The Medusa Effect: Representation and Epistemology in Victorian Aesthetics (review)

This book consists of five dense meditations on the figure of the Medusa in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem and abandoned painting "Aspecta Medusa" (1867), Sigmund Freud's essay "Medusa's Head" (1922), Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1870-71), two aestheticist essays on Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci by A. C. Swinburne and Walter Pater from the late 1860s, and a reading of George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" (1859). For Thomas Albrecht, these diverse sources are organised around the structural repetition of what he terms the "Medusa effect." He divides this into three stages: first, the writer or artist confronts a dangerous object that offers some terrifying knowledge; next, there is a protective turning away from the object, and its subsequent sublimation into aesthetic representation; finally, there is recognition that this representation at once masters terror but also builds a monument to it. After an introduction that concentrates on Rossetti's commissioned painting of Perseus beheading the Medusa—a painting deemed too gruesome or insufficiently sublimated by his wealthy patron and which left a trace only in the accompanying poem—Albrecht turns immediately to Freud. This is because the three-stage Medusa effect is precisely modelled on Freud's understanding of the fetish. The fetishist sees something horrifying and covers it over by monumentalising something else as a fetish, which simultaneously hides and reveals the truth; it becomes an emblem of disavowal, that unstable condition between knowledge and denial. The Medusa's head is an instantiation of this condition of ambivalence: it will scare you to death, but if viewed in a mirror or contained in a representation, it can also be used as an instrument of power. Thus, "saving and killing are both simultaneous properties of the one Medusa's head" (15).

Apart from Freud, the other presiding influence on Albrecht's book is American deconstruction. In an analytic strategy that will be very familiar from the writing of Paul de Man or J. Hillis Miller (to whom the book is dedicated), Albrecht is always interested in the moment when these texts rhetorically undermine themselves. Central to deconstructive criticism, Freud and Nietzsche thus finally reveal that their invocations of Medusa collapse under their own anxious figurations. Freud's confident interpretation of the Medusa's head as a symbolic warding off and monument to castration is itself Medusoid, desperate to assert authority where his interpretations might arbitrarily skirt across the surface of an abyss of meaning. Nietzsche's opposition of Apollo and Dionysus, interpreted as sublimated Greek art that tries to master the Medusoid terrors of the Dionysian, is also, entirely unsurprisingly, found to unpick itself rhetorically and epistemologically in Nietzsche's text.

The Medusa's capacity to act as a generalisable deconstructive lever is tested in the last two chapters. Albrecht focuses on Pater's discussion of the "Head of Medusa" in the Uffizi, a painting that Victorian scholars incorrectly ascribed to da Vinci. The essay borrows its intensely subjective regard for the contradictory feelings of beauty and terror evoked in this image from Swinburne's "Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence" (1868), which glancingly invokes the Medusa in his discussion of Michelangelo's sketch studies of a woman's head. Both Pater and Swinburne repeatedly catch at the contradictory sense of looking at and looking away from such beauty, the embrace of fear and desire that lies at the core of aestheticism. Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" takes a parallel metaphor of unveiling for horrifying revelation, and Albrecht reads this as another instance of the Medusa effect, which begins to unravel Eliot's ethics of sympathy. Albrecht shows great patience and adeptness in teasing these patterns out in intensive close readings and this slim monograph consequently has an unusually sharp focus and coherence in its core thesis.

This is avowedly not a piece of historicist scholarship. It harks back to Jacques Derrida or de...