Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (review)

The commitment of the Victorians to a broad project of the revival of myth and legend is well known in literary history. It was hoped that the recovery of language and form, as well as a more elusive spirit of past ages, might infuse poetry or religion or painting with new life. At first glance, Persephone Rises looks a lot like the old-fashioned philology Margot K. Louis discusses in the first two sections of the book, ‘Gods and Mysteries’ and ‘A Myth Appropriated’; it is philology, to be sure, but there is nothing old-fashioned about it. The work is rigorously historical. At all points in the argument, Louis keeps the literature in dialogue with contemporary mythography – mainly philologists and social anthropologists. Significantly, the influence here is not one-sided. British mythography, she argues convincingly through comparison with the Germans, was deeply conservative, more concerned with justifying the ascendancy of Christianity than with advancing scholarship. Romantic poets such as Wordsworth altered the direction of scholarship in the next generation by arguing for ‘the continuity of religious consciousness.’

The breakthrough came gradually through the century and took at least two different paths: there were the poets interested in the myth for its representation of the mother-daughter bond and women’s struggles with marriage and family in a patriarchal society; and there were the poets who saw the myth as primarily a spiritual one, dictating a particular attitude toward death. The former is especially clear in Louis’s discussion of poets Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell, whose poems about a captive wife interfaced with historical and proto-anthropological studies of family structure. The concern with Persephone as goddess and harbinger of death begins with Swinburne, an influence Louis, whose book Swinburne and His Gods is still a standard work on the poet, traces comfortably through authors on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the Canadian poet Isabella Valancy Crawford and the American Edith Wharton. As Louis shows, however, the pessimism associated with Persephone and Demeter did not endure. By the end of the century, writers like Thomas Hardy (in Tess) and Willa Cather (in My Ántonia) are more interested in Persephone as a rural goddess, the virgin with the sheaf. Modernist poets take this dialogue with myth even further, identifying themselves, whether male or female, with the abducted goddess.

The dates given in the title, 1860–1927, do not convey the true breadth of the work. Louis does not just track the figure of Persephone through Victorian and Modernist literature and mythography; she takes us back to the origin, the earliest surviving accounts of the Persephone myth. She analyzes the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the version in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Claudian’s fragmentary epic, De raptu Proserpinae. In English literature, she starts with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, returning often to The Winter’s Tale, which saw a gradual revival through the nineteenth century.

Margot Louis died in 2007, one week, her colleague Lisa Surridge tells us in a brief foreword, after she signed the contract with Ashgate. The book we have is complete, therefore – a rich parting gift from a remarkable scholar (and her loving friends who brought the book through press). Yet there are poignant hints of what might have been – a two-page appendix, for example, on the causes of fin-de-siècle pessimism. Surely Professor Louis wanted to do more with this analysis, perhaps in a future book or article. And there is a remarkable bibliography of works that refer to Persephone (compiled by Yisrael Levin), many of which are not treated in the text; but perhaps, in her generosity, she was laying out a path for future scholars to follow. It was this generosity that struck me as I closed the book: it provides a formal model for teaching an engaged literary history and a literary history full of works and authors who have barely been visible in standard accounts...