Hardy and the Aesthetic Mythographers: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone in Tess of the d'Urbervilles

G. G LEN WICKENS Hardy and the Aesthetic Mythographers: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone in Tess of the d'Urbervilles In his study of the seven different versions of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), J.T. Laird reveals that many of Hardy's references to classical mythology are present in the ur-text of the novel, including Angel Clare's comparison of Tess to 'Artemis' and 'Demeter.' To strengthen the link between Tess's story and the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Hardy changed the description of the club-walking from 'Vestal rite' in the manuscript to the 'local Cerealia' for the Graphic serialization. ' The analogy between Tess and the 'two goddesses' - the mother, Demeter or Ceres, founder of the Eleusinian mysteries, protectress of the growing com, and goddess of agriculture in general; and her daughter, Kore, 'the maiden: otherwise known as Persephone or Proserpine - was not an afterthought, a literary top-dressing added to the novel in its final stages of revision. Whereas The Return of the Native (1878) began as a pastoral novel and underwent what John Paterson calls a 'classical transvaluation ," Tess of the d'Urbervilles contained from an early period of composition not only scattered or isolated references to various classical myths, but also the genesis of an extended parallel to the configuration of characters, action, and imagery in the most popular of the Greek divine tales. Hardy developed his allusions to Demeter and Persephone into a pattern of symbolic correspondences, an organized mythological motif that, while not as prevalent or consistently explicit as his use of the Christian mythology, Biblical and Miltonic, of Adam, Eve, and Satan,' nevertheless deserves more attention than it has yet received. I To understand the aesthetic function of the Demeter motif, we must first consider the view of classical mythology implicit in Tessofthed'Urbervilles. There is considerable evidence in the Literary Notes and the Lifethat Hardy followed the debate on myth in the 1870S and 1880s with more than a passing interest. His reading, for example, ofJohn Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets (1870) alone would have acquainted him with most of the current approaches to the study of myth.4 Since Hardy quotes extensively and with approval from Symonds, the latter's argument for the relevance of mythology to Victorian poetry can help illuminate UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 1, FALL 198) 86 G. GLEN WICKENS Hardy's similar concern to employ mythological motifs in his fiction. According to James Kissane, Symonds, along with Walter Pater and John Ruskin, was 'somewhere near Victorian "mid-stream'" in his 'aesthetic'S approach to the development of mythology. Rather than concentrating on the origin ofGreek myths, Symonds traces 'therassage of mythology into religion and the expression of religion by art.' Mythology is, therefore, 'the first essential phase' (p 39) of religion and art or, to put the matter another way, mythology in its primitive stage projects itself as 'a common and unconscious work of art' (p 5), while 'the religion for which it supplied the groundwork was itself a kind of art' (p 35). 'Long after [mythology] has died as religion,' Symonds concludes, 'it lives on as poetry, retaining its original quality though the theology contained in it has been for ever superseded or absorbed into more spiritual creeds' (p 39)· The pattern of growth that Symonds describes is similar to the succession of general stages that Pater and Ruskin find in the transformation of any given myth. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Hardy examined Ruskin's chief work on mythology, The Queen of the Air (1869), the Literary Notes I indicates that he did read the second part at least of Pater's 'The Myth of Demeter and Persephone' (1876), an impressionistic account of 'truee phases ... which are more or less discernible in all mythological development'7: There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mysticat phase, in which ... there lie certain primitive impressions ofthe phenomena ofthe natural world. Wemay trace it next in its conscious, poetical or literary, phase, in which the poets become the depositories of the vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it with a purely...