Out of That Hole: Reflections of the Demetrian Myth in Six Contemporary Poems

Tatjana P. Bijelić

doi:10.5937/zrffp47-14900

Tatjana P. Bijelić University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Philology, Department of English Language and Literature

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5937/zrffp47-14900

Keywords: myth, Persephone, Demeter, contemporary poetry by women,

Abstract

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).

References

Boland, E. (2008). New Collected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Boland, E. (1995). Object Lessons: the life of the woman and the poet in our time. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Boland, E. and Schmidt, E. (2001). Where Poetry Begins: Eaven Boland in Conversation. Retrieved from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/where-poetry-begins-eavan-boland-conversation

Dowson, J. and Entwistle, A. (2005). A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Duffy, C.A. (2001). The World’s Wife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Enemark, N. (2016). Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Hope Mirrlees’s Antiquarianism in Paris. In: E. Anderson, A. Radford, and H. Walton (Eds.), Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness (115-134). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gill, J. (2007). Women’s Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hirsch, M. (1989). The Mother / Daughter Plot – Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

House, V. (2014). Medea’s Chorus: Myth and Women’s Poetry Since 1950. New York: Peter Lang’s Publishing.

Fainlight, R. (1997). Sugar-Paper Blue. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books.

Norton, J. R. (2016). The Demeter-Persephone Myth as Writing Ritual in the Lives of Literary Women. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.

O’Rourke, M. (2013). Demeter in Paris. Retrieved from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/demeter-paris

Ostriker, A. (2009). The Book of Seventy. Pittsburg, Pa.: University of Pittsburg Press.

Ostriker, A. S. (1986). Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. London: Beacon Press.

Rich, A. (1977). Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Bantam Books.

Rich, A. (1995). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Theodorakopoulis, E. (2012). Women’s writing and the classical tradition. Classical Reception Journal, 4(2), 149-162.