Reconciling the Mother-Daughter Dyad in the Female Psyche: Understanding Persephone through the Unconscious (original) (raw)

The mystery of woman has captured the imaginations of humanity since before the dawn of agriculture. The capability of woman’s body, seemingly without cause, to create and possibly destroy life within her seemed to mankind akin to the mystery of the seed in the soil; this eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth eventually became symbolized through the myth of the Grain Mother Demeter and the loss, and return, of her daughter, Persephone. In representing woman at both extremes of her life, that of maiden turned mother, this myth grew to represent the process of women’s maturation, both socially and psychoanalytically. Yet, the archetypal figure with whom women should empathise in this process, the daughter Persephone, has a shadowy, incorporeal presence in the myth. Her experiences once she has descended to the Underworld are undescribed; only through parallels with the experiences of other females in the narrative, particularly those of her mother Demeter, is Persephone’s maturation supposedly brought to light. Applying a Jungian psychoanalytic viewpoint to the narratives gives the Underworld a new perspective: representing the unconscious mind. That Persephone literally descends to the Underworld in the myth could be seen to represent the way woman represses conflicts of her adolescence in order to be a better mother figure. Projection onto the mythic archetypes of Persephone and Demeter allow a woman to explore these repressed emotions and experiences objectively while simultaneously extending her own conscious. Rita Dove and Louise Glück, two contemporary female authors who have appropriated these archetypes in their poetry for this very purpose, provide models of successful and insightful processes of unconscious awareness of themselves. Through understanding the myth in all its forms—agrarian, social, and psychoanalytic—and applying that understanding to Dove’s and Glück’s poetry, woman can begin to reconcile herself not as two identities of just maiden and mother but of one identity as woman.