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  • The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature by Holly Virginia Blackford
  • Martha P. Hixon (bio)
The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature, by Holly Virginia Blackford. New York: Routledge, 2012.

The title of Blackford's book led me to assume that it would be a study of modern retellings of the Greek myth: either directly, in terms of books that reenvision the story for modern readers, such as Emily Whitman's Radiant Darkness; or indirectly, looking at how the narrative pattern that outlines Persephone's movement from childhood to womanhood is embedded in fantasy fiction featuring adolescent female protagonists, as in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series or Robin McKinley's novels. While Blackford does purport to take the latter approach, the novels chosen for her study are for the most part surprising (for example, none of the above authors is represented, and several nonfantasy fiction works are included), and she interprets, and then applies, the motifs of the myth through a very specific critical lens. This approach, while illuminating in some ways, doesn't always fit the diverse and eclectic mix of stories she has chosen to include in this study. The end result is both provocative and frustrating.

Blackford's central thesis is that the story of Persephone's abduction by Hades—particularly the means by which the young girl is lured within his reach, along with her mother Demeter's disconsolate reluctance to relinquish her—forms an underlying narrative paradigm in stories that feature girls on the cusp of young womanhood. Such a basic reading of the myth certainly can be applied to numerous stories about girls [End Page 255] growing up; movement from childhood to adulthood, with a focus on the catalyst that enables that transition, is a key narrative paradigm in young adult literature, and Persephone's story, like that of "Beauty and the Beast" and a handful of other folktales, is about being forced to acknowledge that such movement must happen. But Blackford's strategy in using the motifs of Persephone's story is not the expected one, at least from a folkloric standpoint; instead of identifying how motifs from this narrative form the underlying structure of contemporary young adult literature, she opts for a psychoanalytic reading of the character roles in the myth and then uses that reading as a framework for interpreting key relationships in her selected texts. One of Blackford's starting points is Ann Suter's scholarship on Demeter and Persephone, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate, while another inspiration appears to be Elizabeth T. Hayes's Images of Persephone. Blackford combines these approaches with feminist theory, particularly regarding the female gothic and French feminism; psychoanalytical theory, especially D. W. Winnicott's ideas regarding toys and transitional objects in Playing and Reality; and the idea of the Byronic Hero. These disparate approaches do provide a rich mix of contextualizing thought, and in that respect The Myth of Persephone is a challenging and thought-provoking study, with rich bits of interpretation scattered throughout. But such a technique is not without its drawbacks.

The introduction deals with the myth itself and how Blackford sees it as an overarching rubric for the modern female bildungsroman. She uses the Homeric poem version of the story, The Hymn to Demeter, from the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, which she says "is one of the first Western stories in which a girl is punished for playing, expressing her very human nature, and coveting a toy . . ." (1; emphasis in the original), and in which "a female figure is tempted and punished for her desires" (2). That Blackford interprets what happens to Persephone as "punishment" for playing and Persephone's desire to pick the flower as "temptation" demonstrates the tone that colors her arguments throughout the book; she says that the myth contains "a deep ambivalence about growing up female" (5) and that "what the girls in this study have most to fear is themselves and their own desires for worlds beyond their mothers" (9).

A keystone of her argument is in how she interprets, then connects to her chosen texts, the item used to distract Persephone: a narcissus, which in translations...

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