A large pink female body lays, pseudo-seductively, on blue tiles, the size of her hips and thighs exaggerated, the head to body ratio warped to accentuate the curvaceous feminine form. Perfectly rounded breasts sit pertly atop the fleshy roundness, indicating a body unmistakably female, unmistakably woman. It is the image of this fleshy, voluptuous, rounded pink body that initially attracts Susannah to the salon in A.S. Byatt’s Medusa’s Ankles. It is the image of woman that brings her to the place she visits only when “her hair began to grow old.” The significance, however, of the image of Matisse’s Pink Nude is only fully realized when Susannah experiences a meltdown following the redecoration of Lucian’s salon and the removal of “the Rosy Nude,” Susannah’s image of womanhood. Throughout the story, Susannah is careful to distinguish between woman and girl. This distinction lays the groundwork for the story’s climax and is central to the tension Susannah exudes. Susannah’s outburst and subsequent destruction of the salon stem, not from a bad haircut, but from her apprehensions surrounding society’s obsession with youth and her realization that she has moved out of the world of the girl into the realm of the woman.
For Susannah, the painting and the pictures represent much more than an appeal to her personal aesthetic tastes; they represent competing ideals of femininity and, for Susannah, her place as a woman in society. Susannah sees, in the salon, a microcosm of society. All around her the image of the woman is being cast aside in preference for the image of the girl. Lucian is leaving his wife, the mother of his child, for his young girlfriend. Matisse’s Pink Nude is replaced with images of girls in grey tones.
The fleshy contours of the Matisse painting are completely absent from the pictures that take its place following the redecoration of the salon. It is against the “photographs of girls with grey faces, coal-black eyes and spiky lashes, under bonfires of incandescent puce hair which matched their lips, rounded to suck at microphones perhaps, or other things,” that the importance of Matisse’s Pink Nude is found. Everywhere the image of the woman is being cast aside, everywhere except in Susannah’s own face, which is incapable of escaping the aging process and the outward signs of maturity. It appears that Susannah’s crazed destruction of the salon is a direct result of her correlating the image of the female present in the salon with her place as a woman in society. The removal of Matisse’s Pink Nude and the subsequent addition of the photographs of girls stands as the symbolic removal of woman from a prominent place in society and the exultation of girl.
The issues of femininity brought up by the story Medusa’s Ankles find visual expression in the literary juxtaposition of Matisse’s Pink Nude and the grey photographs of girls. While one is the embodiment of fleshy womanhood, the other stands as a representation of society’s changing relationship with the female figure and the developing obsession with youth and figural emaciation. It is the stark contrast between the media and the opposing femininities that underline the story’s central conflict, aging in a youth crazed society.
-- Shreese Williams, UWF Student
