[Ads-l] OT: Sheelanagig was Re: It was not permitted to pass.

[Laurence Horn]

> On May 30, 2017, at 7:13 PM, Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM> wrote:
> 
> On 5/30/17 12:00 AM, ADS-L automatic digest system (but, really, Larry Horn) wrote:
>> Hmmm.  Which myth are you thinking of, Medusa the Gorgon?  I’d never really considered her as a manifestation of the V.D. motif (as it were), although being turned to stone isn’t a walk in the park either.  But I see that if you detour through Freud you can see her in that light, or some have claimed to.  Apparently the snaky hair represents the mother’s pubic patch glimpsed by the young boy, who is thus afflicted with fears of castration (even more than he would have been anyway).  I don’t see it, but there’s this depiction of the relation of Medusa to the V.D. motif in a particularly well-argued passage excerpted from a paper in_Bits of Organization_, a 2009 volume edited by Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes, found by searching “Vagina Dentata” + “Medusa”; emphasis mine.
> 
> Sometimes a toothed vagina is just a toothed vagina . . .
> 
Better make sure there’s no cigar (that’s just a cigar) in the immediate neighborhood, though...

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org