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MEDUSA'S MIRRORS: SPENSER, SHAKESPEARE, MILTON, AND THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE FEMALE SELF. By Julia M. Walker. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Pp. 236. $39.50.
In Medusa's Mirrors: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and the Metamorphosis of the Female Self, Julia M. Walker fuses psychoanalytic and New Historicist approaches to offer strong and imaginative readings that challenge our perception of three canonical Renaissance texts. Adopting feminist theory on the function of the male gaze, she evinces the trope of the mirror in Eve's observation of her reflection in the lake, Britomart's gaze into her father's magic mirror, and myriad instances of Cleopatra's reflection in the eyes and acts of others, as a key to the construction of female selfhood. Her study asks the important question of whether the sense of interiority that Renaissance male authors have been understood to initiate in male characters has been granted equally to their women. In response, she offers an intellectually rigorous and nuanced examination of the limits within which female subjectivity is constrained. In a stroke of originality, as astute as it is ingenious, Walker weaves her argument around the texts' often subtle allusions to the image of the mirror in Ovid's myth of Medusa and its analog, that of Narcissus. "The pattern of reflected identity and power found in the Medusa story," she writes, "is at the heart of Spenser's representation of Britomart, of Shakespeare's character, Cleopatra, and of Milton's construction of Eve.... it is the intellectual equivalent of a genetic fingerprint that so clearly marks Ovid's tale of a woman who seems to have power, but who actually has none, except as the result of the reflected vision of a man" (p. 14).
The trope Walker examines is itself extremely complex and her analysis even more so. In it the text is a mirror, but in the process of miroring a figure must undergo a reversal, or chiasmus, on the rain, or surface, before the image is returned to the eye as a reflection. Walker reads this process perceptively into her teasing out of the Medusa myth and its subtle interweavings of selfhood, identity gender, and power. In Ovid, Medusa, because of her beauty, is raped by Neptune in...