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The Medusa Reader, edited by Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), ISBN 0-415-90098-0, xviii + 310pp., £16.99 pb.
In this much needed anthology, Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers artfully confront the icon of dangerous looking. The extracts are arranged chronologically from ancient legends told by Homer and Hesiod et al to relatively recent discourses of feminist empowerment, as in Emily Erwin Culpepper's essay entitled 'Ancient Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women's Rage' (1986). Feminists have found, within the stories of the Medusa, narratives of rape and ravishment, retribution and revenge along with mirrors of themselves. As May Sarton writes in her poem 'The Muse as Medusa" (1971): Ι turn your face around! It is my face. / That frozen rage is what I must explore' (108).
That the Medusa is wooed by the poets is not surprising, considering that she gave birth to Pegasus, the poet's muse. Among the Medusa poems included here are Percy Bysshe Shelley's tribute to Leonardo da Vinci's Medusa in Florence, which he caresses as 'Tempestuous loveliness of terror' (76) and Sylvia Plath's spiky'Medusa' (1962), which begins: Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs. . . / You house your unnerving head - God-ball / Lens of mercies' (102).
The inter-disciplinarity of this collection reflects the different faces of the Medusa. Lizbeth Goodman's 'Who's looking at Who(m): Re-viewing Medusa' (1996), situates the Medusa within performance art as a metaphor for the transformative power of women by drawing on Dorothea Smart's one-woman show 'Medusa'. Smart interprets the Medusa's snaky locks as a black woman's 'nappy' hair, which serves as a metonym for the lesbian, 'outsider' or black woman, who have been threatening to certain white men. More intrepid males (since no woman has been petrified by the gorgon) include artists and fashion designers from Giorgio Vasari to Gianni Versace. In the latter's 'The Versace Moment' (1996), the Medusa is shown as a haute-couture designer logo, in stark contrast to Jo Springer's homely instructions on embroidering your own Medusa to make an 'attractive pillow' (122) design. Less heimlich is Freud's...