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

As Perry Nodelman reminds us in The Pleasures of Children's Literature, such works often function using the logic of repertoire, with similar plot patterns playing themselves out over a range of texts (143). Indeed, he finds the home/away/home plot to be one of the most prevalent, if not the most prevalent, pattern in children's literature. In her fascinating and often brilliant study, Holly Virginia Blackford focuses on a particular variant of the home/away/home pattern—the myth of Persephone, who descends into the realm of the Underworld before returning to the world of her mother—as the recurring pattern found among books that track the ambivalent and often fraught development of female characters. While many of us have been teaching Persephone for years as the structural complement to Oedipus as the typical myth of masculine development, Blackford's study opens up exciting new areas of exploration in its rigorous and expansive treatment of the various facets of the myth in nineteenth-and twentieth-century texts.

Although Blackford's premise is well conceived and her readings utterly fresh and original, there are some structural infelicities in the book which I would be remiss not to mention in a review. The first has to do with the mismatch between the title and the texts under consideration. Surely this is a study of the myth of Persephone, but the text set that Blackford works with far exceeds the category of "girls' fantasy literature" in two ways: first, several of the books to which she devotes chapters, including Little Women and Wuthering Heights, are not by most reckonings considered fantasies; second, several of the others—including Peter and Wendy, Charlotte's Web, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Coraline— aren't traditionally thought of as exclusively or even predominantly girls' literature per se. A more descriptive title might have been something along the lines of "The Myth of Persephone [End Page 101] in Novels of Female Development"; not only would such a title render more truth in advertising, but it would also expand the readership to rightfully include scholars who study realistic texts centering on girls, as Blackford's thesis clearly has applicability and range beyond fantasy literature.

Another structural miss in the book is its failure to tell Persephone's story from the outset, let alone clearly delineate the important differences in the versions. Blackford assumes a readership as familiar with and interested in the various source texts of Greek and Roman mythology, and this myth in particular, as she herself is; from the introduction on, she interprets the myth without actually telling the story. Thus readers who haven't read the myth in a while, or in multiple versions, will need to set Blackford's book aside and seek out source texts on their own before proceeding. Even in chapter one, where Blackford outlines the intertextual journey of Persephone in art and literature alongside the growth of developmental psychology in the nineteenth century, she writes as a literary historian and bibliographer rather than as a storyteller, an approach that will unfortunately distance some readers.

Setting aside these complaints, however, I found Blackford's arguments in the introduction and throughout the rest of the book intellectually compelling, original, and a pleasure to read. Her thesis is multilayered, and thus opens up to readers interested in various schema on multiple levels. On one level, for instance, readers can simply note the recurrent pattern of female development at the level of plot and character: young Persephones like Marie of Nutcracker and Mouse King, Wendy Darling, Fern Arable, Ginny Weasley, and Coraline Jones reach out for transitional objects, which, like Persephone's narcissus, open up new and potentially dangerous worlds to them. They enter these worlds and meet compelling figures, most of whom are very attractive boy-toys (further connecting them, Blackford notes, with the narcissus), some of whom are also dangerous, but all of whom challenge the girls to question their mothers' values and restrictions...

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