Understanding Persephone.doc

2019

Anne Baring’s “Long journey to a new story” seminars have been a terrific opportunity to look at the journey of evolution of our collective consciousness from a childhood of innocence and magic through the turbulent times of adolescence and to realize that, today, we may stand right at the threshold of adulthood. Following Baring’s reflections on the traumatic transition between the matrilineal, peaceful civilization models of the Bronze Age and the patriarchal, warrior-like cultures of the Iron Age, I will suggest that one of the fundamental aspects of a collective shift into adulthood is recovering the feminine values and energy from the exile they have been pushed into in the last four millennia of our history. In approaching an exploration and reclamation of the feminine values, I will focus also on the darker, denser aspects of the Goddess: her apparently destructive energy, her raw power, and her erotic charge, arguing that these qualities represent disowned energies of our own psyche that we absolutely need to rescue from their exile. I have used the archetypal and mythological character of Persephone to symbolize these darker aspects of our psyche, and I will suggest that, both collectively and individually, we need to journey down into the underworld, meet Persephone, and ask for her help and support. Only by bringing her back can we hope to restore an integrated consciousness, one that can usher in the next stage of our civilization.

2018

I was born with big curious eyes and am often caught staring at people. I have come to see that my intense gaze is a fascination with what I see and feel around me and inside me. My gaze lives in relationship to my environment influencing the way I relate to the world, how I internalise my experiences and what is born as a result. The Greek Philosopher and writer Nikos Kazantzakis refers to the authentic gaze that moves between the outer and inner world. This is captured in the subtitle above and reflects my own experience in pursuit of an authentic gaze. It raises a personal question for me: how to give form to the life force deep within me as I gaze outward and inward. My gaze takes me beyond what can be seen with the naked eye and allows beauty to take shape within me and around me.PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, No. 13, 2017: 19-28

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.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, DOI :10.1007/s12138-018-0461-2, 2018

This article offers a close reading of Yannis Ritsos’s dramatic monologue ‘Persephone’ (1972) and argues for the need to adopt a gender-sensitive perspective on Ritsos’s work, one that will do justice to his politics but that will also take on board the gendered imaginary and discourse he draws and depends on. ‘Persephone’ forms part of Ritsos’s wide-ranging engagement with classical myth in most of his mature writing, where gender and political issues are firmly intertwined or even serve as a metaphor for one another. In my reading of the poem, I argue that ‘Persephone’ dramatizes a female’s Oedipal momentum on her road towards individuation and social connectedness within the rigid framework of both the Greek military junta (1967-1974) and the post-Stalinist era. Engaging a psychoanalytic feminist framework enables us to involve the Lacanian legacy regarding the role that language primarily plays in the formation of subjectivity. I focus more particularly on the theoretical perspective of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, both of whom place classical myth at the centre of their explorations of the modern subject. Despite their fundamentally disparate projects, they both draw on Lacan’s reading of Freud in order to give rise to a fundamental change in the realm of the Symbolic. To view, then, Persephone as an Oedipal subject provides an excellent resource for exploring the heroine’s attempt to define herself as a woman, as a citizen, as a Greek, and as a human being, within a complex web of power and discursive realities.

Conventus Granatensis: contribuciones de investigadores noveles Ganimedes a la Filología Clásica, 2024

Persephone went from longing the presence of her mother in the ancient story to desiring the escape of her company in diverse contemporary receptions of this myth as seen in Louise Glück’s Averno (2006). Here Persephone is viewed as a representation of a victim of psychological abuse. While uniting Reception Studies and Vulnerability Studies, the following research will demonstrate how Glück successfully presents an original and outstanding appropriation of the myth of Demeter and Persephone in two of her poems pertaining to her book of poetry Averno. “Persephone the Wanderer” is the name that both of the poems concerning this research share. That title encapsulates the mental state in which Persephone finds herself as Demeter is presented in this appropriation of the myth as a controlling and narcissistic mother who encourages Persephone’s trauma. Therefore, this research aims to prove, firstly, that Demeter is vulnerable to her own anger, and secondly, that her abuse is the one causing Persephone’s trauma. Moreover, the formal similarities and differences between the ancient sources and the contemporary hypertexts will be closely explained focusing on Demeter and Persephone, who are presented differently in Glück’s reinterpretation of the myth.

2021

This essay argues that The Skin Between Us (2006), Kym Ragusa's memoir of her upbringing as the daughter of an African-American fashion model and a working-class southern Italian father, writes beyond a patchwork heritage account of multiracial, multicultural identity. The book's cover, which features white hands folded into and over black hands, is misleading, as the memoir underscores how racial difference complicates ethnic affiliations. Tensions between Ragusa's two families are never resolved, nor is Kym ever fully accepted by her Italian-American grandmother, from whom her birth had been kept a secret by her father for years. The Skin Between Us is less the narration of an identity quest than it is a reflection on its transformation through writing: the hybridity Ragusa celebrates, the cross-cultural connections she makes between her Italian-American and her African-American female ancestors, are products of a journey of memory that is associated with Persephone&#3...

Die Sprache, 2007

The principal idea, which I was not the first to have, consisted in a slight doubt whether the usual analysis of the name in a verbal first part and a nom inal second part should not perhaps be considered the consequence of a re modelling of an older form with a first part ending in an [o] and thus of nominal type, and a verbal second part. The only thing one would have to find was a Greek noun *cptpp°';, *rctpcrov or the like, and since nothing plau sible could be found, I transposed the forms (not the -pp-ones, which can easily be explained from -pa-, but the latter) to Sanskrit via the Greek and Inda-Iranian sound changes. This gave the results bhar�a-or par�a-, which I looked up in . The first form does not exist, but the second is attested in the Rigveda as a hapax legomenon and translated by 'sheaf of corn'. This made me jump, of course, and I looked forward to con sulting other works of reference as well as the original passage, which I did not then have at hand. It was only three days later that I had the time to look more closely into the problem, and what I then found was most exciting. For the big question was, of course, what verb was hidden in the second part, -cpana, no doubt more archaic than -cp6w:ta or -cp6v17 of the poets.

VULNERABILITY, RESISTANCE, DEPENDENCY AND MANIPULATION: THE RECEPTION OF HADES AND PERSEPHONE IN RITA DOVE AND LOUISE GLÜCK, 2024

The myth of Demeter and Persephone has acquired a stable place in contemporary literature. Three prominent examples of this reception are the poems "Hades' Pitch," "Pomegranate," and "A Myth of Devotion" pertaining to Rita Dove's Mother Love (1995) as well as Louise Glück's The House on Marshland (1975) and Averno (2006). Considering Reception Studies and Vulnerability Studies as the main theoretical framework, this paper will pursue the dialogue between the ancient myth and these contemporary appropriations by exploring the reception of the ancient myth in these poems while focusing on Hades' manipulation, Persephone's vulnerability, the mother-daughter dependency bond, and resistance.