The Rape of a Goddess (original) (raw)
Related papers
Voicing Persephone: Narrative, Voice and Structure in The Pomegranate Cycle
Historical repertory commonly uses threats to a women's virtue, her person, or her death as a narrative device to produce the moral or emotional climax in opera. The fate of these female characters reinforces patriarchal notions of femininity and acceptable gender behaviour, or alternatively is intended to reveal the complexity of feeling experienced by male characters. This is problematic because historical opera forms the overwhelming majority of all operatic works staged by major opera houses. This article documents the way The Pomegranate Cycle (2010) confronts archaic representations of women in opera and models a new narrative trajectory of healing and growth for its central female character, Persephone. It examines key choices in the works story, structure and power-relations embedded in vocal timbres as a mean of commenting on problems in the operatic tradition and its historical development. In doing so, this article seeks to encourage the production of new operatic works, especially works where female characters exhibit autonomy, and where female singers have more choice and agency over the kinds of women they portray through their performing bodies.
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.
Persephone and Hades Revisited: Modern Retellings of the Myth in Young Adult Literature
This thesis examines how Greek mythology, a topic that has already enjoyed popularity in Western literature for a long time, is incorporated into literature for young adults, specifically focusing on two novels that retell the Persephone myth: Abandon by Meg Cabot and The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter. In this regard the concept of intertextuality is traced back to its origins in Bakthin’s theories, and to the ideas of French scholars Gerard Genette and Michael Riffaterre. The use of mythological intertexts in Young Adult Literature (YAL) is also of interest here. These theories are further extended with an examination of certain concepts of gender theory, such as, agency, power relations, and gender systems, as these are notions important to the discussion of patriarchal metanarratives found in the source material. Although Greek mythology has been a topic explored by various scholars, not only in connection to literary studies, but also in regard to modern art or history, academic reviews of it as theme in YAL have so far been limited. One reason for this is that YAL, as a specific literary field, is merely a few decades old, thus, compared to other areas, relatively new. The discussion of the primary literature takes these considerations into account, and is mainly concerned with the intertextual relations between the Persephone myth and its modern retellings. In general both novels incorporate aspects of the myth in their plots, and the authors use certain techniques, such as paratextual references, to achieve an even closer connection to the mythology. However, the degree, to which characters or events from the myth are adopted, varies to a considerable amount. This is also true for the extent to which the aforementioned metanarratives are represented in the retellings. The research shows that authors of Young Adult literature also take inspiration from ancient material such as the Greek myths, as these are, to a certain degree, also concerned with issues important to adolescent readers, like coming of age, first love, or parent-child relationship. The thesis highlights these possible points of overlap, and indicates possible points of departure for future research.
Considering Rape in Ancient Rome and Greece
This paper seeks to answer the question: what consisted 'rape' for the Ancient Greek and Romans. Primary sources used feature: For Rome, Livy’s account of the abduction of the Sabine’s and demoralization of Lucretia will be analyzed. For Greece, the myth of Persephone and the seduction of Euphiletos’ wife.
τιμή and the Nurturing Principle in the Iliad and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
In her set of interpretive essays on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Foley famously analyzed what she termed “the mother/daughter romance,” suggesting that “for ancient women, Demeter and Persephone may have represented the extraordinary endurance of the bond between women of different generations in the same family.” By contrast, Clay insists in her chapter on the hymn that “while the hymn-poet is by no means unaware of the psychological and sexual implications of his narrative, his attention remains fixed on the larger political and theological ramifications of his story.” Clay and Foley each bring out different points of emphasis in Demeter’s well-known hymn, but I believe there is a way to read these various elements as complementary to one another. In this paper, I argue that the hymnic poet places the bereaved mother’s intensely personal and even guilty anguish on an equal plane with the combined grief and anger of a Homeric hero derived of personal τιμή. With the rape of Persephone cruelly framed as a breach of the maternal protective-instinct—which is central to Demeter’s τιμή as the goddess of nurturing and fertility—Demeter’s subsequent grief and rage are brought into parallel with those of the tragically ironic mother-figure, Achilles himself. Too often overlooked by those wishing to focus on the more “political” elements of the hymn, Demeter’s early period of mourning for her lost daughter shares numerous parallels with that of Achilles for Patroclus. Both Achilles’ grieving process, however, and his correspondence to the bereaved, anti-mother Niobe draw attention to his undeniable guilt in the death of his beloved. Demeter, on the other hand, can take no rational responsibility for the rape of her daughter. Rather, the hymnic poet parallels her mourning process to that of the shamed and guilty Achilles in order not only to place her personal grief on a level with that of the archetypal Homeric hero, but even more so to bring out her inviolable dedication to her maternal duty. In the mind of the hymnic poet, Demeter is such a paragon of Homeric motherhood that her sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of her child leads her to grieve in the very same manner as the pitiably failed mother-figures, Achilles and Niobe. Throughout the body of her hymn, Demeter is consumed with the desire either to restore her personal τιμή as the goddess of nurturing and fertility or at least to avenge its deprivation. Her final success depends upon her effective manipulation of the aspect of her nurturing τιμή which has not been stolen from her—her patronage of human agriculture. By withholding her maternal care from the fields of men and threatening her fellow gods with a loss of all γέρα and θυσίαι, Demeter finally reasserts her own power as a maternal nurturing figure—a force absolutely necessary for the maintenance of Zeus’ cherished cosmic order. Nickel summarizes, “Her position in the Olympian community is thereby confirmed and even augmented. No longer having any reason to be angry, Demeter returns with her daughter to Olympus.” As numerous scholars have pointed out, Demeter and Persephone act as mirror images for one another throughout the body of the hymn. Thus, with Zeus’ final redistribution of τιμαί at the hymn’s close, Persephone actually becomes an extension of her mother’s power into the realm of Hades. As mother and daughter return physically to Olympus, the primal maternal force which they together embody is stretched out over all three realms of the cosmos—Hades, earth, and Olympus. Paradoxically, the temporary break in the mother-daughter relationship of protection and care serves finally to extend and augment the power of that relationship and to reestablish its central importance for the solidarity of Zeus’ cosmos.
"Out of That Hole: Reflections of the Demetrian Myth in six contemporary poems"
COLLECTION OF PAPERS OF THE FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY XLVII (3), 2017
Focusing on the most revisited ancient mother-daughter myth, that of Demeter and Persephone, the paper engages with some of Demeter-centered appropriations of the myth in contemporary poetry written by women. Through continual reworkings of the archetypal story about the strongest primary bond between two biologically related females and their forced separation due to male intervention, women poets are increasingly addressing the qualities of Demeter's new-era powers to regain her progeny and restore abundance. While concerned with possibilities of revival and regeneration, contemporary poetic renditions of the mythic framework offer a whole array of plots and images that tend to both perpetuate and challenge original versions of the myth by reassessing the dynamics of mother-daughter disengagement and reunion. The aim of the paper is to examine and juxtapose the strategies of performing the Demeter-Persephone myth in six contemporary Demetrian poems in which their authors extend the mythic space to incorporate other benevolent female characters and their journeys (Fainlight), situate their speakers and Persephones within a national tradition or a familiar setting (Boland), celebrate the birth of a new Persephone (Duffy), embrace the era of contradictions and its impacts on the female body (Ostriker), and fragmenting the myth through the use of various discourses to simulate instant yet profound interplays of deaths and revivals (O'Rourke).