The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (review)

Myths are at once the “oldest stories” (Gamble and Yates 102) and the stories most frequently renewed and retold. The trend for reworking mythology—from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad to Eowyn Ivey’s just-published version of The Snow Child—is especially prominent in children’s literature. Myths are “right and proper fare for children” (Saxby 162) and have often been seen as appropriate vehicles for the social, moral, and cultural values we seek to impart to children. Rather than focusing on straightforward retellings of classical mythology, Holly Virginia Blackford’s engaging study, The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature, shows how the Persephone story subtly informs a range of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century narratives. Taking Persephone and her Narcissus as psychological archetypes, and the story of the girl’s separation from her mother, her descent into the underworld, and their subsequent reunion or reconciliation as a narrative prototype, Blackford offers detailed readings of nine texts and shows how the Persephone myth has been reworked—consciously and unconsciously—since the Romantic period.

Blackford sees the Persephone myth as an elegant and timeless exploration of female relationships and as “a powerful evocation of child development” (33). The myth, as she suggests in chapter 1, maps the natural cycles of death and renewal onto a story of loss and recovery whereby Persephone is symbolically killed by the underworld only to rise again in the spring. The story of Persephone and Demeter fascinated Victorian artists and writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walter Pater (33), and became for Carl Jung and other psychologists “an expression of the female psyche” (32). Drawing on a range of texts as diverse and popular as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, Blackford demonstrates how this psychological dimension may inform our readings of girls’ fantasy narratives that draw upon the Persephone myth. Focusing on lost girls and female adventurers who travel into literal and figurative underworlds, and on their relationships with desirable and sometimes deceitful male figures, Blackford traces the figurations of Persephone, Demeter, Hades, and Narcissus through girls’ fantasy literature from the nineteenth century through to the present day.

In chapter 2, “Toying with Persephone,” Blackford discusses E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King (1816) and sets up an exemplar for the chapters that follow. Roughly contemporaneous with the developments in psychology, which underscore the methodology, the Nutcracker and Mouse King are ideal test cases for Blackford’s theoretical approach. Other chapters see the re-emergence of some of the themes expressed in Blackford’s earlier scholarship on Alcott, Rowling, Brontë, and Barrie, but Blackford uses her methodology to offer new insights into these texts. In chapter 3, “Jo’s Sensational Boy and the Gift of Amy’s Soul,” Blackford reprises ideas from “Chasing Amy: Mephistopheles, the Laurence Boy, and Louisa May Alcott’s Punishment of Female Ambition,” published in Frontiers, but this time offers an extended analysis of the relationship between Jo and Amy, positing Amy as both a sculpture and a sculptor whose greatest work of art is her own body. Similarly, Blackford’s “Lost Girls, Underworld Queens” expands a 2006 article, “Mrs. Darling’s Scream: The Rites of Persephone in Wuthering Heights and Peter and Wendy.” This chapter successfully brings together two seemingly diverse texts—J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)—through images of faces at the window: the “Byronic” (4 and passim) figures of Hook and Heathcliff.

Blackford’s greatest strength may be her ability to incorporate apparently disparate texts into a single argument through her exploration of common themes and imagery. I was particularly enchanted by the fact that so many of the texts contain references to pigs. As Blackford reminds us, pigs were “offered to Demeter in the festival of Thesmophoria, in honor of the swineherd Euboleus who, with his swine, was swallowed along with...