![]() One answer was fin de siècle pessimism, the other was indebted to the rediscovery of fertility cults across the globe by late nineteenth-century anthropologists and led to the contemplation of primitive ritual in order to regenerate Westerners’ shaken faith in life. The return of the Persephone figure is thus to be located both within the (relative) decline of Christianity and within a “shift in sensibility” which made the human condition appear incompatible with the concept of an omnipotent and benevolent god. Louis writes, “the myth of Persephone provides the ideal nexus for these movements by studying the tale as it is explored, celebrated, and recreated in literature, we can understand how these developments are connected” (x). As a corollary, the undermining of the religious faith led to new questions and approaches to death and resurrection, while, at the same time and as another result of the autonomization process, the alteration in the position of women led to fresh views on marriage, rape, and mother-daughter relationships. Gauchet terms the autonomization of Western societies which, in this case, was translated as a fascination with deep and hidden forces within the individual psyche and cultures giving rise to the symbol of a life-giving and appalling underworld. More fundamentally, the reemergence of the myth can be understood as a manifestation of what M. Bachofen’s Das Mutterecht (1861) laying emphasis on matriarcal organization of societies, not to mention the discovery of the “Leyden manuscript” of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 in Russia. Louis’s book-length study of the myth of Persephone in Victorian and early Modernist literature is devoted to writers’ reinterpretations of this complex Greek figure using contemporary historicist “mythic criticism’” “seek to see how myth operates, within its cultural context” how a mythical allusion or pattern of mythical echoes within a literary text operates within that text’s cultural context’ (xi).ĢWhy did the multi-faceted figure of Persephone return in English-speaking cultures? Or rather, when? At a literary history level, it appears that Romanticism played an important role as well as J.J. This myth is a symbol of the budding and dying of nature.1M. When Persephone was in Hades, Demeter refused to let anything grow and winter began. The other months she stayed with her mother. When she later ate of it, it bound her to underworld forever and she had to stay there one-third of the year. Hades grudgingly agreed, but before she went back he gave Persephone a pomegranate (or the seeds of a pomegranate, according to some sources). Knowing this could not continue much longer, Zeus sent Hermes down to Hades to make him release Persephone. ![]() Demeter was so angry that she withdrew herself in loneliness, and the earth ceased to be fertile. None but Zeus, and the all-seeing sun, Helios, had noticed.Broken-hearted, Demeter wandered the earth, looking for her daughter until Helios revealed what had happened. One day, when she was collecting flowers on the plain of Enna, the earth suddenly opened and Hades rose up from the gap and abducted her. Persephone was such a beautiful young woman that everyone loved her, even Hades wanted her for himself. She is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Persephone is the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |