Direct and Indirect Speech in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Introduction and Overview

Recent interest in the Hymn to Demeter has focused on two different aspects of the poem: its possible relationship to, and/or explanation of, the Mysteries at Eleusis;¹ and the issue of gender relations, primarily as exemplified by the forcible rape and marriage of Persephone to her uncle Hades with the consent of her father Zeus, but against the wishes of herself and her mother.² The conflict between the actions of the male gods and the behavior of their female relations, which forms the central theme of the poem, provides an unusually fertile ground both for examining the conflict between male and female perspectives and for viewing the love that exists between female family members in a positive light independent of their conflicts with their male relations.³

This paper will enlarge upon previous discussions of the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship of Demeter and Persephone in the Hymn to Demeter by examining the representation of speech acts in the poem, particularly those that appear in scenes where this relationship is prominent. The Hymn consistently uses direct and indirect speech in different and complementary ways so as to emphasize the relationship of Persephone and Demeter, and more generally of mothers and daughters as opposed to their male relations, as a key theme of the poem. By "direct speech," I mean language that reproduces both the content and the expressive or subjective features of the represented utterance and is conventionally represented within quotation marks.⁴ Indirect speech, by contrast, attributes the representation of the original utterance to a reporting narrator and generally provides the content but not the subjective aspect of the speech act. Moreover, the content of indirect speech is subject to the interpretation of the reporter.⁵ The methods of representation I am including under the general name of "indirect speech" range in specificity from mentioning that speech has occurred without any reference to its content (which I will call "implied speech") to a word-by-word reproduction (with pronouns and verb forms changed as necessary) of what the reported speaker has said.⁶

In the Iliad and Odyssey, direct speech is used to represent the vast majority of speech acts, whereas indirect speech is confined to a very limited set of contexts in which, for various reasons, the speech act is marginal or relatively unimportant.⁷ The Hymn to Demeter, in contrast, uses direct speech and indirect speech with comparable frequency, thus demonstrating an approach to indirect speech, and so to the broader issue of representing speech acts in narrative, that differs noticeably from that of Homeric epic. We will see not only that indirect speech is a more prominent and positive aspect of the narrative technique in the Hymn to Demeter than it is in the Homeric epics, but also that the representations of speech that fall under the general heading of "indirect speech" in the Hymn display a much greater range and flexibility than their counterparts in Homeric epic. This variety of indirect speech techniques demonstrates that in this poem, in contrast to Homeric epic, indirect speech is treated as a useful and important tool in its own right for the representation of speech. Moreover, as the last third of the paper will show, the sharp division that exists in Homeric epic between formulaic speech conclusions that are used for direct speech and the framing language used for indirect speech does not occur in the Hymn to Demeter.

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the speech act in the Homeric epics, each of which consists of approximately 50% direct speech. Indirect speech, by contrast, appears infrequently and is limited to particular kinds of situations. De Jong, in her narratological study of the Iliad, notes that it contains 677 examples of direct speech, 88 cases of indirect speech ("rarely longer than two verses"⁸), and 39 simple references to speech-acts (that is, where the fact of a speech act is mentioned but the content is not reported). She concludes that "indirect speech forms the exception to the rule of direct speech...