ELH

ELH 68.1 (2001) 135-154

The Politics of Medusa: Shelley's Physiognomy of Revolution

Barbara Judson

In his influential essay "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure," Neil Hertz speculates on the logic through which revolutionary violence is "emblematized . . . as a fierce but not exactly sexless woman." ¹ Although the texts he examines center on the uprising of 1848 and the Paris Commune, he implicitly identifies the English reaction to the French Revolution as the locus classicus of this particular symbol of political terror, noting the exemplary conservative usage of Medusa in Burke's Reflections and the British cartoons it spawned. During the 1790s the Medusa functioned fetishistically: as a horrific image of castration, she emblematized the establishment's fear of losing its political and social privileges to the fury of women and the unpropertied classes demanding enfranchisement; but, at the same time, by virtue of the condensation and displacement intrinsic to symbolization, her snaky tresses extrude an apotropaic effect--constellating the male organ's petrifaction upon encountering this image--a stiffening that reassured the masculine establishment of its undiminished authority. ² This nineties' emblem, encapsulating the Revolutionary drama of terror and its containment, materializes in Burke (and later in other conservatives such as Hugo, du Camp, and de Tocqueville), providing, in Hertz's words, an instance of right-wing "intellectual narcissism . . . , the wish . . . to produce a representation of a complex political situation which would function simultaneously as a representation of self." ³ The icon also appears in the work of Shelley's great period (1818-1819), encompassing Prometheus Unbound, Julian and Maddalo, The Cenci, and the fragment "On the Medusa," but it assumes a different role in this more liberal political context. As a symbol of insurrection, Shelley's Medusa operates predictably enough--depicting the Revolution's spiral through beauty, promise, and eventual terror--but as an emblem of Shelley's consciousness she breaks with the narcissism of conservative allegory, furnishing him with a self-critical representation of his own liberalism. Kelvin Everest has remarked the importance of the double in Shelley's poetry as a medium of self-analysis, and I argue that the Medusa, one of his most intriguing doubles, functions in that way. ⁴ [End Page 135]

Shelley deploys a Medusan iconography most famously in the lyric fragment "On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" (dated 1819, first published in 1824 in Mary Shelley's edition of his Posthumous Poems), but this symbolism also emerges in Prometheus Unbound and the two other works he was writing contemporaneously, Julian and Maddalo and The Cenci. ⁵ These last three pieces were constructed with reference to each other: the first two acts of Prometheus Unbound were punctuated by Julian and Maddalo, and Shelley interrupted his lyrical drama yet again--this time between the third and fourth acts--to write The Cenci. This interwoven composition history is well-known, and much scholarship has focused on the connection between the two dramas, although Julian and Maddalo has for the most part been treated discretely. I argue, however, that these works comprise a syntactic unit, constituting Shelley's troubled statement on the meaning of Medusa in politics and particularly in his own liberal program. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, the wreckage of hope in Britain's reform movement reached its nadir during 1816-19, a period which saw intense spasms of working-class agitation in England brutally put down by the government's machinery of repression--the Spa Fields riots (December 1816), the Pentridge uprising (June 1817), and the Peterloo massacre (August 1819); exiled in Italy, Shelley wrote in support of reform yet feared that England was hovering on the brink of civil war. ⁶ To counter this fear he attempted to forge an oppositional language untainted not only by violence but also by power, of which he was profoundly nervous in the aftermath of two decades of war. Dorinda Outram refers to "the Revolution's rejecting and contorted attitude to power. Many writers have stressed the extent to which, in this discourse, power as such...