A.S. Byatt draws on Greek mythology to title and frame the first story “Medusa’s Ankles” in the short story collection The Matisse Stories. In that story the protagonist, Susannah, is a metaphorical figure for the mythological monster Medusa but avoids the Gorgon’s fate. By drawing on such a potent symbol of women’s rage, Byatt is able to draw a character who does not meet society’s definition of beauty like the mythological Medusa. Rather than a harrowing monster, Medusa emerges as a heroic figure for liberation against her culture’s limited ideas about what a woman should be.
Medusa is an often-referenced character in Greek and Roman mythology. According to the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa was a desirable maiden whose claim to beauty was her hair. One day, as she was praying in the temple of the warrior goddess Athena, the sea god Poseidon saw her and, overcome by her beauty, raped her in the temple. The virgin goddess Athena was so outraged that she turned Medusa’s hair into snakes, thereby making the gorgon monster so hideous that anyone who looked at her turned to stone. Only by looking at her reflection in his bronze shield, was Perseus able to slay Medusa without turning to stone.
This use of the mythological figure has obvious significance in “Medusa’s Ankles.” Susannah struggles against transforming from a beautiful maiden into a middle-aged monster. In the past, Susannah had always insisted on a “natural” look for her hair, consciously fighting against the “artificial” perms of her mother’s era, created by snake-like coils attached to a metal dome. Yet, as she aged, she felt her hair losing its “chestnut-glossy curtain;” as “the ends split, the weight of it broke” and “a kind of frizzed fur replaced the gloss.” So, she turns to hairdresser Lucian for guidance, as the one who will save her from Medusa’s fate as the sexually attractive female transformed into a man’s worst nightmare.
Ironically, Lucian fosters her transformation into Medusa. He speaks of his young girlfriend, how she compares with his middle-aged wife with the fat ankles. Susannah identifies with Lucian’s wife and submits quietly to this emotional rape until Lucian hands her off to an assistant, who completes her metamorphosis into the Gorgon monster. Susannah looks into the mirror and sees herself as the “snake-crowned” replica of her mother emerging “from the dryer in all her embarrassing ir-reality.” In an act that evokes Perseus’ slaying of Medusa, she smashes the mirror image in resentment and rage.
In Susannah’s rage lies a reworking of the myth. She demolishes the mirror image, not herself. This is Medusa attacking Perseus’s shield and its reflection. In the process, she reclaims Medusa as a figure of liberation against the artificial and socially-constrained image that would define her as a monster. Susannah rejects society’s and the mirror’s mandate that she is only “a middle aged woman with a hair-do.” In expressing her smoldering rage, she finally becomes what she has always wanted to be—a potently sexual female. Both the mirror and Lucian’s hands had held her down physically and emotionally: she must bow her head “under his repressing palm.” With the release of her emotions and the smashing of the myth, Susannah becomes a compelling, real, forceful woman.
Only after she rejects society’s and, in a sense, men’s definition of beauty does she become attractive to her husband. He “[sees] her. (Usually he did not.)” In this myth, Medusa does not die at the hands of a man. Instead, she uses the rage of Medusa to reject the curse of aging and assert her own beauty
-- Virginia Zasadny, UWF student
