ABSTRACT
We have seen how nineteenth-century mythographers slowly, after long debate, came to accept the worship and myth of Persephone as religious or spiritual phenomena. In poetry, too, this understanding comes in fits and starts for a long time before it is generally embraced. In English literature particularly, the myth of Demeter and Persephone seems often to be wandering the world in search of its own lost meaning. It is, in fact, a story that pulls in two different directions: toward a sardonic assessment of woman’s tragic entrapment in a society dominated by male institutions, and toward a joyous vision of reunion after alienation. The long disappearance of the deeply religious Homeric Hymn and the ascendancy of Ovid’s secularized version of the tale produce a literary tradition in which the myth’s stature and significance are diminished for many centuries. Chaucer’s very Ovidian Proserpyna in The Merchant’s Tale has nothing of the great goddess about her. It is true that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale offers an extended allusion to the myth (and perhaps a revision of the myth itself throughout the play) as a masque of regeneration, a winter’s tale calling up the possibilities of spring, and yet this mythic dimension of the play seems never to have been widely appreciated until the mid-nineteenth century. Milton in Paradise Lost firmly subdues any spiritual energy within the classical myth to the Christian myth that constitutes his plot, and in this he follows the tradition of the Ovide moralisé, which had appropriated all the myths of the Metamorphoses and allegorized them to Christian ends. It is in the Romantic period, as the sense of what constitutes spiritual experience shifts in the Western world, that the myth assumes new potency, emerging tentatively from under the shadow of its great competitor-the Christian myth of the Passion and Resurrection.
