Persephone Rises, 1860–1927

Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality

Margot K. Louis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754664550
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351912013
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the figure of Persephone rapidly evolved from what was essentially a decorative metaphor into a living goddess who embodied the most spiritual aspects of ancient Greek religion. In the first comprehensive survey of the Persephone myth in English and American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Margot Louis explores the transformation of the goddess to provide not only a basis for understanding how the study of ancient history informed the creation of a new spirituality but for comprehending the deep and bitter tensions surrounding gender that interacted with this process. Beginning with an overview of the most influential ancient texts on Persephone and references to Persephone in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Romantic period writing, Louis shows that the earliest theories of matriarchy and patriarchal marriage emerged in the 1860s alongside the first English poems to explore Persephone's story. As scholars began to focus on the chthonic Mystery cults, and particularly on the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, poets and novelists explored the divisions between mother and daughter occasioned by patriarchal marriage. Issues of fertility and ritual resonate in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Willa Cather's My Antonia, while the first advance of a neo-pagan spirituality, as well as early feminist critiques of male mythography and of the Persephone myth, emerge in Modernist poems and fictions from 1908 to 1927. Informed by the latest research and theoretical work on myth, Margot Louis's fascinating study shows the development of Victorian mythography in a new light; offers original takes on Victorian representations of gender and values; exposes how differently male and female Modernists dealt with issues of myth, ritual, and ancient spirituality; and uncovers how deeply the study of ancient spirituality is entwined with controversies about gender.

Chapter 1
A Myth Appropriated:
Greek Persephone to Romantic Proserpine

We have seen how nineteenth-century mythographers slowly, after long debate, came to accept the worship and myth of Persephone as religious or spiritual phenomena. In poetry, too, this understanding comes in fits and starts for a long time before it is generally embraced. In English literature particularly, the myth of Demeter and Persephone seems often to be wandering the world in search of its own lost meaning. It is, in fact, a story that pulls in two different directions: toward a sardonic assessment of woman’s tragic entrapment in a society dominated by male institutions, and toward a joyous vision of reunion after alienation. The long disappearance of the deeply religious Homeric Hymn and the ascendancy of Ovid’s secularized version of the tale produce a literary tradition in which the myth’s stature and significance are diminished for many centuries. Chaucer’s very Ovidian Proserpyna in The Merchant’s Tale has nothing of the great goddess about her. It is true that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale offers an extended allusion to the myth (and perhaps a revision of the myth itself throughout the play) as a masque of regeneration, a winter’s tale calling up the possibilities of spring, and yet this mythic dimension of the play seems never to have been widely appreciated until the mid-nineteenth century. Milton in Paradise Lost firmly subdues any spiritual energy within the classical myth to the Christian myth that constitutes his plot, and in this he follows the tradition of the Ovide moralisé, which had appropriated all the myths of the Metamorphoses and allegorized them to Christian ends. It is in the Romantic period, as the sense of what constitutes spiritual experience shifts in the Western world, that the myth assumes new potency, emerging tentatively from under the shadow of its great competitor—the Christian myth of the Passion and Resurrection.

As the tale of Persephone was appropriated by Christianity, so it was also appropriated, from an even earlier date, by an androcentric literary tradition. The Homeric Hymn is a tale primarily of the relationship between the great goddesses, mother and daughter, and secondarily of the tension between female and male: the mother struggles with the father and uncle to determine the daughter’s fate; the daughter escapes her rapist-consort for a time, but not altogether. However, in their dealings with the myth, Ovid, Chaucer, and arguably Shakespeare all seem primarily concerned with the relationship between man and woman, whereas in Milton’s allusion to Proserpina the underlying concern seems to be the relationship of the soul to Christ. In the Romantic period, Mary Shelley refocuses our attention on the feelings of the great mother and her daughter, and this is the beginning of the slow reappropriation of the myth and its reapplication to female experience and female relationships. This process, too, advances only intermittently, repeatedly derailed or complicated by the urgency of religious debate in the nineteenth century. (Only in the late twentieth century, with the fresh upsurge of feminism in the 1970s, is the tale of Persephone predominantly used to express women’s experiences in contemporary poems, novels, and mixed-genre texts beyond the boundaries of this book.)

A new dimension of the myth’s rejuvenation enters in the late Romanticism of the American transcendental movement, when Margaret Fuller begins to establish the figure of Persephone as an entity of independent significance, the embodiment of humanity’s intellectual evolution. This perception of the Koré as a dynamic principle is the keynote that, once struck, continues to sound even to the present day. The deity who embodies time and change, not the deity to whom time is subject, seems most stirring to most modern poets.

Women's Distresses, Women's Power: Classical Themes

The story of Persephone is known to us primarily through literature. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae—these are the best-known classical sources. In discussing any myth, it would of course be misleading to imply that there is a single correct version from which all others deviate; for example, archaeological and written evidence indicates that the myth and rites of Demeter and Persephone varied from shrine to shrine. There was an Eleusis in Aexandria as well as the Eleusis near Athens (with which Western readers are most familiar), and at the Alexandrian Mysteries, a tantric or “erotic drama” was performed that, according to Carl Kerényi, was quite different from the religious epiphany of the Attic Mysteries (Kerényi 119). However, my focus is on literature of the last two centuries, which draws more heavily on classical literature than on archaeology; so, in discussing the classical myth, as opposed to modern revisions of it, I generally refer to the tale as it is presented in the Homeric Hymn, Ovid, and Claudian—the versions that have been most influential so far. Even these sources differ significantly.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter was lost to the West until 1777, when a fifteenth-century copy was found in a Moscow stable (Richardson 65–6). This anonymous work (Homeric in style, not in authorship) appears to date to the sixth or seventh century BCE—the beginning of the classical era in Ancient Greece. Persephone, gathering flowers, reaches out to seize a particularly marvelous multiflowered narcissus and is snatched away by Hades; Demeter, searching for her daughter, hears from Helios the sun god what has occurred, and then in rage and sorrow lays waste the land, permitting no living thing to grow and refusing to consort with the gods: “Never, she said, would she mount up to fragrant / Olympus nor release the seed from the earth, / until she saw with her eyes her own fair-faced child” (331–3).¹ Demeter’s determined conduct forces the gods to give way, but Hades has secretly compelled Persephone to swallow the pomegranate seed, and so she must return each winter to the underworld. In the meantime, Persephone enjoys a joyous and tender reunion with her mother, who permits the fields to come to life again and teaches us her sacred mysteries, by which we, like Persephone, may hope for a kind of rebirth or immortality.

As the Homeric Hymn tells the tale, Demeter is the heroine. Her ardent and tender quest for her daughter; her struggle to protect her daughter and her nursling Triptolemus from death; her rage, which finally forces the male Olympians to yield to her—these are the main features of the story. Persephone is at first an eager girl reaching out her hands to gather a flower that seems the very essence of cosmic sexuality, the multitudinous bloom of sensual life (12); she is on the point of sexual maturation, but she finds too late that sex has a less beautiful side as she becomes vulnerable to sexual predation. The cruelty of her rapist Hades, who is also her uncle, is supported by the collusion of her father Zeus, who is enjoying “choice offerings” even as his daughter vainly shrieks to him for help (29, 77–80). The brutality of the male gods is contrasted with the tender connection between the divine mother and daughter. Dragged off by Hades until she lost sight of the sun, Persephone “still hoped / to see her dear mother”; in the Underworld, she is “shy” to the husband beside her and “strongly reluctant / through desire for her mother”; when she returns to life, she and Demeter rush wildly into each other’s arms (35–6, 343–4, 385–9):

Then all day long, their minds at one, they soothed
each other’s heart and soul in many ways,
embracing fondly, and their spirits abandoned grief,
as they gave and received joy between them. (434–7)

As Helene Foley has argued, Persephone’s marriage in the Hymn is “a deceptive and cruel trick foisted by violence on an idyllic mother/daughter relationship” and Demeter’s triumph is to undo some of the damage a male-arranged marriage has done to her relationship with her daughter (Foley 107, 111). Her furious resolution to withhold the fruits of the earth forces Zeus to require Persephone’s return from the underworld, and only a piece of chicanery with the pomegranate seeds prevents the mother’s victory from being total.² The Hymn not only recognizes female rage and female solidarity as potent and vivifying energies but also evokes outrage at the male exploitation of female sexuality and male disruption of the bond between mother and daughter. Further, the Hymn is a religious exploration of death, loss, and the triumph over death and loss—a religious vision expressed in terms of female experience. This sacred poem ends by praising Demeter’s holy Mysteries, which it assures us are essential to our future after death (480–82).

By contrast, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, effectively completed by 8 CE, in the early years of the Roman Empire, is “full of gods but empty of reverence” (DeVeau and Getty 11).³ Here the tale of Ceres and Proserpina is presented as the winning poem in a competition between the Muse Calliope and the upstart Pierides that is subsequently reported to Minerva; the layers of narration distance the reader from the story and encourage us to perceive it rather as a work of craft than as a revelation of spiritual truth. The characters, too, are diminished in stature, humanized, and pitiable. Instead of reaching out for the blossom of sensual maturity, Proserpina is stuffing any flower she can reach “into baskets and into the folds of her gown” with “childlike eagerness” (137). Ovid evades any suggestion of maturation or sexual desire on Proserpina’s part. Proserpina calls for her mother and drops her flowers, “and she was so young and innocent that even this loss caused her fresh distress” (137); the nymph Cyane tries to bar Pluto’s way, but Pluto flings his sceptre into the depths of Cyane’s fountain and a road downward opens for him there—this is clearly a symbolic rape. Cyane weeps in her pain and sympathy until she dissolves away entirely. These details in Ovid suggest the loss of identity and of pleasure that women suffer as the result of rape.

Similarly, Ovid presents Ceres’s quest as a series of episodes that broaden the scope of the myth in everyday terms and make it applicable to daily life in a patriarchy. The nymphs Cyane and a rethusa, whose experiences parallel in different ways those of Proserpina, show that Proserpina’s sufferings represent women’s griefs. Ceres also has a series of confrontations with hostile males: an insolent boy whom she turns into a lizard; a scalaphus, who betrays the fact that Proserpina has eaten the seeds; Jupiter himself, who tells Ceres that the rape is an act of love (non hoc iniuria factum, / verum amor est) and that it provides her daughter with a husband of high status (274).⁴ These encounters further suggest that this is a myth about women’s distress in a male-dominated world. However, Ovid expresses pity where the Hymn evokes outrage at the wrongs endured by the goddesses, and his Ceres and Persephone have far less power to resist male dominance or to support one another. Ceres herself is made to beg Jove for help rather than compel him as in the Hymn; she is a figure of anguish rather than of potent rage. Ovid laments the effects of male supremacy but takes care not to undermine it.

Sill more deeply patriarchal in thought and feeling is Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae (c. 400 CE). This incomplete but elaborate poem takes the tale only as far as Ceres’s quest for Proserpine. Although the sufferings of mother and daughter are delineated and the selfish disorderliness of Pluto is noted, Jupiter’s decision to give Proserpine to Pluto is depicted as a statesmanlike measure to establish order. The goddesses’ suffering makes possible the transformation and enrichment of two worlds; it is therefore, in Claudian’s view, fully justified. A strong streak of misogyny runs through the poem. Ceres is frequently blamed for leaving Proserpine alone; it is repeatedly stated that young women should stay within the house to avoid injury to their honour. Venus (though acting on Jove’s command) is reproached for her deceit and wiliness in luring Proserpine out of doors, tricking her into a vulnerable position. Though Diana and Pallas try to protect Proserpine from Pluto, Jupiter orders them to end their resistance and even conceal the truth from Ceres when she is seeking her daughter. Finally, Ceres’s anger is intense but ineffective. The goddesses in this poem have virtually no power and yet are subjected to moralistic attacks rarely leveled at the gods.⁵

Two motifs appear in Claudian, however, that were to influence later literature significantly. Claudian’s Proserpine is an artist in textiles; before Venus comes to lure her from the house, Proserpine is working on an astonishing piece of needlework depicting the entire universe—Olympus, the elements, the underworld.⁶ Further, her mere arrival in the underworld not only causes that “pale and bleak” world to “frolicke in triumphant iollity” (2: 513–14) but also creates a glorious transfiguration throughout the human world. “Death stops his progresse … / Free from contagion healthy Cities are, / Free from the plagues of famine, sicknesse, warre” while “to her Nuptiall bed / The Virgin’s brought” (2: 549–59). Claudian’s Proserpine embodies a transfigurative energy that makes her a more dynamic figure than her earlier counterparts in literature and anticipates the transfigurative and redemptive Persephone figures of Ezra Pound and H.D. It is notable that the redemption in Claudian is presented in strictly secular terms.

Ovid and Claudian’s secular revisions survived to influence the West’s understanding of Ceres and Proserpine through the Middle Ages, and for several centuries thereafter; it is Ovid’s version (slightly bowdlerized) that forms the basis for the account in Bulfinch’s Mythology (1855), still a standard handbook today. Yet, through the rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries, much of the religious vision expressed in the Hymn survived well into the Christian era (to be appropriated and reframed in patriarchal terms within the new religion). It was widely believed that through the Mysteries instituted by Demeter, humans might share in Persephone’s reascent from death—in “happiness both here and hereafter” (Kerényi 15). Pindar and Sophocles assert that the Mysteries bring a blessing after death—“life” after death, Sophocles specifies (fr. 837). Cicero, centuries later, “attaches the highest importance to the radiance which Eleusis cast on all life. ‘We have been given a reason,’ he writes, ‘not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope’” (De legibus II.xiv.36).⁷ And later still, when a Christian emperor attempted to abolish the rites at Eleusis in 364 CE, the proconsul in Greece “‘declared that this law would make the life of the Greeks unlivable, if they were prevented from properly observing the most sacred Mysteries, which hold the whole human race together,’” and the emperor was persuaded to allow the rites to continue (Ker...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction: Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century
• 1 A Myth Appropriated: Greek Persephone to Romantic Proserpine
• 2 Marriage by Capture and the Captive Wife in Jean Inigelow and Dora Greenwell
• 3 Proserpine and Pessimism: Goddesses of Death, Life, and Language from Swinburne to Wharton
• 4 The Virgin with the Sheaf: Fertility. Ritual, and Imagination in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and My Ántonia
• 5 "I am Koré": The Modernist Underworld and the Rising Persephone
• Appendix A: The Sinister Influence: Causes of Fin-de-Siècle Pessimism
• Appendix B: Proserpine: A Bibliography, compiled by Yisrael Levin
• Works Cited
• Index