![]() ![]() Fuller’s “conversations” on mythology.ĤChapter 2 is devoted to examining how J.J. Within two decades, she had become a formidable embodiment of the maturing mind of humanity, in M. Shelley’s verse play Proserpine (1820, pub. When Persephone re-emerged in Romantic literature, it was as an avatar of the Romantic self, losing and regaining the original closeness to Mother Earth as is shown in M. Louis provides short readings of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae before highlighting some allusions in Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton which show how the myth was perceived as a prophetic affirmation of the Christian doctrine, a sardonic illumination of the relationship between sexes and as a vehicle for gender concerns. Chapter 1 goes back along the historical road and provides an exploration of the classical and English heritage of texts concerning Persephone. It is in this context that other female perspectives on gender appeared, making use of the figure of Persephone to voice modern questions.ģThe book begins by an outline of two general mythographic trends in the nineteenth century, namely the increasing respect for ancient Greek paganism as an expression of spirituality combined with a diminishing consideration for the Olympian gods of the Homeric mythology, and the consequent rise of Persephone as a chthonic goddess. ![]() 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. ![]()
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