There have been lots of literary and pictorial representations of Medusa from Homer to Freud, from Caravaggio and Rubens to today's Versace and Six Flags Great Adventure advertisement. The trite but widespread Freudian notion that Medusa ultimately refers to female genitalia, however, has not been under precise scrutiny. Whether Freud interpreted Medusa's head as the one simultaneously bringing about castration and erection, it is true, however, that he contributed in the formation of negative Medusa while discarding the “tempestuous loveliness” and “countenance divine” of beautiful Medusa which Shelley described in his “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” The Medusa which Freud adopted was the one most of painters and sculptors portrayed in a negative way.The popular and scholarly reception of her, however, has been following the negative image of Medusa which Freud unwittingly emphasized and propagated. Hélène Cixous, therefore, in a way, made a revisionary counterstatement to Freudian imagination while recovering the image of beautiful and life-giving Medusa and thus seemed to succeed in breaking the association link between femininity and death. Even if the ambi-valence of Medusa pervades in the twentieth century poems, novels, and advertisements, the death-dealing aspect of Medusa has been considerably off-set and superceded by that of beautiful and life-giving Medusa which lots of European writers has praised for. Medusa is beautiful, not ugly.