“…and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my wicked little ways…” [1]

 This study has developed an interpretive model to examine the singular drive of Western culture to purify, idealize and define itself by fictions, by visual or written images, the latter also being termed by convention “figures” or “tropes.” The compulsion of the West to create an artifice by which to present itself readily becomes a need to transform itself into an artifice. Western identity is a project of transformation and the result, like the heads of Orpheus or Medusa, otherwise so different retain an image-making power in the mesmeric horror of their attenuation that mirrors the traumas in which the drive to the artifice began. The death and loss of Eurydice and the rape by medusa by Poseidon are the founding traumas; the decapitations and the song, sculpture that eventually result are artistic forms the idealize the horror from which they sprung. As the trajectory of culture plays itself out, the internal horror becomes discussed and represented with increasing clarity in mages of Medusa, Sphinxes, the death of Orpheus, sexual ambiguity and novels like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ultimately, with the birth of the early Modern period, in the mid-Victorian and Symbolist era the horror and ambiguity is seen as good by increasing numbers of intelligentsia first and then, seeping downward the lower classes, “workers, puppets” or “cattle” of the idle nobility who alone know beauty, as Ruskin put it [2]. At that point, I should say, this point, whichever way one seeks to flee is hell because institutions, assumptions and ideals have been redefined in hellish, that is traumatic ways with the ultimate terror being the arrival of a virtual reality, an ultimate artifice that displaces life as utterly as the Demonic triumphs in “Christabel.” (more…)