Medusa on the Barricades

The mythology created by the powerfully patriarchal society of classical Greece (and substantially adopted by Rome) turned the Medusa or Gorgon—like other female images that originated in a matriarchal context as beautiful and independent—into a monstrous and evil creature whose decapitated head had lethal powers put in the service of the patriarchal deity Athene/Minerva (herself transformed from her matriarchal origins).

This myth of transformation has remained a persistent paradigm in post-classical Western society. Moreover, I believe that it corresponds to and can help clarify changes in representations of women during the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, and that innovative reinterpretations of the myth by feminists in Paris after the 1960s (which have significant implications for Freud’s famous interpretation) constituted an effort to break a cycle of liberal expansion and conservative contraction. At issue often is the desire of a socially dominant male group—sensing a threat to that domination within a period of social turbulence—to produce a sexually tendentious representation of women. ¹ During the late sixties some French feminists schooled in Lacanian psychoanalysis vigorously contested the exclusive role of male desire in such representations.

Particularly relevant to the feminist critique as it emerged in the turbulent conditions of the sixties was the thought of Bakhtin, who emphasized laughter in the carnivalesque as a form of popular counterculture capable of shaping reality. The role of laughter has more recently been made explicit in the historical studies of Natalie Z. Davis, who connected the “disorderly woman” to carnivalesque disobedience, ² and Lynn Hunt, and in the polemics of Julia Kristeva—who wrote in the periodical Tel Quel (1974) that “We laugh at castration”—and above all of Hélène Cixous (1975). But the issues that exploded in the sixties were long in formation.

The ideal image of a woman to prerevolutionary neoclassical writers and artists was the mother tending her child; daughters, raw and unformed creatures, were essentially mothers in training. In the eighteenth century the ascendant bourgeoisie in France increasingly emphasized the nuclear family as a control of inheritance rights modeled after the lines of succession of royalty and nobility.

The growing egalitarianism associated with the new social ideals evolved in the enlightenment had an impact on political behavior during the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830: for a moment it enabled women to enter the public sphere of political action and made possible a new image of young women. During the early phases of the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 real or invented stories described how vigorous young women, standing beside their male compatriots, performed valiantly on the barricades, sometimes advancing the standards at great personal peril. In the first flush of turbulent revolution, images of such women (termed by Agulhon “Mariannes au combat”) served as allegorical representations of Liberty. One such image of liberty as female and strong and without mysogynistic overtones was represented in a drawing by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon of a muscular Liberty who “Has Overthrown the Hydra of Tyranny and Broken the Yoke of Despotism.” ³

It is helpful to frame these moments of enthusiasm through the well-known concept of the “Carnivalesque” of Bakhtin, complementing it with the theory of the “Ventil-Sitte” of the ethnologist A. Vierkandt (1867–1953), who, before Bakhtin, described the carnival as one of those ritualized moments of catharsis when a society releases its accumulated tensions, and thereafter returns to normal. ⁴ We can characterize the historical swings between coercive order and anarchy in terms of an oscillation between systolic contraction and diastolic expansion.

Such a sequence seems in fact to have developed during the French Revolutions. Some male revolutionaries initially figured Liberty by Marianne, a woman of the people; but invariably this vigorous young female was later either transformed into a monstrous woman-man by male revolutionaries or displaced by the scions of Zeus, symbols of law and reason— Pallas Athene, sprung from Zeus’ head, paradoxically a virgin with quite matronly dimensions; and Herakles, Zeus’ son (protected by Athene). As observed by Lynn Hunt (following hints of Agulhon), in the Republic of 1792 “the collective violence...