Medusa's Curse or Cure?

middle age, friendship, and body insecurity

My 45-year-old self is so much a betrayal of what my 20-year-old self believed and desired for my body. I can almost see the sneer. But I’m secure in my competencies, my sturdiness, all the fucks I don’t give that I gave then about my physicality: thighs rubbing, cellulite puckering, thick thumbs, wonky hairline, crooked nose, thin lips, blue under eyes.

Yet my attention to ankles has remained. They are my fetish and my shame.

There’s a shared understanding between my mom and me. She is my biggest supporter, reluctant to criticize me about anything, but we have a euphemistic mother-daughter lexicon when shopping for shoes. “That strap cuts at a bad angle;” “the color draws the eye too much;” “maybe unpractical in London’s rain?”  It’s almost always the shoe’s fault.

As mouthy daughters do, I call her on many things, but in a shoe store, I nod, give my silent assent, sign my name to our tacit agreement that yes, it is certainly some fault of the shoe or designer that my thick ankles are not made thinner in these shoes.

Boots have become my bag, out of vanity.

I was 11 when I learned my ankles were unflattering. Starting middle school, my two closest friends were twins, Kelly and Kara. They were the youngest of five, all of their names starting with K, and they weren’t so much beautiful as terrifically healthy. Sporty, crafty, outdoorsy, never procrastinating, their cellar walls lined with jars and cans for the end of the world. If there was a nuclear holocaust or a rapture, this was the family that would last. And if they’d been poets too, I would’ve called it in and died there at age 11.

We were playing Oregon’s Trail in their study after school the day Kelly pulled out a drawing of a woman’s body, a grayscale outline. “These are the way women’s legs should look,” she told me. The legs touched ever so lightly at the inner thighs, then the knees, then the calves, then the ankles. 

The computer screen blinked, a tombstone “Here Lies Stephanie, she should have known better” signaling the end of our game, and Kelly stood up, pulled up her shorts to her crotch, and beamed. Her legs were the drawing’s legs, but her thighs didn’t quite kiss.

“Show me yours,” she demanded. I stood up, understanding mine wouldn’t match the picture because her thin smile told me they wouldn’t. 

My ankles, then and now, were built for old fashioned nurse shoes, Katherine Mansfield ankles. Sturdy, like a tree with two trunks. There is no tapering. No hourglass shape to my Achilles tendon. My feet look like they’ve been crudely pushed onto the bottom of my legs by a child potter instead of sculpted, like Kelly’s were. 

Ever since that afternoon, I’ve noticed ankles, hungrily. As I lunged into warrior one in a yoga class and looked ahead, I fell in love with the way a colleague’s ankles tapered into her heels. Last weekend, I licked my lips at Indira Varma’s ankles when she walked out in her nightgown as Lady Macbeth. I notice ankles. Always. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen your ankles. I’m sorry. 

My husband has wonderful ankles; I envy them daily, crossed on the coffee table in front of us as we settle into a movie. They fit together so snugly, like long lovers sunbathing. And I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge considering this years ago as I thought about our prospective progeny.

The human body has about 350 joints, and the ankle joint is the intersection of three bones: the tibia, fibula and talus; their gathering point in diagram looks a bit like where Algeria meets Niger meets Libya on the map. Even though it’s one of the body’s primary joints, the ankle is notoriously unstable—25,000 people per day are spraining their ankles—but perhaps not as weak as my weakness for them. I don’t want to admit what I’d give up for a nice pair.

In the 1800s, the ankle was considered provocative, the subject of Victorian pornography. And in the 1930s, the UK held “pretty ankle” competitions, Kelly and I in her den on that spring afternoon, but at a larger scale. The women’s bodies and faces were concealed so the judge (a man) might not be distracted from the delicate lines of their ankles. 

Even as I want to distance myself from my ankles, I can’t help but join a conversation about ankles. And even as I don’t want to pay attention to them, there they are, preceding me into the room. In the time of ankle competitions, ankle was verbified, used as slang in the entertainment industry to describe “walking out on something or someone.” But even as I ankle, my ankles are with me. The inescapable thickness of them.

I read A.S. Byatt’s short story “Medusa’s Ankles” because ankles were in the title. The subject of the story is Susannah, a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her stage of life and her discontent in a salon, where she repeatedly subjects herself to a stylist (Lucian) who talks more than he listens, bemoaning his predicament between wife and mistress. 

In Lucian’s subtext, there’s a plea for Susannah to substantiate his right to leave his wife for his mistress—as if it’s not also a rejection of Susannah. As if a scorned middle-aged woman is not a hall of mirrors in which all women see the reflection of their own rejection. Their own possibility of being made the gorgon.

There are scissors everywhere in the story, often carelessly close to Susannah’s face as her hairdresser gesticulates. Chekov’s gun waiting to stab. In her final visit to the salon, when Susannah asks Lucian what he will decide, he tells her the deciding factor is his wife’s “fat ankles.” They disgust him so he will risk it all and leave her.  

At this remark—not the scissors—Susannah assumes her monster self, in her maroon smock she rages and breaks everything she can: dryers and basins and brushes. The sound system. The strangest and eeriest part of the story is the hairdresser’s response. Lucian remains calm, becomes understanding, patronizingly so. Even as he’s created the reasons for her fury, even as Susannah destroys his newly-renovated salon, even as his employees cower, he is indifferent to her destruction, just as he has been to the pleas of his wife, his daughter. It’s as if Susannah behaving monstrously was the consent he needed.

Beyond the title, Byatt never mentions Medusa, but like the scissors, she’s everywhere in the narrative. Medusa was cursed after Neptune ravaged/raped her in Minerva’s Temple (depending on whose story you read). And in revenge for defiling her temple, Minerva transformed Medusa’s luxurious hair into snakes, thus the beautiful maiden became the monster.

Medusa is nothing if not a myth of women’s shame about what is none of their doing.

“Head of Medusa” by Benvenuto Cellini (1545) at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Some myths suggest Perseus killed Medusa while she was sleeping, as this statuette might suggest, with Perseus’s hand grasping her hair from behind.

The tragedy of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Assia Wevill is a 1960s story of two women embodying both Medusa and Minerva, each of them victim and perpetrator. Hughes got his mistress, Wevill, pregnant while Plath was at home, isolated in her cave with their one- and four-year-old children. Shortly before she committed suicide, Plath listened to the broadcast of her husband’s play, “The Difficulties of the Bridegroom,” the latter half of which details an obsessive desire for and attention to the mistress’s body, a play that filled Plath with shame and further socially isolated her. 

In a letter, Plath expressed her devastation but also her shock at Hughes’s choice in mistress, noting Wevill’s “thick ankles” in her criticism. Indeed, even after Plath’s death, her long shadow remained to haunt Wevill. Assia was tortured by Plath’s suicide, blamed for it, so much so that she took her own life and her daughter’s life by the same means Plath had, dragging a bed into the kitchen, smashing up sleeping pills, turning on the gas. 

Hughes, like Neptune before him, remained relatively unscathed but for several feminist critics.

The story of the two poets and the translator smacks of Greek tragedy, and yet, years after reading about it—I feel gross even saying this—I remember the pleasure it brought me to know a thick-ankled woman’s body could be rhapsodized in a play. 

Writing of ankles, I’d be remiss not to talk about Achilles. Even as I’m sure his ankles had the beautiful long lines my husband’s have. The sea nymph Thetis dipped her son into the River Styx to protect his mortal body from death. But a mother can’t dip a baby in a river without holding on, and where she grasped him, by his ankle, she doomed him. At the Trojan War’s end, after nine years of proving himself Greek’s greatest warrior, Achilles was struck by an arrow in his ankle. An arrow shot not by a great fighter, but by the playboy, the dallier, the impulsive reason for the mess of that war: Paris. 

The Achilles tendon, mine, is almost not there. Sometimes I wonder if an arrow were shot in, would I have enough extra bulge to survive? Achilles might’ve benefited from a pair of trunks like mine. 

Now that I’ve reached middle-age, I’m thinking a lot about resilience and midpoints. There’s a vantage point to being in the middle of things, your past an equal distance away to (hopefully) your future. The experiences of what was readily applied to what is and will be. I have let go of so much vanity, so many insecurities of my physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual self, and still I hold onto this obsession with ankles. Why?

My hatred for my ankles was born out of jealousy and comparison. Kelly and I; Sylvia and Assia; Minerva and Medusa. 

But there’s also this: in all the myriad myths about Medusa, there is not one documentation of her killing a fellow woman. Men turned to stone at her gaze, goddesses cursed her and ensured her decapitation, but she never exacted revenge or fury on a mortal woman. Terrified as I was by her serpent hair and isolation, this is a part of her mythology I never paid attention to as a child. Today I am charmed by the vulnerable; the part of us not dipped, not gilded by immortality; the parts exposed to the world and to arrows; the parts we wish weren’t ours. In my 40s, my friendships have deepened as I’ve been in awe of my friends’ abilities, accomplishments, qualities—qualities, accomplishments, abilities I would’ve been enchanted by but also jealous of ten, twenty years ago. By baring myself, naming my Achilles heels, letting out my serpent hair, I’ve been liberated to love the women in my life in a way I didn’t know before. And in return, I feel loved more than I’ve ever felt loved. In “Medusa’s Ankles,” Susannah refused middle age. I am delighting in it. 

It is just that Achilles heel—my ankles—that still rankle, still remind me of envy and vanity and how often women are pitted against women, girls against girls, made again and again both the villain and the victim of the story. 

And maybe, really, my ankles are a pesky and necessary reminder: a reminder of how far the rest of me has come.