MEDUSA FIGURES AND SACRIFICES IN THE POETRY OF BOGAN, PLATH, REKDAL, SCHIFF, AND SHAUGHNESSEY

Abstract

This essay considers the use in contemporary poetry of the mythological figure of Medusa and the mythological practice of sacrifice. In Part One, “Medusa Figures in the Poetry of Louise Bogan and Sylvia Plath,” I provide a broad introduction to the Medusa mythology and its critical interpretations and then focus on two poems about Medusa or Medusa-like figures by each poet, considering Bogan’s “Medusa” and “The Fury” alongside Plath’s “Perseus, The Triumph of Over Suffering” and “Medusa.” The gorgon provides both poets an ambiguous and potent figure for exploring ideas ranging from female monstrosity to conceptions of self and the gaze. Together their poems illustrate pervasive themes in poetry about Medusa but also provide evidence for how even a single writer’s approaches to a single myth can resist generalization. In Part Two, “Mythical Sacrifice in the Poetry of Paisley Rekdal, Robyn Schiff, and Brenda Shaughnesssy,” I first provide a brief overview of scholarship about sacrifice, touching on its role in religion and its other cultural roles, especially in relation to power, war, and hierarchy. I also consider the phenomena of female sacrifice and female self-sacrifice. I then discuss how Rekdal, Schiff, and Shaughnessy approach the mythology of sacrifice through retellings of classical mythology and through poems which use allusions to the sacrifice stories of classical myth to explore modern situations. I closely examine Rekdal’s “Horn of Plenty” and Schiff’s “A Hearing,” “A Doe Replaces Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar,” and “A Doe Does Not Replace Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar.” Finally, I look at Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Our Andromeda,” a book within which there is scant mythical allusion and no retelling, but which is governed by the allusion in the title. Both sections of this paper illustrate how contemporary women poets use myth in ways as complex and multivalent as the mythology they explore.