The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive

OpenAlex · English

Written by a scholar–an expert in the field of women and writing, with a focus on the representations of women in mythology and women writers’ re/vision of these myths–this book can be read as a product of an extended interest, already evident in her earlier study Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology (Lexington Books, 2003). Alban’s 2003 book pursues the figure of Melusine, the serpent woman, into French medieval folklore and ancient myth, and inevitably compares it to the Medusa myth. Now, in this dense investigation of the Medusa figure in contemporary women’s writing, Alban focuses on many works in various genres by writers as different as Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Rhys, and Michèle Roberts. Studying the female characters as both the bearers and receivers of the “petrifying, nurturing and redemptive” gaze of Medusa, the “dreadfully gorgeous victim” (2), she views them through the vision filters of such giant figures as Freud, Lacan, Laing, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Irigaray, Spivak, Klein, Winnicott, and Chodorow.