Carol Ann Duffy’s Medusa: The last stanza revised..

And here you come

 with a shield for a heart

and a sword for a tongue

 and your girls, your girls.

Wasn’t I beautiful

Wasn’t I fragrant and young?

 Look at me now.

Revised.

Medusa’s last words seem to linger over the physical proportions and accoutrements  of her impending executioner, Perseus. The intense ironies of his self protective substitutions are met by Medusa with acceptance.

As a mature, profoundly unattractive woman, she accepts the inevitability of such displacements and the reader recognises perhaps Medusa’s resignation to this final consummation, where death not unusually, displaces sex. In this case of course, it is her death that provides the consummation and the  tragic irony of the last line seems as much a self conscious plea for a last look of interest, however predatory, before her extinction and consignation to be the head that is triumphantly displayed as a grotesque trophy on Perseus’s shield.

In another way, I feel that Duffy is highlighting the fate of so many women, consigned by a frequently misogynistic world, to accept the ‘substitutions’ that men impose upon their daily lives. Even the serial unfaithlessness of the male seems something to be admired rather than criticised.  Medusa’s age has reduced  her to jealousy and rage. Yet here,she rather ironically admires the male status and success flaunted by the many  ’girls’ who favour this active, desirable male.

Reading my notes again, I still find the dreamless state of Medusa deeply saddening. Her antagonistic behaviours have alienated her from sociality. Who would risk friendship with such a femme ( truly) fatale?  Therefore the last plea articulates her resignation to solitude, to being ‘offensive’ as there  is no other defence for her hurt.

Old thoughts.

Medusa’s final words before her infamous decapitation by Perseus communicate a pathos which emanates from the elegaic tone as much the irony of her observation. Medusa’s reflection upon the approach of Perseus with his warrior physicality and powerful sexual aura, involves several misrecognitions or displacements which highlight the imaginative torment inflicted upon her by the jealous goddess Athene. For Medusa’s belief in Perseus’s subsitutions reveal a lingering idealism which has not been destroyed by the incarceration of her ugliness, dramatically embodied in the serpents writhing about her head. Medusa still finds it possible that there can be a residue of humanity in this hellish new world she is forced to live in and to perpetuate. Hence the shield is standing in ‘for a heart’ and the sword ‘for a tongue.’ Our knowledge of Medusa’s fate of course challenges this unfortunate reading, yet Carol Ann Duffy reminds us that even Medusa was ‘beautiful’ and ‘fragrant’ and ‘young’. Does fate and often age take away such anchors? I think not. Words return to haunt us, close time capsules of emotions that just cannot go away. I do wodner at this point about the smell of Medusa. Did she ever smell otherwise? Does her self neglect anticipate that of Miss Havisham? Would it have made any difference if Miss Havisham smelt of Chanel? ! I think so! And I realised as I was walking through mud with my dogs this morning that the greatest pathos around the compelling tale of Medusa is that in turning everyone who gazes upon her to stone, she has forgotten how to dream, perhaps because she is too bitter to risk dreaming ever ever again. Thus,through Athene’s cruel punishment for her natural libido, she deprives other’s of their mutability, of their physical flexibility and mobility by fixing them into stone. They become, as a very astute student told me on Saturday without any ability to ‘rot’ and thus cannot enjoy the natural cycle of ‘invisiblity’. They remain fixed, frozen in ironic, doll like masks of themselves, not unlike( and I will write more on this) Freud’s conception of the ‘unccanny’ in his hugely influential essay of that name. The tragedy of the last line ensares the terrible paradox of Medusa’s dreamless fate. She is woman who not unnaturally desires to be gazed at, to be looked at with love, even with desire. yet who would dare to gaze upon the Medusa knowing the living death that awaits them for such a look? Hence the last line is both plea and threat. And Carol Ann Duffy is superb at finding such moments in her poetry where a character is simultaneously in several psychological and emotional places at once. ‘Look at me now.’

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