Meanwhile, she holds the tribe under the aura of her evil eye, from which dubious magic they attempt to protect themselves with what turns out to be the gesture of the old Christian cross, always occurring in response to her petrifying
Medusan gaze.
This passage, like the lines that describe the narrator's initial encounter with the
Medusan "flower," evokes the woman's unknowability.
(19) But what are we to make of Westervelt's equally
Medusan manhood?
With its rictus, evocative stone 'chevelure', griffin-topped helmet and Sphinx-like attributes, Rude's 'la Marseillaise' on the facade of the Arc de Triomphe (1833-6) materialized the ambiguities of the
Medusan 'reve de pierre' which Baudelaire would subsequently enshrine in a verbal image in 'La Beaute' (1961: 20).
The woman's
Medusan hair that is the centerpiece of this description functions as what the earlier passage calls a "serpentine or otherwise bestial emblem" of her fatal nature.
Whereas Beatrice helped Dante overcome 'the
Medusan image of a past poetic' (87), Laura and Petrarch confronted the virgin together in order to affirm his identity.
In these occurrences the shield/mirror signifies as it (1) makes captives of those in the audience who identify with the stereotypes, (2) immobilizes and erases the texts of those
Medusan feminists with whom these men perceive themselves to be involved in a contest-conquest, and (3) allows the men to engage in exhibitionary narcissism - a perverse pleasure too intense to be imagined (alone).
14 Pym offers an elaborate discussion of audience reception that is unremarkable in itself, but is ripe for psychoanalytic inquiry in the anxious, unwittingly "
Medusan" drama its rhetoric betrays, especially, of course, in light of the relevance Freud's "Medusa" has for his theory of fetishism.
The extensive embroidery on the breast is the text's
Medusan laughter, chiefly evoked by Pearl as she represents the "rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" of Hester's nature (59) while mocking the law of the fathers and the pusillanimity of her father.
Rates of these biological interactions could provide information to modify physically based estimates such as EVR to create a more realistic model of the physical-biological interactions that ultimately determine
medusan foraging rates.
In the section "The Problem of Zenobia," Dill addresses Zenobia's most salient characterizations--as a
Medusan or Ophelian figure, as a masochist, as a betrayer of feminist ideals.
Indeed, in the next couplet, the "Doctor she" becomes a witch whose "sole delight" is "[t]o order draughts as black as night"--an unnatural act, as the clangorous iteration of the dental /d/ sounds hints, through which the
Medusan physician's "very glance might cast a spell" as she produces her "chill and acrid potions." In violating female nature she has become unsexed: her appearance is "so grim and stern" that no "heart could burn / For one so uninviting"; she no longer displays a normative woman's "gentle sympathy" but eschews "[a]ll female graces"; and, most ominously, "[s]he seems a man in woman's clothes." In its final stanza, titled "Moral," the poem reiterates its distressing message.
