During the era of the French Revolution, Medusa was a powerful symbol, and one that was very popular for the Jacobin movement, who often would display it as an emblem of "French Liberty". This symbol was considered to be in opposition to "English Liberty", represented by Athena. Medusa was also a very common way to demonize the opposition, when exploited by conservative publicists. The monster represented a fear of the establishment losing privelidge to those not yet enfranchised in the system.
An excellent subversion of how Medusa was typically involved in this time frame originates from Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical writer during the early 19th century. To him, Medusa represented an ‘abject hero’, a victim of tyranny whose weakness, disfiguration, and mutation become a revolutionary power of their own. Shelly subverted this demonizing symbol and instead of using to demonize the opposition to those in power, he identified with Medusa's femininity to better delineate his own liberalism. However, he didn't find what he wanted in the figure, and eventually found himself dissatisfied, his dissatisfaction with his attempt to reclaim a symbol from the establishment circles tracing a path similar to his dissatisfaction with his own reform efforts, his efforts at reclaiming Medusa only leading to another symbol of revolutionary violence, the Demogorgon, when he wanted nonviolence and reason. He effectively finds his own despair at the state of politics of the time in Medusa. In a way, the outcome of his efforts mirror the outcome of the French Revolution: violent, destructive change. Revolutionary violence, just as was prevalent at the time. |
On The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci
Percy Bysshe Shelley It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death. Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [ ] grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions shew Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there- A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks. Florence, 1819. |