegemonic weapon of culture, and men and women both become its victims. Literature is also a kind of mythmaking, and artists are known for challenging the values of their societies. As St. Augustine has explained, “the present of things past is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation.” In what Czeslaw Milosz has called “our only homeland,” the homeland of language, we can improve our memories of the past by sharing our stories, hence increasing the possibilities when imagining our common future. We need to know more than just the empowered tales, or we will only recreate the past that those tales have shaped. Gillian Alban has collected and connected centuries of stories we may never have heard— what a gift she has given us!

The next step beyond identifying and dissipating the curse put on women—by re-membering with the earliest versions and deconstructing later versions of the myths—is to imagine where the quest could lead us given enough time and space to generate our own stories. As Byatt’s final observation in Possession suggests, the questing human consciousness may make connections in its own time and place that remain unknown to history but imaginable to the Romancer, as Ash seems to have done with Maia. We are all a part of the quest, and the story is indeed never-ending, coiling around our communal lives and our mysterious world and into our mouths, providing the words of our ongoing story of humanity.

In the following pages you will read of “the aquatic, ophidian, and avian goddess, snake, winged serpent, or dragon, also woman [who] is seen in the legend of Melusine” that has been manifested in our stories, whether myth or literature or both. Hopefully, studies such as Gillian’s will continue to familiarize a contemporary audience with the earlier versions of myths that supported gylanic communities in hopes that this expanded understanding of herstory and hisstory—as versions of our common story—can help us shape a better future for every marriage of body and soul that constitutes our individual and communal lives.

Book Review

JULIE MARNEY, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Published in European Journal of English Studies, 20 August 2006
volume 10, no. 01, pp 97-110

An investigation of female mythological figures throughout literary history is an engaging and thoughtful idea. This book, which focuses on the occurrence of serpent goddesses, is a well-researched and broad ranging critique. It sets out to provide a historical context for a reading of Melusine, the serpent goddess, as she appears in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, and it does this enormously well. The image of ‘the snake woman or mermaid, who metamorphoses between being woman, snake and dragon’, as Alban describes her (p. 1) is traced back from Byatt’s novel, through Ted Hughes’s muse, and Keats’s Lamia, to a detailed exploration of French legend, and the encounter of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Alban continues the exploration in the cultures of the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Cretans, the Anatolians, the Romans, and the Greeks, with chapter eight focusing on the mythologies of Artemis and Persephone. The mythology surrounding this ophidian goddess is carefully and illuminatingly discussed.

According to Alban, the serpent goddess should be reinterrogated as a feminist figure. As such, the book attempts a re-visioning and reterritorialisation of the herstory of the goddess. Alban seeks first to rescue the myth of the serpent goddess from her appropriation by a patriarchal culture, which has reworked her creative power into a mythology of destruction, and she then seeks to re-vision the snake-woman image as a feminist icon. Unfortunately, it is in this area of feminist argument and debate that the book is ultimately disappointing. Alban fails to communicate how her approach is positioned within the fields of feminist and literary criticism. This is rather ironic considering the inspiration for the study is Possession, a novel of piercing observations about such fields of academic study. In this area, no real consideration is given to the thrust of the analysis, and, as such, this intelligent book is a frustrating read. In terms of the feminist debate of the book, Alban does not go far enough or deep enough, and the argument fails to be rigorous enough.

Any exploration of the snake-woman that fails to acknowledge the significance of He´l`ene Cixous’s image of the monstrous, laughing Medusa, as this study does, is problematic – especially when given the feminist debate that forms the centre of both works. Cixous’s essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, also seeks to repossess the snake-woman figure: ‘You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing’ (Marks, Elaine and de Courtivron, Isabelle, eds. New French Feminisms. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981. 255). This feminist re-visioning of female mythological figures is essential, as Adrienne Rich outlined in her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken’: ‘Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival’ (‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.’ On Lies, Secrets and Silence. New York: Norton, 1979. 40). This act of re-visioning, which Alban calls a repossession, forms the centre of the snake-woman investigation, but never fully articulates the history of feminist re-visioning into which the study falls.

Although this study could be more thoroughly engaged with the feminist debate, it nevertheless articulates an anxiety around the categorisation of images of women into the easy dichotomies of profane, demonised, sexualised, monsters on the one hand, and sacred, idolised, virginal femininity on the other. It is in this way that Alban’s repossession of the snake-woman mythology feels particularly timely. The recent popularisation of the latter image of ‘the sacred female’ by Dan Brown’s best seller The Da Vinci Code, relies on images of woman as the nurturing yin to the patriarchal destructive yang, and reaffirms the mythology of the sacred feminine as the natural and nurturing foundation, the ‘chalice’, of all creation. Such easy bifurcation of the sexes into naturalised, behavioural signifiers of dichotomised gender traits is at best problematic in a post-Cixousian world. Alban’s ‘act of survival’, her repossession of the ideology of the dichotomised sacred or monstrous female is particularly pertinent while such mythologisation continues. Such re-visioning was also undertaken in Gloria Anzaldu´a’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldu´a’s text also celebrates the creative power of female mythological iconography, whilst relishing the element of such mythology that has made woman at once the force of creation as well as the monstrous threat to patriarchal domination. Alban’s intelligent text falls into this lively debate on women’s literary history and iconography, and, as such, provides an illuminating and engaging reading of the history of Melusine, the serpent goddess, and the need for her repossession.