Book Description

Though Persephone resisted fiercely, Hades seized her and carried her off, screaming in shrill voice. Her cries echoed from the mountain peaks to the depths of the sea, and her noble mother Demeter heard her. "This book's originality rests upon its intertextual approach to some of the most powerful archetypes of Western literature. . . . A sample study of women's responses to well-entrenched Western patriarchal values."--Marcelle Maistre Welch, Florida International University "An exemplary model for the intersection of the feminist/literary/archetypal approaches. . . . All the essays [are] informative, well-substantiated, and interesting."--Kathleen Ashley, University of Southern Maine Images of Persephone have appeared in the works of male and female writers for hundreds of years. Because the story of Persephone and Demeter is so moving, embodying archetypes of the "loving and terrible" mother and the rite of passage for women in patriarchal cultures, the myth resonates throughout Western consciousness. These essays explore the myth through critical analysis of literary texts, the authors of which include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Atwood, Cixous, and Morrison. The essays converge at three important areas of study: the feminist/cultural, the archetypal, and the literary/textual. They explore women's relationships and experiences within patriarchal cultures that range from Homer's classical Greece to Cixous's postmodern France, from Chaucer's England to Alice Walker's contemporary America. Contents The Persephone Myth in Western Literature, by Elizabeth T. Hayes Chaucer's Use of the Proserpina Myth in "The Knight's Tale" and "The Merchant's Tale," by Marta Powell Harley "Like an Old Tale Still": Paulina, "Triple Hecate," and the Persephone Myth in The Winter's Tale by Janet S. Wolf Sexual and Artistic Politics under Louis XIV: The Persephone Myth in Quinault and Lully's Proserpine, by Michele Vialet and Buford Norman The Persephone Myth in Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, by Laura Laffrado Through the Golden Gate: Madness and the Persephone Myth in Gertrude Atherton's "The Foghorn," by Melissa McFarland Pennell "Lost" Girls: D. H. Lawrence's Versions of Persephone, by Virginia Hyde Ghosts of Themselves: The Demeter Women in Beckett, by Mary A. Doll Dark Persephone and Margaret Atwood's Procedures for Underground, by Eileen Gregory From Persephone to Demeter: A Feminist Experience in Cixous's Fiction, by Martine Motard-Noar "Like seeing you buried": Persephone in The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple, by Elizabeth T. Hayes Elizabeth T. Hayes is assistant professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, and has published in The Southern Literary Journal.