PDF Document 3

UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX
DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, FILM, AND THEATRE STUDIES
Reconciling the Mother-Daughter Dyad in the Female Psyche:

Understanding Persephone through the Unconscious in
Rita Dove’s Mother Love and Louise Gluck’s Averno
By
Brittany Kuhn
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of degree of MA in Myth,
Literature, and the Unconscious
In accordance with Regulation 6.6 I certify that I have acknowledged any assistance or use of
the work of others in my dissertation for the MA in Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious
(Signed) .........................................
Academic Year..2013-14..........................
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CONTENTS
Abstract 1
Introduction 2
Chapter 1: Demeter and Persephone in Myth and Psychoanalysis 6
Chapter 2: Locating the Kore within Mother Love 15
Chapter 3: The Unconscious Persephone in Averno 34

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ABSTRACT
The mystery of woman has captured the imaginations of humanity since before the dawn of
agriculture. The capability of woman’s body, seemingly without cause, to create and possibly
destroy life within her seemed to mankind akin to the mystery of the seed in the soil; this
eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth eventually became symbolized through the myth of
the Grain Mother Demeter and the loss, and return, of her daughter, Persephone. In
representing woman at both extremes of her life, that of maiden turned mother, this myth
grew to represent the process of women’s maturation, both socially and psychoanalytically.
Yet, the archetypal figure with whom women should empathise in this process, the daughter
Persephone, has a shadowy, incorporeal presence in the myth. Her experiences once she has
descended to the Underworld are undescribed; only through parallels with the experiences of
other females in the narrative, particularly those of her mother Demeter, is Persephone’s
maturation supposedly brought to light. Applying a Jungian psychoanalytic viewpoint to the
narratives gives the Underworld a new perspective: representing the unconscious mind. That
Persephone literally descends to the Underworld in the myth could be seen to represent the
way woman represses conflicts of her adolescence in order to be a better mother figure.
Projection onto the mythic archetypes of Persephone and Demeter allow a woman to explore
these repressed emotions and experiences objectively while simultaneously extending her
own conscious. Rita Dove and Louise Glück, two contemporary female authors who have
appropriated these archetypes in their poetry for this very purpose, provide models of
successful and insightful processes of unconscious awareness of themselves. Through
understanding the myth in all its forms—agrarian, social, and psychoanalytic—and applying
that understanding to Dove’s and Glück’s poetry, woman can begin to reconcile herself not as
two identities of just maiden and mother but of one identity as woman.
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Introduction
All women are daughters who were raised by and have the potential to be mothers. To
understand, as a daughter, one’s internal relationship with the concept of motherhood allows
woman to understand the origins of her approach to being a mother. The canvas upon which
many female writers have chosen to project their anxieties concerning this dual identity is the
Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.1 While picking flowers in a field, Persephone,
Demeter’s only daughter, is abducted by Hades to become his bride in the Underworld.
Demeter goes searching for her and eventually causes a famine on earth in order to force the
gods to return her. When Persephone is returned, Demeter is placated, and she returns fertility
to the earth. But because Persephone has eaten the seed of the pomegranate while she was in
the Underworld, she must return to the earth for a quarter of every year (sometimes a third,
sometimes half), at which point Demeter will grieve again until Persephone’s return,
symbolized by the lack of fertility of the earth during the winter months.2
Although conceived as an agrarian myth, the experiences of Demeter and Persephone
provide parallels for the feminine experience; various elements relevant to the myth (the
picking of the narcissus, the eating of the pomegranate seeds, the return of fertility) can be
viewed through the lens of female maturation.3 Yet, if Persephone’s experiences in the
Underworld are meant to be representative of girl-become-woman, why is Demeter’s actions
and revelations the focus of the narratives and their subsequent analysis? What does
Persephone’s ethereal quality, and her subsequent doubling with her mother, say about a
woman’s identity as separate from her mother’s?
Psychoanalytically, Persephone’s time in the Underworld could be representative of
the oedipal period as experienced by the female; where the male experiences a seductive
desire to be with the mother as he begins to identify himself as a separate being, the female
experiences a conflict in wanting to be continually connected to yet separated from her
mother.4 Demeter’s experiences could be viewed as representative of the mother’s reactions
1 Since the divinities in this myth have been recounted under different names, I will use the Greek forms in
order to avoid confusion.
2 Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Mysteries of Eleusis, Trans.
William R. Trask. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 289-291. Kindle.

3 Bruce Lincoln, “The Rape of Persephone: A Greek Scenario of Women's Initiation,” The Harvard Theological
Review, Vol. 72, No. 3/4 (Jul. - Oct., 1979), 224, accessed June 10, 2014
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509722>
5
to this separation: intense mourning and depression followed by anger and denial, which
leads to acceptance and the formation of a new type of relationship with the daughter.5 The
myth implies that this cycle of abduction, maturation, depression, and reintegration repeats
indefinitely; however once a woman has become a Demeter figure, she cannot return to her
previous existence as Kore, and such a psychoanalytic explanation falls apart.
Demeter and Persephone, then, must be representative of something more personal to
the female psyche than a literal analogy of a girl’s childhood development. To understand
exactly what relevance this has requires an understanding of the elements of the agrarian
myth and how those elements manifested themselves within the social rites of female
initiation. From there, an exploration of Demeter and Persephone as archetypal images in the
female unconscious should provide a model upon which unconscious anxieties are projected,
developed as they are in conjunction with the social ideals of both “mother” and “daughter.”
Once an archetypal importance has been defined, an in-depth analysis of how the
myth is utilized by two contemporary female authors provides insight into why Persephone’s
experiences in the Underworld, repressed as they are by the mythic narratives, become
relevant to a woman’s process of individuation. Woman, unlike man, must define herself
multiple times in relation to motherhood: once as not-only-a-daughter, again as a new
mother, and finally as not-only-a-mother. Rita Dove, in her 1996 volume Mother Love, is
unique in this approach in that she presents a woman in the context of all three stages,
allowing the poet of the volume to explore herself and her memories pre-motherhood from
the position after she has come to terms with her new identity. Louise Glück, in her 2006
volume of poetry, Averno, is also a unique approach because her analysis of the no-longer-a-
daughter stage is viewed in a much more psychoanalytic perspective than Dove; Glück even
goes so far as to acknowledge in the poem that “the characters/are not people./They are
aspects of a dilemma or conflict.”6 Through viewing the myth of Persephone in its agrarian
and social forms, as a psychoanalytic archetype, and through its representation by
contemporary authors, one can hopefully bring to light the increasing difficult process
woman has to become herself, a process which involves knowing herself at each stage of
womanhood in order to better prepare her transition into the next one.
Chapter 1
4 Helene P Foley, ed, “Mother/Daughter Romance” in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation,
Commentary, and Interpretative Essays. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), Kindle.
5 Ann Suter. The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 52.

6 Louise Glück, Averno, (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 17.
6
Demeter and Persephone in Myth
Scholars have found that the mystery of the female may have long been the subject of
awe and worship, and at the dawn of agriculture, when humanity would have been in the
practice of using the cycles of the moon to determine time, the correlation between the lunar
cycles and women’s menstrual cycles could have been the source of primitive people’s
worship of the female. When humanity began to tame the soil, its understanding of and
ability to manipulate cycles for its own measures would have become more essential to
providing a plentiful harvest.7 This “mystery” of agriculture would have given rise to new
myths and rituals connected to those of the female; evidence from civilizations of this time
period show that vegetation and cereals were thought to have come from the death of a divine
woman, an Earth Goddess, whose blood and body provided the fertility to produce the fruits
of agriculture.8
The “death” most ascribed in Greek mythology as the cause for the continued fertility
of both plants and mankind could be attributed to Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld.
Her abduction and marriage to Hades, along with her continued return and descent each year,
was celebrated at multiple sites and under multiple names in honour of a stable fertility on the
earth.9 That a ritual involving the marriage of divinities from two different realms ensured
fertility is not abnormal, nor is it uncommon that a myth solely about the female condition
would be applied to a ritual in order to protect the process of agriculture; it has been proposed
that women, due to their experience of the ‘mystery’ of creation within their own wombs,
were often responsible for the harvest.10
A mythic connection between the mystery of agriculture and the mystery of childbirth
can be seen in the symbolic equation of earth and womb. The soil could be likened to the
womb of woman, with one symbolizing the other: both hold a seed within itself so that it can
grow, and upon the grain’s maturation, deliver said seed to the earth in order for it to mature
and produce its own seed, restarting the cycle. Women would seem to be only natural as
priestesses of agrarian rituals through their very ability to control the origin of life (through
growth within the womb), the production of food (in the form of lactation), and the
sometimes death (within the womb) of both child and plant.11
7 Eliade, 37.
8 Eliade, 38.
9 Suter, 106.
10 Eliade, 40.
11 Eliade, 40.
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In the Greek myths which survive to this day, however, gods and goddesses do not
die like the seed; they are immortal and ever-present on earth, intervening and affecting the
lives of humanity12. For Persephone to “die,” she had to disappear, much like the seed
disappears in order to be born at the harvest, and this need for a primordial murder to explain
the changing of the seasons could have given birth to the myth as we know it today,
consisting of the hieros gamos13 of a fertility goddess and her male consort; a gifts-to-
humanity narrative explaining the origins of agriculture; and an Underworld element seeking
to guide humanity to a better afterlife through performing a set of specific rites while on
earth. That the original concern of the myth seems to have been with food is shown through
the analogy created between the maturation of the seed and the process of female initiation
rituals, both of which complete the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. 14
The Grain Mother Demeter has long been associated with these mysteries; her rituals
and myth can be traced back to the Neolithic, with links to Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia,
and Crete. Her symbol is the double axe, the main tool of agriculture, and her priestesses are
known as the melissae or “bees”; an image which at once evokes the sweetness of the earth
and the bringing forth of the fruitfulness of plants.15 Evidence of cult practices from various
times and civilizations portray her and Persephone, along with an insignificant male consort,
as worshipped in connection with chthonic and agrarian concerns: that of the life of the plant
along with the death of the plants which preceded it and will ultimately follow it. One of the
more well-known rituals, the Thesmophoria, seems to directly make this fertility connection16
through a strong parallel of the periodicity of the female reproductive system and the
rhythmic changing and repeating of the seasons.17
From the evidence which has been gathered, the Thesmophoria was a women-only
ritual which brought women from all areas of social standing together for as-yet
undetermined reasons; some think it was to ensure the harvest’s fertility, some think it was
simply to instruct nubile girls in the “mysteries” of women, some think it was an initiation
ritual in itself.18 Regardless of the purpose behind the Thesmophoria, it is thought to have
12 Foley, “Commentary” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter

13 “sacred marriage”; Suter, 139
14 Suter, 139
15 Mara Lynn Keller,” The Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone: Fertility, Sexuality, and Rebirth,”
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), 28-33, Accessed May 21, 2014.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002068>.
16 Suter, 113.
17 Ellen Handler Spitz. “Mothers and Daughters: Ancient and Modern Myths.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 48, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990), 416. Accessed May 21, 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/431577>.
18 Keller, 43.
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been performed near the Autumnal Equinox, with the three-day festival representing stages of
both plant and human life: the first day, the Kathados/Anados or Going Up/Coming Down,
representing both the sowing of the crops and the sexual union of male and female, in which
the “seed” is planted within the womb; the second day, the Nestia or Fasting Day,
representing the waiting season while the plants grew, as well as the nine months of gestation
during pregnancy; the third day, the Kalligenia or Fairborn Birth, representing the harvest of
the “fair” cereals, as well as the birth of the child.19
Yet scholars are confused as to which goddess the rituals of Thesmophoria were
dedicated as images of both goddesses are represented at the site archaeologists assume for
the rituals; that both goddesses could fulfil the role at the Thesmophoria speaks to the unique
duality of this mother-daughter pair. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the earliest and fullest
of the surviving narratives of the Demeter-Persephone myth,20 includes the same three stages
of growth as the Thesmophoria within its narrative. Persephone and Demeter both experience
a descent from their relative realms: Persephone descends into the earth like a seed through
her abduction by Hades while Demeter descends from Olympus in order to search for her
daughter. Persephone and Demeter both fast in their mutual mourning, and both are born
again when Hermes “harvests” Persephone from the Underworld and Demeter returns to her
position as fertility goddess.
Although some scholars, such as Eliade, claim that the tradition of linking fertility
goddesses with the rites and beliefs of initiation and survival of the soul were not carried over
into Homeric religion,21 the Hymn to Demeter seems to contradict that statement, specifically
as other scholars have found that “ancient poets often exploited the similarity of the rituals of
marriage and death as rites of transition from one phase of existence to another.”22
Persephone could be said to exhibit the traditional elements of the female initiation ritual: a
cyclical quest defined by a girl’s fertility and marriageability told in conjunction with the
cycle of agriculture.23 That Persephone’s female maturation is meant to parallel that of the
seed is evidenced by her connection to vegetal life: her eating of the pomegranate seed is
what dooms her to return to the Underworld for a portion of each year,24 not a divine decree,
as is often misinterpreted as the case.
19 Keller, 37.
20 Foley, “Interpreting the Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter
21 Eliade, 137.
22 Foley, “Interpreting the Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter
23 Foley, “Female Experience in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
24 Suter, 129.
9
In nearly every version of the myth, Persephone is introduced as a kôre25 who naïvely
is picking flowers in a meadow. The feminine imagery of Persephone as flower-like identifies
her with the plants which will grow while she is underground, and the list of flowers she
picks—the hyacinth, narcissus, violet, crocus—are mythically associated with young epic
heroes who died an untimely death at an early age. Her picking of flowers in a meadow could
be viewed as significant to female initiation rites for two reasons: nubile girls often
participated in flower gathering festivals which signalled their readiness for a husband, and
meadows in Greek myth (along with the caves and lakes in other versions of the Persephone
myth) are often associated with the borders of the earth and the Underworld, foreshadowing
Persephone’s eventual transition to Queen of the Underworld. That she is left alone by the
Okeanidai, water nymphs charged to protect and nourish young children, has been perceived
as further evidence of Persephone’s readiness for marriage.26
Persephone is abducted by Hades and thus separated from this world, the first stage of
the tripartite pattern of initiation rituals. Archaeological and mythological evidence suggests
that the Underworld was often equated in ritual with a loss of identity; once Persephone is
taken there, she loses her previous identity of kôre in conjunction with losing her
maidenhood, particularly through her eating of the pomegranate seeds.27 The pomegranate
seed could be symbolically connected to the eternal cycle in as many ways as Persephone’s
comings and goings are. Because it is the seed which is specifically mentioned and not the
plant, Persephone’s eating of it evokes images of germination and reproduction, life and
birth. Pomegranates and their seeds are a deep red, which could represent mortal wounds
(such as those suffered by the dead souls Persephone will come to rule), menses, and the
blood of sexual defloration.28 By eating the pomegranate seed, Persephone also echoes her
own cycle by taking the seed inside her the way a woman would bear a child; she gives birth
to a new existence in the afterlife the way a mother gives birth to a new human existence.
Because she has been deflowered sexually, she is no longer the carefree maiden she
was above and is properly renamed as Persephone.29 In many rituals both ancient and
contemporary, proper names are often conferred upon a member once she had successfully
completed the initiation. This is would explain why, after Persephone returns to the earth, she
is only ever referred to as kôre when Zeus discusses her time with Demeter; Persephone’s
25 Defined as “young girl of initiatory age”; Lincoln, 224.

26 Foley, “Commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
27 Lincoln, 228.
28 Lincoln, 234
29 Suter, 83.
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return to the earth each year reverts her to the status of initiate.30 Persephone’s continued
transformation from girl to woman each year—like the seed which matures, is pollenated
(sexualized), “dies,” and is reborn as a new crop—causes the successful transformation of the
entire community from primitive hunter-gatherers to enlightened farmers, for due to her
daughter’s return each year, Demeter brings forth the earth’s fertility and teaches humanity
how to harvest it for their own purposes.31 Persephone’s actions meld her hieros gamos, her
violent abduction, and the development of agriculture into an opportunity for humanity to
find a happy existence beyond the grave. As the representative of the seed and as the only
divinity (besides Hermes) who had returned from the Underworld (and would continue to do
so each year), Persephone “had annulled the unbridgeable distance between Hades and
Olympus [and would] thereafter intervene in the destiny of mortals.”32
But it is Demeter whose actions make up more of the narrative than Persephone’s in
the Underworld; in fact, Demeter’s experiences could be said to parallel Persephone’s but
less as a rite of initiation and more as a female version of the epic journey. Like Odysseus
and Gilgamesh before her, Demeter begins her quest in an effort to “save” her daughter from
whatever woe Persephone called out against. Demeter’s search gives birth to her increased
experience of mortal grief (which will lead to the gift of agriculture and Eleusian Mysteries),
and she sets conditions for the gods in order to return her to Olympus. When these conditions
are not met, she withdraws again into her temple at Eleusis, taking her gift of fertility with
her. Embassies are sent to placate her, and once the conditions (Persephone’s return) are
finally met to her satisfaction, Demeter finally restores both herself to Olympus and
fruitfulness to the earth. The only element of the epic journey missing is the death of a
substitute, which some argue is met by Persephone’s “death” to the Underworld, although
Persephone is never identified as a substitute for Demeter.33 Considering Persephone’s
journey has a symbolism all its own, Demeter’s death (from her position as fertility goddess)
could be witnessed in her double withdrawal from both Olympus and earth, while her
emergence from Eleusis to receive Persephone could be her rebirth to her rightful place in the
Olympian pantheon.
This parallel narrative structure between Demeter and Persephone has not been lost on
scholars; outside of this myth, the two goddesses are never equated to one another. The
earliest account of any relationship between them is in Hesiod’s Theogony where he
30 Lincoln, 230.
31 Lincoln, 233.
32 Eliade, 293.

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mentions, in passing, that Persephone is Demeter’s daughter by Zeus and her abduction by
Hades is how she came to be Queen of the Underworld.34 Yet, in the evocation of the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddesses are represented together as “fair-tressed Demeter
and her slim-ankled daughter.”35 In all of the Homeric hymns from this era, an evocation to
more than one deity happens only six times, with the others being dedicated to groups of
deities such as the Muses and the Dioskouroi. This doubling of the two goddesses in the
narrative provides evidence of a new perspective from which to view the myth.36
The evocation is not the only instance of this doubling; the Homeric poet responsible
for the Hymn also doubles the two goddesses stylistically. Both goddesses’ accounts of their
“rapes” are of equal length and are the longest speeches in the text, a symbol of high
importance on the part of the speech as well as the speaker.37 However, both speeches are also
suspect in their content: Demeter’s account is a lie told to the girls at the Maiden Well for her
presence there while Persephone’s account is a lie as to how she came to eat the pomegranate
seeds. Even the moment they return from their withdrawals is stylistically paralleled, with
Persephone rising from the Underworld at the very moment Demeter steps foot from her
temple.38
Ovid’s treatment of the Demeter-Persephone myth extends this doubling even further.
Persephone, in Ovid’s world, is less an actual deity to be worshipped and appeased and more
a shadowy figure with whom other females portrayed in his version of the myth can parallel
their experiences. In Metamorphoses Book V, Persephone becomes less of a protagonist in
her own narrative myth; rather than describe her while in the Underworld, Ovid has her plight
echoed not only by Demeter’s epic journey but also by the experiences of the nymphs Cyane
and Arethusa.
Upon the abduction of Persephone, Cyane the water nymph is the only character who
attempts to prevent Hades from leaving with Persephone. Cyane urges Hades to woo
Persephone instead of stealing her so that their love could be viewed as consensual rather
than forced.39 Hades ignores her protests and plunges his chariot into her pool, symbolically
raping her as he might do with Persephone. Although Persephone is not shown to be violated

35 Foley, “Text and Translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
36 Suter, 125.
37 Suter, 125-126
38 Suter, 128-129.
39 Andrew Zissos. “The Rape of Proserpina in Ovid Met. 5.341-661: Internal Audience and Narrative Distortion.”
Phoenix, Vol. 53, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1999), 99, accessed June 10, 2014.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1088125.
12
by Hades once in the Underworld, the graphic image of Cyane’s dissolution at Hades’ touch
signifies the defloration and transformation Persephone will undergo once she has arrived
there. Cyane’s later helplessness in informing Demeter of Persephone’s misfortune could also
be said to signify Persephone’s helplessness in her own fate.40
The nymph Arethusa parallels Persephone’s experience in the retelling of Arethusa’s
arrival and subsequent rape in Sicily. Instead of Persephone providing an insight into exactly
what Hades did with her in the Underworld, Arethusa describes an attempted rape much more
in the vein of Demeter’s own experience with Poseidon, to the extent of being transformed in
an effort to elude her pursuer. Once this story is told, in the same narrative position as
Persephone’s story in the Hymn, Demeter is satisfied and teaches her gifts of agriculture to
humanity. Persephone is provided with no voice at all and her return is almost a non-event;
her transformation is less important in its own right and more important as the impetus for
Demeter’s actions on earth. 41
From the doubling of Persephone and Demeter in the narrative arises the mother-
daughter tension inherent to the myth42 and important in understanding the relevance of their
parallel cycles to modern women. Persephone and Demeter can never progress beyond their
archetypal roles, but women, through the very nature of their identification with the
goddesses as mothers and daughters, can insert themselves into the myth and use
Persephone’s and Demeter’s processes of separation and continued identification to help
resolve their (mortal women’s) own conflicts. Mothering is cyclical by nature; through
psychological aspects, mothers produce daughters who are trained, subconsciously, how to
mother their daughters, who will train their daughters in reflection of their mothering, and so
on.43 As the psychoanalyst Carl Jung has determined, the mother is almost always the source
of a neurotic disturbance within a woman due to the extreme closeness infant and mother
share from its birth.44 The successful individuation of both mother and daughter are thus even
more important because any discrepancy between the needs and wants of the daughter and
the quality of care given by the mother creates an anxiety throughout the daughter’s adult life
which could very well be passed onto her children.45
40 Zissos, 100-101
41 Zissos, 104.
42 Suter, 129.
43 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, (Berkley: University
of California Press), 7.
44 Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol. 9, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, ed. Sir Herbert
Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. 2nd edition. (London:
Routledge, 1968), 85.
13
In Jungian psychoanalysis, Persephone and Demeter provide valuable archetypes

upon which to analyse dream fantasies focusing on the female, particularly when those
fantasies come from a female. It would seem only natural that the anxieties of a woman’s
unconscious would focus on the two aspects with which she may identify herself: a mother’s
daughter and a child’s mother. A woman can never escape these identities, for even if her
mother dies, she will always remember being a daughter, and even if her child dies, she will
always remember being a mother. Like Persephone who must return to her place as
Demeter’s daughter each year, woman often returns to the relationship with her mother in an
effort to help her make sense of becoming a mother herself.
Demeter, as an image of the mother archetype, could be represented in a variety of
figurative images, most often as a maternal figure from the analysand’s personal life, but
also: a redemptive figure like the Virgin Mary; a place which inspires awe or devotion, such
as can be found in nature, religion, or mythology; an object which represent fertility
(“cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden…a deep well”)46; a protective or hollow object
which represent the womb or uterus as good or bad (ovens, bowls, caves, graves, sarcophagi,
and the like); or a destructive force such as a witch, dragon, whirlpool. 47
Whatever image Demeter takes depends on the qualities the analysand ascribes to the
mother archetype. Is she wise, protective, nurturing, fertile? Is she “secret, hidden, dark”48?
The Demeter of myth could be said to represent all qualities; she is both the nurturing
goddess of fertility who, in her anger, removes it from the earth at the detriment of humanity
and heavens. Demeter, as a mythic image, represents the “great and terrible mother”49 who is
capable of producing and extinguishing; just like the soil can destroy the seed while it lives
within it, so too can a woman’s womb destroy the growing embryo inside it. Women often
internalize these anxieties, and in extreme cases, can become psychically infertile through
their fears, unconsciously avoiding children or harbouring jealousies towards their children
for fear they will cause them damage.
This unconscious projection by the mother is rarely lost on the daughter, often
becoming repressed by the unconscious as a girl moves into womanhood. Because the
conscious can only partially understand the unconscious, and then only as an object, one must
project those anxieties onto archetypal figures whose narratives can help elucidate her own.
45 Chodorow, 59.
46 Jung, 81.
47 Ibid, 81-82.
48 Jung, 82.
49 Ibid.
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Kore/Persephone is generally thought to be this ultimate image upon which to associate a

woman’s unconscious,50 representing the “dark side of [her] human psyche”51 because of
Persephone’s ability in myth to transcend the boundaries of earth and Underworld. The
qualities the Kore/Persephone embodies in the unconscious are indicative of what kind of
complex needs to be unearthed. When the Kore presents itself in the form of a dancer, a water
sprite, a fairy, an unknown young girl, or the like, then the woman’s unconscious is
presenting her with an image reminiscent of a young, nubile girl: helplessness, vulnerability,
innocence, naivety. When the Kore is represented as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld,
she could represent the death drive of the unconscious made manifest, shrouded as she in
mystery and darkness. Regardless of her presentation, the Kore is most often viewed as a
“prize” to be won by two conflicting “good” and “evil” forces, such as Hades and Demeter.
The side which the analysand attributes to “good” often indicates what kind of association
with the mother she has. 52
Such is the case in the literature of both Rita Dove and Louise Glück, albeit
approached from different perspectives. Female writers have long utilized Demeter and
Persephone as an archetypal relationship of the female artist in a man’s world; lost amid an
Underworld without a sense of where she belongs, the female writer must decide whether to
remain masculinized by the Underworld or return to the world of the feminine.53 But what
Dove and Glück seek to do is utilize the myth, particularly the lack of description concerning
Persephone’s experiences in the Underworld, in an effort to understand themselves as women
in a woman’s world.
50 Uta Gosmann. “Psychoanalyzing Persephone: Louise Glück's Averno.” Modern Psychoanalysis. 35(2010): 236,
accessed August 9, 2014, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing.
51 Jung, p. 219
52 Jung “Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” Essays
53 Isobel Hurst, “‘Love and Blackmail’: Demeter and Persephone.” Classical Receptions Journal 4, no. 2 (2012),
181, accessed May 8, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/crj/cls014.

15
Chapter 2
Locating the Kore within Mother Love
That Rita Dove would appropriate the cyclical dualism of Demeter and Persephone is
not surprising given her personal experience of living in two worlds at once. As an African-
American, a hyphenated term which echoes a duality by its very nature, Dove must
constantly live within this “double consciousness.”54 Rather than force herself to write simply
about the “African” side of her identity, as was the message of the Black Arts Movement of
the 1960s and 1970s in America,55 Dove echoes Persephone’s willing separation from her
mother by being the kind of writer who is still connected to yet separate from the culture of
the African-American identity,56 exploring this displacement and fragmentation as a means of
seeking wholeness and equilibrium within herself.57
Myths, particularly Greek myths, give Dove the paradigm by which to explore this
quest as she sees a parallel between the mortals of the Greek world, fighting to survive the
actions of their often fickle and violent divinities, and the slaves of early American history
fighting to survive within the chains of their Caucasian masters.58 Her first play, The Darker
Face of the Earth, exploited this connection through adapting Oedipus the King as it would
have played out on a plantation in 1800s America.59 Through the Oedipus myth, Dove locates
the ancient within her own culture’s past 60 to show that the past has cycled back around;
through the appropriation of both the form and themes of the canonical source, Dove shows
that what was relevant then is relevant now. Demeter and Persephone, then, become Dove’s
method of illustrating how that cycle is inherent not only in history but in the self, as well.
In Mother Love, Dove approaches the conflicting, often convoluted, mother-daughter
relationship in a very different method from her treatment of Oedipus in The Darker Face of
the Earth. Rather than situate the action in a very concrete place and time resonating with
54 a term appropriated by W.E.B. Dubois to define that one can never be wholly American (due to the
marginalization of their race in society) nor completely African (in that they have lost all ties to the history
there); Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature, Vol.
64, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), 305-306, accessed August 3, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2927837.
55 Therese Steffen. “Myths’ Remakes: Mother Love” in Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita
Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Kindle.
56 Steffen, “Biocritical Introduction, State of the Art, and Outlook” in Crossing Color.
57 Ibid
58 Steffen, “In Conversation with Rita Dove,” in Crossing Color.
59 Steffen, “Myths’ Remakes: The Darker Face of the Earth” in Crossing Color
60 Ibid
16
African-American cultural issues, Dove draws on the abstract, fluid settings seen in the
Homeric Hymn, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and other versions of the myth61; the reader is rarely
aware of exactly where or when events are taking place. Even the point of view in which the
poems are written, Dove’s intertwining use of “I,” “you,” and “she,” forces the reader both to
respond to and interact with the text.62
Dove’s preface to the volume, “An Intact World,” discusses her decision to use the
sonnet, the “little song […] where everything is in sync,”63 as the structure for her poetry; the
sonnet allows Dove “pretty fences” she can use both to contain the chaos of the narrative and
fight against it. Yet, she does not keep to the traditional structure of the sonnet; no poem in
the volume conforms exactly to the fourteen lines of Petrarchan or Shakespearean meter and
rhyme. There are variations: some poems have fourteen lines (or some multiple thereof) but
no rhyme; some have a metrical rhythm but no couplets; some aren’t sonnets in any form,
connected only by the number of sections presented (seven, evoking the pomegranate seeds
of Persephone while also being a derivative of the fourteen lines of the sonnet).64
But these variations, this struggle for freedom against the “pretty fences” of form is
exactly what Dove is striving for; forcing the reader to count meters and lines in order to
locate the connection of each poem to the sonnet form is akin to a daughter trying to find a
connection to her mother without losing herself65 or a mother struggling with her daughter’s
separation. The struggle against the sonnet form is the struggle for freedom from an imposed
identity.66 The sonnet and the myth of Demeter and Persephone are aptly suited for each other
“since all three—mother-goddess, daughter-consort and poet—are struggling to sing in their
chains.”67
The dedication of the volume “To my mother, for my daughter”68 begs a different
reading of this statement; not as Dove’s struggle against the order imposed by poetic form,
but as a reflection of Dove’s personal experiences in attempting to find wholeness between
her dual identities as both daughter and mother. Mother Love, then, is less an experiment in
61 Alison Booth, “Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures: Rita Dove’s Mother Love,” Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 1
(Winter, 1996), 125-126, accessed May 21, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299332.
62 Hurst, 181.
63 Rita Dove, Mother Love, (New York: Norton, 1995), xii.
64 Stephen Cushman, “And the Dove Returned,” Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), 131-134, accessed May
21, 2014, http://0-www.jstor.org.serlib0.essex.ac.uk/stable/3299333.

65 Cushman, 132.
66 Lotta Lofgren, “Partial Horror: Fragmentation and Healing in Rita Dove’s Mother Love.” Callaloo 19, no. 1
(Winter 1996): 135-142. Accessed May 21, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299334,140.

67 Dove, xii.
68 Dove, vii.
17
modernizing a Greek myth than it is the fantasy thinking of what the poet remembers of her
girlhood now that she is a mother. Dove once stated that she was moved to write Mother Love
because of the dualism she felt once she became a mother; while feeling an intense desire to
protect her child, she could still remember being the independent girl who rejected her
mother’s rejection. The irony of this double identity and that the actions Dove originally
rejected became manifested in her as a mother seemed to her another aspect of fragmentation
in Greek myths which relevant to modern-day women.69 Mother Love is Dove’s attempt to
view women’s transition from the role of daughter to that of mother, beginning with a
speaker at the cusp of puberty and moving to the speaker coming to terms with herself after
the birth of her first child.
The fluidity of settings and narratives resemble memory recollection, with one
seemingly unrelated memory bleeding into another which may have happened out of
chronological order. As is often the case, repressed memories are described through
Persephone or Demeter directly and instances in the poet’s girlhood which are particularly
traumatic become entangled in both the poet’s mother-like consciousness and the mythic
archetype of the violated Persephone, making it difficult to ascertain what exactly has come
from the poet’s memory and what is the mythic memory. However, the poet, writing from the
position of a Demeter looking back on herself as a Persephone, interjects her present thoughts
on her memories of the past, changing them and interspersing them with her comments of her
past as viewed from her present age. As the poet gets closer to her present state, the identities
of Persephone and Demeter become harder and harder to differentiate, signalling the change
within the speaker from child-less woman to mother-with-child. This change becomes the
focus of the volume, the lesson Dove wishes to teach her daughter about what it means to
become a woman, with all the trauma, anxiety, and love this change brings.
Dove offers very psychoanalytic reading of her poetry from the start. Each section of
the volume begins with its own epigraph, and this first she provides is a quote by American
archetypal psychologist James Hillman: “One had to choose,/and who would choose the
horror?”70 This particular quote, taken from Hillman’s book discussing depth psychology and
how the dream relates to the soul and death, creates the decision the poet is faced by
embarking on this recollection of memory: where the underworld is a place of horror, so too
is the unconscious mind, and there may be memories there which she would rather not
unearth. However, as this is an exercise in coming to terms with herself in order to explain
69 Steffen, “Myths’ Remakes: Mother Love” in Crossing Color

70 Dove, 1.
18
the process of womanhood, those horrors need to be unearthed, analysed, and catalogued.
Without them, the poet is only one half of herself, like a Demeter without Persephone.
As homage to the seven pomegranate seeds which dictated Persephone’s eternal
return, Mother Love is divided into seven sections in which the archetypal narrative of
Persephone and Demeter is paralleled and repeated; in each section, Persephone is
“abducted,” Demeter “grieves,” and Persephone “returns.” For this reason, each section must
be taken chronologically, section by section, reading the order of the poems for how they
represent the chronology of the archetypal narrative. Where Dove differs from the canonical
story becomes highlighted in its misplacement, and the message of that particular poem
becomes even more relevant to the overall volume.
The first section includes only one poem, “Heroes,” about a young girl who picks a
poppy which leads to the death of an old woman. Paired as it is with the epigraph from
Hillman, “Heroes” becomes an allegorical poem for delving into the unconscious. “You,” the
reader, are helping the poet to “kill” her conscious mind in a fashion similar to Hades
“picking” Persephone. The reader, then, is not meant to empathise with Persephone or
Demeter; “you” are Hades himself, causing violence by a seemingly innocent act of
thoughtfulness. By opening the volume of poetry with a parody to the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter, the poet is signifying that Demeter and Persephone are not meant to be taken as
literal figures; they are abstractions, archetypal images the poet will use to describe herself
and her memories as a young girl.71 Even the individual elements as presented in the Hymn
are perversions: the irresistible narcissus and the slim-ankled Persephone in a field of
blooming flowers come together to be a lone poppy in a field of weeds, and the fair-tressed
Demeter becomes a maniacal old woman who is killed for her grief. There are no
pomegranate seeds, no Eleusis, no chance to return things to their original state, as in the
Hymn; once the poppy has been picked and the gate to the unconscious has been opened,
there is no going back.72
The epigraphs for each of the other seven parts signify the stages of life they
represent. Part II begins with the final two stanzas from the Mother Goose nursery rhyme
titled “Naughty Baby,”73 significant for this part’s recollections of the poet’s younger self
willingly rebellion against her mother. The fact that the poet chooses only the last two stanzas
of the poem, which focus on the violence Napoleon Bonaparte inflicts if he hears the naughty
71 Cook and Tatum, 346.

72 Dove, 3.
73 Dove, 5.
19
child, also signifies that these actions were not without consequences; for the poet, “growing
up” was just as violent as it was for the naughty baby caught by Napoleon and the recalling of
such memories will be violent for her again.
“Primer,” the first poem of this section, begins the poet’s recollections from the
moment she decided “I’d show them all: I would grow up.”74 Told as a memory she
experienced in her prepubescent years, the poet expresses her response to the actions of her
overwhelming, Demeter-like mother, a “five-foot-zero mother [who] drove up/in her Caddie
to shake them down to size.” Rather than continue in complete identification of her mother,
unable to develop her identity because her mother fights all her battles for her, 75 the poet’s
preadolescent self has decided to eschew all elements of the feminine aspects in her life (as
represented by both her mother and the girls taunting the poet in the poem) in order to
become self-sufficient and independent. 76
This condescension towards dependency on the mother figure continues in the
following poem, “Party Dress for a First Born.” In this memory, the poet has moved forward
in time to the moment of her sexual awakening. The “headless girl so ill at ease”77 is the
identity she has already thrown off, no longer willing to hide within the embrace of her
Demeter-like mother, “radiant/as a cornstalk at the edge of a field.”78 Although the poet
recognizes the allure of this type of identity in that “nothing else mattered: the world stood
still,” she recognized, too, that her life was standing still; unless she moved past identifying
with her mother, she would never become an independent woman.
In object relations theory, puberty and adolescence is usually the time when a girl
moves toward a lover (often male) in an attempt to recapture the intense love she once felt
with her mother.79 “Party Dress for a First Born” symbolizes this by describing the women in
the second stanza as budding flowers, waiting and hopeful to be “cut” and deflowered by the
men who are like scissors. The final line reiterates the same rebellion of “Primer” in its
implication that the girl will hide her sexual transgressions from her mother: “Mother’s
calling. Stand up: it will be our secret.”80 The “it” of this line remains ambiguous; it could
mean that the poet, as a mother figure looking back, literally does not remember the secret
74 Dove, 7
75 Jung, 89
76 William W. Cook and James Tatum. African-American Writers and Classical Tradition. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 362.

77 Dove, 8.
78 Ibid
79 Suter, 124.
80 Ibid
20
which she is recalling, or it could be the older poet’s voice signifying that she still hasn’t told
her mother what happened on that night, choosing instead to protect her the way Persephone
did Demeter in the Homeric Hymn, when she lies and claims Hades forced her to eat the
pomegranate seeds.
“Persephone, Falling” invokes the archetypal image directly through its move from
the personal, informal “I” and “you” to a more authoritarian, mythic third person. This move
to projecting onto a mythic figure what the poet experienced suggests that the experience was
painful and traumatic, particularly as the memory also calls forth protective advice mothers
often give daughters in order to avoid this situation:
(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don’t answer to strangers. Stick
With your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)81
These lines of warning may have been spoken to the poet when she was a child or by the poet
to her child, and their intrusion into the memory here denotes an acceptance by the poet, in
her current state, that her actions were the very ones she was being warned against doing.
A later poem of this section, “The Narcissus Flower,” reads like a repressed memory
of the same traumatic event of “Persephone, Falling.” Recalling the imagery of man as
scissors from “Party Dress for a First Born,” the poet describes the poet’s first sexual act in
terms of the archetypal rape of Persephone by Hades. Her mate, “this man/adamant as a knife
easing into//the humblest crevice,”82 destroys more than just her virginity; “as the blossom
incinerated,” so did her sense of self. Just as Persephone became Queen of the Underworld
once she had been deflowered, the poet comes hate herself, to “live beyond dying.” Sex has
not awakened a new identity within her; it has only killed the one she already had.
Between these two poems is the description of a grieving mother:
Blown apart by loss, she let herself go—
wandered the neighborhood hatless, breasts
swinging under a ratty sweater, crusted
mascara blackening her gaze. […]
but an uncombed head?—not to be trusted.
[…]
…Winter came early and still
81 Dove, 9
82 Ibid
21
she frequented the path by the river83

as paralleled with that of the grieving Demeter in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:
Sharp grief seized her heart, and she tore the veil
on her ambrosial hair with her own hands.
She cast a dark cloak on her shoulders
and sped like a bird over dry land and sea,84
As part of the poet’s memory recollection, the mixing of more modern images of grief (“ratty
sweater, crusted/mascara blackening her gaze”) with those from the mythic equates her to the
Great Mother. In her imagined grief at reliving this memory, the poet recognizes the
overbearing mother within herself; she would lose all sense of identity if she lost her
daughter85, which she recognizes is a negative in the way she is “pulled down to size”86 by
those that witness her lamentations.
The violated girl of the repressed memory and the poet as mother now become
paralleled in their grief in the next poem “Persephone Abducted,” illustrated by the simple
ambiguous use of the pronoun “she”:
She cried out for Mama, who did not
hear. She left with a wild eye thrown back,
she left with curses, rage
that withered her features to a hag’s.87
Like the mythic Persephone crying for Demeter as she does in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, the first “she” is the raped girl, but as the lines continue, the “she” becomes
a hag, like the Demeter in the Homeric Hymn. The melding of the two personas into one but
split vertically through poetic form show the daughter’s experiences becoming those of the
mother. As the poem continues, the time and place of the abduction becomes fragmented,
suddenly being located at a plantation with slaves singing and picking in the fields. Like the
slaves and the mortals of Greek myths, the violated girl felt she had no recourse for there “are
no laws when laws are broken” and “no names/to call upon.”88
“Statistic: The Witness” and “Grief: The Council” are associations the poet makes
with other aspects of her personality. Mythically, these poems take up the position of Helios
83 Dove, 10
84 Foley, “Translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,” lines 40-43.
85 Jung, 88
86 Dove, 10
87 Dove, 13.
88 Ibid
22
(in the Homeric Hymn) or Arethusa (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), both of whom saw
Persephone’s abduction and counseled Demeter to come to terms with it. But the poet’s
renditions speak to a deeper emotion than just passive observing or willful acceptance; they
represent her ego’s and superego’s reactions to the rape.
“Statistic: The Witness” describes a young girl who was forced to grow up before she
was ready. Because of this event, part of her has become stagnated, stuck by the trauma in
seeking the last place she felt safe: “kindness, in the bottomless lull of her [mother’s] arms.”89
“Grief: The Council” describes, in classic African-American call-and-response style, the
poet’s reasoning with herself; she may have lost her younger self, but her reason and logic
encourage her to move on, take up a hobby, find some other distraction. The Eros side of the
poet, delineated as it is by being indented and in italics, show her response through mythical
allusions to Demeter, deciding “to abdicate/to let the garden go to seed”90 and the earth go to
ruin just as this experience has done to her. No amount of counsel will help her; only through
the process of restoration, bringing the repressed to the surface, will allow the poet to move
on, just as Demeter did at the return of Persephone.
“Mother Love,” the title poem of the volume, represents the poet’s attempt at
overcoming her grief through the process of being needed, like the Demeter of the myth. Told
informally as it is by Demeter herself, these two sonnets gone askew91 represent the divided
emotions the poet feels following her rape. Each stanza represents the poet as both
fragmented and divided in coming to terms with the loss of her innocence. In the first, she
desires to be wanted again, to recapture the love she felt before the event; in the second, she
laments the pain she causes to herself in the process of forgetting.92
But forcing herself to forget in this way is like Demeter’s failure to nurse the baby
boy. The poet becomes like the “muttering crone/bent over a baby sizzling on a spit,”93
cooking her own innocence like Demeter does the boy: “sealing [the] juices in slowly so
[s]he might/be cured to perfection.”94 But the perfection the poet seeks is short lived; just as
Demeter is interrupted by the boy’s mother’s love, so too is the poet interrupted by
remembering. Like Demeter, the poet must remove herself from the memory in order to delve
deeper into her unconscious.
89 Dove, 14.
90 Ibid
92 Ibid
93 Dove, 14.
94 Ibid
23
The final poem of this section, “Golden Oldie,” breaks from the canonical chronology
of the myth of Demeter and Persephone to highlight the poet’s desire to remember; fashioned
as a modern-day Persephone, pausing to listen to a passionate love song before returning
home, the poet is signifying that she aims to understand how her first interactions with sexual
intimacy impacted the way she felt about love in general. Her experience studying abroad in
Paris, overlaid by the archetype of Persephone’s unexplored experience in the Underworld,
will hopefully provide her with an understanding of why she chose the path she did and how
the man she chose made her into the woman she is.
H.D. introduces Part III with a quote from Hermetic Definition: “Who can escape life,
fever, the darkness of the abyss? lost, lost, lost…”95 As the title of the sole, seven-sectioned
poem of this section is “Persephone in Hell,” the “lost” of H.D.’s quote could represent the
lost Persephone, searching for a way home. Balanced as it is in the quote with words like
“life” and “fever,” the loss the poet is seeking to retrieve is that of her time in Paris, when she
was an independent woman looking for that lover she left to find. Persephone’s sojourn in the
Underworld is the archetype for the poet to project this loss and darkness she felt during a
time abroad, separated as she was from family and country. By perceiving herself through
this template, the poet can come closer to understanding her own actions and the way they
came to affect her later perceptions about herself and about motherhood. Because the poet is
imposing her memory on the myth, “there are no sonnets in Hell,”96 for the poet is
appropriating the archetype solely for the purpose of unearthing what the memories seek to
teach her; she must break her chains of form in order to freely reconstruct her past.
In attempting to delve deeper into her memories, the poet structures the next two
sections as a parallel to the lack of explanation provided by the canonical texts of the
experience Persephone had while separated from Demeter: Persephone is drawn into the
Underworld, travels through looking for purpose, is seduced by Hades, and returns to her
mother a changed person. Where “Persephone in Hell” is the poet’s experience narrated as if
she were reliving the memories verbatim; the poems of part IV reveal the way she presently
views the experiences from her state as an older woman looking back on herself. Each poem
leads into the next one, providing a sequential process both of exploring the unconscious and
a narrative of a girl’s self-induced maturation.
By beginning “Persephone in Hell” as a young woman of “not quite twenty,”97 the
95 Dove, 21
96 Steffen, “Myths’ Remakes: Mother Love” in Crossing Color.
97 Dove, 23
24
poet highlights her attachment to her previous life; her Demeter-like mother, represented in
“the smell of bread,/the reek of multiplying yeast”98 still provides her comfort which she
cannot provide herself. At one point, the poet even forgets which way to travel in order to
find her way back home, but the “sour ecstasy of bread”99 calms her way being at home
would. She is the mourning Persephone who has not yet eaten the pomegranate seeds;
wishing to be back in a place she felt she belonged.
But as she explores Paris, the desires of the flesh and impulses begin to act upon her.
Rather than keep her mother at ease, she began to indulge those impulse, “doing what
[Mother] didn’t need to know. […] doing everything and feeling nothing.”100 She half-
heartedly describes her associations with men, the “flowers” the poet collects are actually
boys; this isn’t a girl with “frilly ideals”101 like her mother. The poet was deliberately
engaging in passionate relationships purely for the ecstasy and rupture of order it made her
feel.102 The poet’s conscious thoughts break through the memory in the form of a Demeter
voice, highlighting an understanding of her past self as the “corn in the husk/vine
unfurling.”103 Where she thought she may have been acting out of maturity, she recognizes in
remembrance that she is still Demeter’s snail, slowly carrying the weight of her mother’s
overwhelming shell behind her. Until she breaks that shell, she will forever be her mother’s
daughter lost in a foreign land.
But the poet has outgrown her shell insofar as her identity as an American is
concerned; the American expats sound like “crudités, peanuts” with their condescending talk
about Parisians and their dogs, and she decides “to let this party/swing without”104 her to go in
search of somewhere more fitting to her mood. Her anxieties and repressed emotions show
themselves even here as the older poet in recollecting realizes the depth of her depression.
She goes out into the chill, lost in the rubbish and dog feces. The interspersed repetition of
lines from the previous section, “this is how the pit opens […] this is how one foot/sinks into
the ground,”105 connect the chronological events of the myth as ordered in part II with the
remaining events in this part.
98 Ibid
99 Dove, 24.
100 Dove, 25.
101 Ibid
102 Jung, 88-89
103 Dove, 25
104 Dove, 27.
105 Dove, 29.

25
When Hades is finally represented, it is through the poet’s recollection of him. She
presents him as a mock artist, seeking a potential mate not for the same reasons the poet
consciously acknowledges (love) but for her own repressed reason (boredom). His
“devilishness” echoes the poet’s thoughts from the previous section: scorn and discrimination
of humans in general as a “noisy zoo” with an “unbearable stench.”106 When the poet enters
the scene, she imagines the Hades figure as being drawn to her because she is different than
others, having a “brave, lost countenance” which distinguishes her from the
“Africans,/spilling up the escalator/like oil from lucky soil.”107
The poet recounts their flirtatious seduction as a conversation concerning time and
language, both elements of the mythic narrative onto which the poet is projecting. When the
final poem is presented, it is a return to the order of the sonnet, twenty-eight lines (or fourteen
half lines) spoken in alternating format by the poet and her male consort. Some scholars think
that this poem represents the return of the Demeter figure to the younger girl’s narrative, that
the half-lines are figurative of Persephone in Hell and Demeter on earth calling for
Persephone’s return.108 But the font for the responding half lines is the same font used to
denote the Hades figure’s thoughts in the previous sections of the poem, and as other poems
of the volume have been careful in utilizing certain fonts and indentions to denote specific
speakers and themes, it is unlikely that a switch would take place here.
Font and style aside, even the content of the poem speaks to a seductive duet, for the
girl’s thoughts (aligned on the left) recall images of the female community in myth: the moon
(Hecate), the olive (Demeter), “the garden gone.”109 As “the seed in darkness,”110 the young
poet is ripe for growing, and the images spoken by the Hades figure evoke a pair of lovers
consummating their love:
you rise into my arms…
I part the green sheaths…
I part the brown field…
and you are sinking…
through heat the whispers…
through whispers the sighing…
106 Dove, 30
107 Ibid
108 Cook and Tatum, 360
109 Dove, 33
110 Ibid
26
through sighing the darkness…111

Even the girl’s final two lines sound like she is experiencing an orgasm for the first time, “be
still she whispers…/and light will enter.”112 This “light” finally brings the poet into contact
with a mate who will help her escape the overwhelming desire to stay connected to her
identity as her mother’s Kore.
In returning to the chronology of the archetypal narrative, the poet introduces part IV
with an epigraph from Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Circling Hand”: “No small part of my life
was so unimportant that [Mother] hadn’t made a note of it,” which allowed the mother to
lecture the daughter, able to “tell it to [her] over and over again.”113 As a mother now
remembering her younger years, the poet will, like Kincaid’s mother, look and comment on
each part of her life in an effort to reconcile with her own past.
The section opens not with the mother or the daughter, not with the impersonal “I” or
“you,” but with the removed third person signifying the poet’s conscious separation from the
events. She is not remembering this event as the young girl any longer; she is choosing to
analyze this the way her own mother might have seen it, the way she might view it if her
daughter were to be the young girl being seduced. As “the Great Man drives home his
desire,”114 the poet’s doubling as a mother figure and a young woman is made explicit: when
her younger version sighs with sexual passion, her present identity as a mother stumbles in
grief. In this moment, the poet recognizes her change from Persephone, her mother’s kore, to
Persephone, her mate’s bride.
“Wiring Home” describes the poet’s recognition that she can never return to
experiencing everything in the same way she did as a young woman, just like her post-coital
self could never return to being a young girl. She describes her conscious mind travelling
through the unconscious mind’s “tales of odyssey and heartbreak,”115 which lead only to a
confrontation of her past mistakes. When the persona of the poem is confronted with an
image of both identities at once: bright yellow canaries (which evoke the mother archetype in
its representation of Demeter) that look like “a thousand/golden narcissi,”116 (the blooming
blossom which symbolizes a move to womanhood), the poet’s unconscious mind reminds her
111 Dove, 33
112 Ibid
113 Ibid
114 Dove, 37
115 Dove, 39
116 Ibid
27
that her past emotions are closed to her; to approach the future dressed in the face of the past
will only bring on more pain and repressed emotions.
The final poem is “The Bistro Styx,” five sonnets symbolizing a reunion between the
younger self and the mother self. The reunion here is imagined as a literal meeting between a
mother and her adult daughter at a café in Paris, such as the archetypal Persephone and
Demeter had at the end of the Homeric Hymn. As with most repressed memories called forth,
the meeting is anything but the joyful gathering of the Hymn. The Persephone figure does not
“fall into the passionate embrace”117 of her mother, nor do they “sooth each other’s heart and
soul in many ways,/embracing fondly, […] their spirits abandon grief,/as they gave and
received joy between them.”118 This is not a romanticized version of the mother-daughter
love;119 this is the honest, realistic joining of two world views in contrast with each other.
In projecting onto the mythic archetypes, the poet is able to take the position of her
conscious as mother, and make objective statements about herself more honestly than she
may have been able to do before. The younger version of the poet is not a particularly
respectable woman: she arrives late, merely nods at her mother’s presence, and is dressed all
in gray, a color associated with the Underworld and the realm of the unconscious. Of course,
the first comments the poet makes are similar to the comments most people make at seeing a
reflection of themselves from twenty or thirty years prior: she saw herself as “a cliché […]//
an anachronism, the brooding artist’s demimonde.”120
Through the inner monologue of the poem, the poet is able to continually criticize and
comment on her youthful actions and choices. Her choice of career with the “Great Artist” is
a farce, his art nothing but acrylics set next to “fuzzy, off-color Monets”121 and their souvenirs
shop containing nothing but cheap, knock-off Paris kitsch. She wonders what her younger
self found so attractive about this man when he so obviously used her for his own ends.
Food takes a symbolic position here as it does in the mythic narratives. Vegetables
and grains make no appearance in “The Bistro Styx,” effectively excluding the mother figure
from the world in which the daughter lives. Even the violent, cannibalistic images of a
Chateaubriand arriving “on a bone-white plate […] steaming/like a heart plucked from the
chest of a worthy enemy”122 could be read as the daughter figure symbolically destroying any
117 Foley, “Text and Translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,” line 389
118 Ibid, lines 435-437
119 Foley, “Mother/Daughter Romance” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
120 Dove, 40
121 Ibid
122 Dove, 41
28
semblance of her mother within her, an image completed by the blood-red Pinot Noir she
drinks. When the dessert arrives, the daughter shoves a ripe and juicy pear into her mouth in a
similar way Persephone partakes of the pomegranate in myth. Food, in its way of establishing
control, becomes the focus of rebellion by the younger self to the older.
Like the Demeter of myth, the poet in her older form does not eat and sticks with her
kykeon, a “café creme.”123 She wonders aloud why the younger self survived such an
existence, unhappy as she is. The final line of the poem signifies the poet’s acceptance that
the romanticized memories of her past self are not without fault and relinquishes this self
back to the unconscious: “I’ve lost her, I thought.”124.
Part V of Mother Love begins with an epigraph from Kadia Molodowsky’s “White
Night”: “Tighten the sails of night as far as you can, for the daylight cannot carry me.”
Molodowsky is relevant for both her experience with double consciousness as both Jewish
and Russian, as well as her double consciousness as a Jewish expat in America, commenting
on the pain and suffering she left behind. The poet’s transition from Paris to Mexico parallels
Molodowsky’s and places her memories of the experience in sharp contrast with the emotions
she felt at the time. The double consciousness of being a woman in a man’s world is
highlighted in the way the poet remarks on aspects of her femininity that seem to contrast or
compare with those of history.
“Nature’s Itinerary” plays with the concept of the woman’s body in conflict with the
woman’s identity; when her timing is late, she is angry at the way her “body [is] so cavalier,”
disobeying her desires even though she is “medically regulated.” But the female body is not
one to be controlled, like the seasons or the moon, and no matter her plans or her travels, the
body will create for the way in which it is designed. Just as the first flow of blood initiates the
girl into womanhood, the stoppage of blood denotes the initiation of the poet into the next
stage of femininity: motherhood. 125
The rest of the volume is the poet coming to terms with her emergence into
motherhood and loss of her romanticized ideals of youth. It’s this loss, not that of a literal
daughter, which causes her to identify more with the archetypal Demeter rather than
Persephone; like Demeter in the myth, the poet’s moods range from contemplative to rage
and back again. When she does identify with the archetypal Persephone, it is not as the young
123 Dove, 42
124 Ibid
29
maiden from the beginning of the myth, but the changed and somber Queen of the
Underworld she has become.
That the poet would interrupt her projection onto the archetypal Demeter and
Persephone with a sonnet about the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo seems abrupt, but in
the context of both the poet and Kahlo’s experiences as women, the connection is apt.
Besides the mention of her first name within the sonnet, the description of her as “the woman
with one black wing/perched over her eyes” 126 identifies Kahlo through the most famous
feature of her self-portraits: her dark, thick singular brow. In presenting Kahlo as a heroic
figure prevailing in light of her physical pain (“the plaster corset/her spine resides in”127) and
her emotional pain (“Diego’s/love a skull in the circular window”128), the poet seeks to
identify with Kahlo’s sense of rebirth through pain as symbolized by her rising to the
butterflies of her lost Communist heroes.129 Kahlo also becomes a more preferable contrast to
the “Great Artist” with whom the poet fell in love, compared as they both are to parrots;130
Hades is distrustful through his pain while Kahlo is aware and uses her pain to create.
Kahlo also could be read as another image upon which the poet projects a traumatic
event; as Kahlo is known to have had many miscarriages in her life (and to incorporate the
pain of that loss into her paintings),131 the extreme grief present in “Demeter Mourning” could
be representative of a woman who has lost a child in utero. The poet speaks directly through
the archetype of Demeter here creating an expectation of a lost child in her description of an
inconsolable grief felt by loss. She knows she is insupportable but no amount of help will
bring her closer to feeling happy; she has lost that feeling of purpose and can only gain it
again on her own terms: “one learns to walk by walking.”132
“Demeter Mourning” could also be the poet’s experience of losing her Hades, her first
love. Just as Kahlo dealt with her husband’s never ending extramarital affairs, so too could
the poet be mourning the loss of her husband to another woman. “Exit” seems to imply this
by describing the poet getting into a taxicab with a suitcase, “the saddest object in the
world”133 and yet also feeling a sense of relief at leaving, opening the poem with: “Just when
hope withers, a reprieve is granted.”134
126 Dove, 47
127 Ibid
128 Ibid
130 Hades in Dove, 31; Kahlo in Dove, 47
132 Dove, 48
133 Dove, 49
30
Such an interpretation would help express the anger and sad nostalgia of “Afield” and
“Lost Brilliance,” in which the poet laments her previous romanticized feelings of love as an
overwhelming sickness she overcame in order to reach her new state of consciousness.
“Afield” is the poet seeing the young Persephone she once was, desiring to end the fertile
months and return to the Underworld so that she could reach be with Hades again, but as a
grown woman in “Lost Brilliance,” the poet realizes that she can never return to that state.
Her “consort, [her] match/ [is] much older and sadder”135 and what was once “a
Venetian/palazzo or misty chalet tucked into an Alp” is nothing more than the same boring
landscape into which she has descended time immemorial.
Love has lost its luster, becoming infected with reality which burst “like these
blossoms, white sores.”136 The poet recognizes that this first love, sought as it was only as an
escape from her girlhood, was just a replacement for the identity from her mother that she
wholeheartedly rejected, and it ended just as badly as complete identification would have:
I had been traveling all these years
without a body,
until his hands found me—
and then there was just
the two of us forever:
one who wounded,
one who served.
The poet keeps ambiguous as to who wounds and who serves, but in this ambiguity is the
implication that through complete identification, she became both inflictor and servant; only
through self-sufficiency and independence can an identity truly be born.
In the last part of the volume to project onto the archetypes of Demeter and
Persephone directly, the poet begins to express her anger at the loss of independence
motherhood brings through connections between the mother-daughter pair and other
historical figures. “Political,” dedicated to Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach, represents
freedom as something for which one needs to continually fight. Breytenbach spent seven
years in prison for treason, and upon his release, wrote poetry and spoke about his
experience. Through constant interaction with his experience, he has found freedom from it;
“Even Demeter keeps digging/toward that darkest miracle/the hope of finding her child
134 Ibid
135 Dove, 51
136 Dove, 50
31
unmolested.”137 The poet, too, must continue to interact with the emotions she felt at having a
child in order to understand herself as a mother: “the world is shit and shit/can make us
grown.”138 By being like Demeter and digging through the “shit,” the poet may find hope in
keeping her own child unmolested by the unconscious thoughts she has within her.
In “Teotihuacan,” the poet creates an analogy with the slaves of the Aztec who were
forced to crush millions of special insects for a small portion of dye to be used on the Temple
of the Sun; but just like Breytenbach’s experiences in “hell’s circles”139 gave birth to his
poetry, so too do the slaves’ servitude find an expression of beauty one might not imagine to
have seen. But this beauty came at the price of their freedom. The poet’s concern here is a
choice, a choice she does not appreciate having to make: create a beautiful miracle and be
tied to it forever, a “slave” to motherhood or continue as an independent self, disinterested as
the poets in “Teotihuacan” are with the plight of the slaves.
As the archetypal Demeter in “Demeter, Waiting” the poet expresses her anger at this
choice through her readiness to abandon everything, to destroy her body and her environment
if it means restoring her sense of self and individuality. When she rages against Hades, as the
father figure, in “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades,” she is not raging as the mother of Persephone,
whom Hades stole from her; she is raging as the same woman whom Hades abducted. He did
not realize that his actions were going to change her life in such an irreconcilable way; the
poet, in speaking as a Demeter figure to a Hades figure, is warning him against impregnating
Persephone because once he does, neither of them can ever go back.
The poet depicts this physically through her anger at society’s desire for a woman to
become both a mother yet remain the “size threes/[…with] skirts ballooning above twinkling
knees/[that]are every man-child’s preadolescent dream.” Woman cannot be both young and
mother; her body will not allow it, and she must reconcile that once she is a mother she has
moved on to a new stage of life and cannot return to her previous one, a concept the poet
comes to terms with in the final lines of “Used” and echoed in the last stanza of “Rusks”:
Enough of guilt—
It’s hard work staying cool.140
Let someone else have

the throne of blues for a while,
137 Dove, 55
138 Ibid
139 Ibid
140 Dove, 60
32
let someone else suffer mosquitoes.

As my mama always said:
half a happiness is better
than none at goddam all.141
By throwing off her “throne of blues,” the poet is coming to terms with the fact that she
cannot be pure and perfect like the Virgin Mary; she must come to terms with the limitations
of herself. By enjoying her “half a happiness,” found in knowing she is doing all she can to
make her child happy, the poet comes to accept herself in “Missing.” Now that she is a
mother, who her previous way of living can never be brought back nor can the poet’s new
identity as mother ever “die.” Although she was a Persephone figure, “who went out with the
girls,/never checked back in [with] nothing to marked [her] “last/known whereabouts,”142 she
was that no longer and the horror of the life-changing event that is motherhood, “is partial; it
keeps you going.”143
The memories of youth are always more promising than what actually took place, and
in the final poem, titled “Her Island,” the poet summarizes her realization of this fact through
a trip to Sicily, one of the sites linked to the myth of Persephone’s abduction and Demeter’s
mourning. With the first line of each section repeating the final line of the section previous,
“Her Island” tricks the reader to think that this is the connection of each poem to the next;
however, its seven sections of fourteen lines presents this poem as a half cycle; in keeping
with the form of the sonnet, there should be fourteen sections. This quest is only half over,
telling the story in reverse like the counter-clockwise direction in which the poet and her
husband travel around the island, searching for a mythic center, a center which they can touch
and say, “This is as it was, undistorted by modernity, representative of Sicily’s early period.”
But as the quest begins, modernity encroaches in the very process of searching the way it did
with the poet’s memories, forcing them to tread the rubbish “among orange peels and
wax/wrappings flecked with grease”144 and “rotten fruit and Tampax tubes.”145 Sicily, like the
poet’s sense of identity, has been altered by the demands of history. The “temples, or pieces
of them,/lay scattered across the countryside,”146 no longer demanding the reverence they
141 Dove, 61
142 Dove, 62
143 Ibid
144 Dove, 67
145 Dove, 72
146 Dove, 74
33
once did because they do not serve to dictate the rhythm of the current “ugly god, the god of
all that’s modern,”147 the automobile.
A modern-day Charon guides them on this journey, and in keeping with his position
in myth, he guides them only to disappointment, exploiting those aspects of the poet’s self
which she thought to have repressed. Their Charon creates a sense of the displaced and
fragmented in the poet; he talks to her husband rather than addressing them as a couple. His
gestures imply he sees her not only as a female Other but an Other of different race, echoing
the dual “double consciousness” as a woman of African descent, with which the poet is
forever adjusting.
When they finally do reach the destination, the lake of Persephone’s myth, the poet is
overcome with disappointment for even here, “the only body of water for twenty miles,”148
has been overwhelmed by the automobile; “around this perfect ellipse/they’ve built…a
racetrack”149 Just as the poet attempted to do with her memories of childhood, the past, as
represented by the lake, has been altered to make way for the present. The only way to avoid
falling victim to the disappointment of this loss is to “drive straight toward the fire,”150 to
continue forward so that one can emerge in consciousness of one’s self, “through sunlight,
into flowers,”151 the same flowers which the poet remembers Persephone walking through
before she was pulled down. As “Her Island” and Mother Love comes to an end, the poet
remarks that “no story’s ever finished; it just goes/on, unnoticed in the dark that’s all/around
us,”152 like the process of woman in defining herself. As an echo of that statement, the poem
ends with the first line of the first poem in this section, signaling that the cycle starts over
again, as it would when the poet’s daughter, like her mother and all mothers, attempts to find
wholeness in her fragmented identity.
147 Dove, 72
148 Dove, 75
149 Ibid
150 Dove, 76
151 Ibid
152 Dove, 77
34
Chapter 3
The Unconscious Persephone in Averno
Louise Glück’s first foray into the precarious position of the Persephone figure during
her development as not-only-a-daughter is in the poem “Pomegranate,” whose message via
Hades implies that it is the mother, the feminine world, who causes the most strife, not the
still blossoming Underworld. When Glück returned to Persephone in her 2006 volume
Averno, it was with a more psychoanalytic slant; Glück saw in the Persephone of myth an
archetype split like the conscious is split. That the volume is titled Averno is significant to
both myth and psychoanalysis; Averno is a crater lake in Italy which was once thought to be
the gateway to the underworld, another archetypal image which has been said to represent the
unconscious.153 Where Persephone in the myth was a nonentity upon which all other females
projected their own experiences, Glück provides her with a voice, anxieties, decisions. She
becomes the representative for all women stuck in-between states of girl and woman,
wondering which direction she will allow herself to go.
Glück is well-versed in psychoanalysis, seeing it as a vehicle to better writing through
objective imagery. Poetry is less about personal exploration, although she utilizes a vast
amount of autobiographical material, and more about attempting to touch something
universal through a manipulation of images and connotations. 154 For Averno, she uses Freud’s
style of free association as a way to explore how the mythological aspects relevant to the
Persephone myth manifest themselves in her unconscious; as both the Homeric Hymn and
Ovid are silent about Persephone’s time in the Underworld, Glück’s approach seeks to
unearth what has been repressed there and how those memories effect the message of the
myth as a whole.155 Which does Persephone prefer: life, as according to her mother, or death,
as according to Hades? Is there really a difference?
As women are generally only defined as one half of a relationship when introduced
with their mothers156, Glück chooses to analyse Persephone while she is hell. Like the
unconscious, a memento mori of this type asks the reader and analysand to remember death,
something which “lies beyond [the] personal memory.”157 Persephone, in this way, becomes
153 Gosmann, 219

154 Glück, as quoted in Gosmann, 221
155 Gosmann, 220-221
156 Cushman, 131.

35
an archetypal figure of death and the unconscious, of what women fail to remember about
themselves which may, in fact, be affecting their present-day lives.158 As Carl Jung describes,
mother complexes are not just a case of repressed mother issues being called forth through
dream fantasies; they can also be expressed through the way a woman conducts herself in the
conscious realm.
An overbearing mother, whose only concern in life is to bear and protect her daughter
such as Demeter is portrayed in the myth, could cause a variety of mother complexes. When
manifested as a similar personality in the daughter, it is referred to as a “Hypertrophy of the
Maternal Element.”159 When manifested as a desire to seek only passionate love in
unsatisfactory relationships with men, often to the men’s detriments, it is an
“Overdevelopment of Eros.”160 The most negative of consequences of this mother type can be
seen in an “Over-identification with the Mother”; the daughter has no need for her own
personality because the feminine forces she should seek are already lived through the
mother’s experience, 161 like Persephone before she is abducted in the myth. The daughter
could also do the exact opposite and live in “Resistance to the Mother,” where she desires to
do and be all the things her mother is not; the daughter marries not for love or security but as
an escape, unfortunately sometimes choosing a mate who exemplifies her mother in every
way.162 These complexes are not mutually exclusive; a daughter can and usually does
experience or live out more than one of these complexes at a time. Glück explores that
concept through her psychoanalysis of Persephone, and her speaker, in Averno. Through free
association with Persephone and her archetypal mother, Glück’s speaker seeks to identify the
ways her own mother complexes may have impacted life.
Though Persephone’s journey in the Underworld serves as the archetypal journey into
the unconscious, Glück does not begin Averno with a poem related to the myth. Rather, the
opening poem, “Night Migrations,” sets the tone which the volume will follow. “What will
my soul do for solace”163 she asks as the day sinks into night. It is a dark question,
precipitated as it is by the thought that “the dead won’t see”164 the beauty of the red sunset in
the mountains or the birds’ flight to nest for the night. Death, like the unconscious, is
157 Gosmann, 219

158 Gosmann, 219
159 Jung, 87-88
160 Jung, 88-89
161 Jung, 89
162 Jung. 91
163 Glück, 1
164 Ibid
36
unfathomable, removed as it is from our present day; and like death, the unconscious has no
need for “these things we depend on,” these everyday relationships and structures. When one
dies, when one delves into the unconscious, “they disappear.”165
The rest of the volume is separated into two parts, simply titled “I” and “II,”
representing the descent and ascent of Persephone to the Underworld. The first poem of part
I, “October,” signifies the acknowledgement of this impending death, littered as it is with
associations of late autumn and winter. The poem is broken up into six sections with the
language for each showing the persona of the poem getting closer and closer to facing an
unknown. As with psychoanalysis, the speaker begins with resistance:
Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted
didn’t the night end,

didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters
wasn’t my body
rescued, wasn’t it safe166
Autumn, here possibly representing repressed memories just coming to the surface, is not
welcomed by the speaker. As the first part of the poem progresses, the speaker begins to
come to terms with this fact but meets it with disinterest, as analysands often do: “I no longer
care/what sound it makes//[…]what it sounds like can’t change what it is…”167
Summer, for the speaker and Persephone, is a “balm after violence […]
returning/everything that was taken away—”168 through its warmth and careless nights. But
the interspersed repetition of the lines “it does me no good; violence has changed me”169
highlights that the unconscious has repeatedly broken through, desiring to share something
which must be dealt with. She knows that not dealing with these issues, not facing whatever
fears her mind seeks to share with her, has caused her to only be half-living her life, like
165 Glück, 1
166 Glück, 5
167 Ibid
168 Glück, 7
169 Ibid
37
Persephone when she is above ground during the fertile months of the year. The other half of
her life lies in the Underworld, the unconscious, and the only way to fully live is to go there.
Rather than the welcome return to the world many assume it would be, Persephone
laments her return from the Underworld each year:
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure.
[…]
death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.170
This awe-inspiring portal of light, rather than feeling warm and welcome like the summer sun
is cold and glassy. Jung suggests water as a primordial mother archetype; as all beings need
and were born from the water, the unconscious often uses the image as representative of the
mother.171 The Persephone figure, analysing the living earth from the Underworld, similarly
recognizes her mother in the water which coats everything. Returning to the consciousness
would be returning to the world of the mother, which, like the pools in the gutters, leads to
unkindness.
As autumn closes, the speaker plays with the homophone of mourning in the sounds
of daybreak: “And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.”172 Just as the birds tire of the
sun, so too does the speaker. “This is the present, an allegory of waste.”173 The descent to the
Underworld, to the unconscious, is almost a welcome event, an acquired taste. Although the
world seems “dark, now, with desolation and anguish,”174 it leaves the mind open to explore
what makes everything seem so grim, “it has left in its wake a strange
lucidity.//[…]Maestoso, doloroso:”175 This majestic pain will bring light to the darkness, a
reprieve from the half awareness of the conscious mind.
The world is losing its lustre as the speaker remarks that there is not enough beauty,
enough candour. The unconscious is lined with “trees, iron/gates of private houses,/the
shuttered rooms” of memory and loss. The further down the Persephone figure descends into
the unconscious, the less optimistic she becomes concerning her future. Hope is “false, a
170 Glück, 7
171 Jung, 81
172 Glück, 11
173 Ibid
174 Ibid
175 Italian: Grand, painful; Glück, 12

38
device to refute/perception—At the intersection”176 between the conscious and unconscious.

One has to go into analysis without preconceptions, without a desired outcome because what
one might find may not be spring, may not help one to be reborn into the sunlight for
“something has ended.”177
Once in the unconscious the Persephone figure can view the mother in a more
objective light:
My friend the earth is bitter; I think
sunlight has failed her.
Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.
[…]
She wants, now, to be left alone.
I think we must give up
turning to her for affirmation.178
The earth, as an archetype for the mother, is something from which to detach. She is in “bitter
disgrace, coldness and barrenness”179 but from that the beautiful moon rises, casting light into
the dark, providing a path with which to find the solace for the soul asked in “Night
Migrations.” Rather than begin with a Persephone as Kore, she immediately becomes
“Persephone the Wanderer.”
There are two versions of this poem in Averno, one at the beginning of the journey in
the Underworld and one at the end. Both are of equal length, twenty-nine lines, and concern
the thoughts of the mythical Persephone, not an invoking of her archetypal image. In the first
of these two poems, the details of her myth are recounted the way an analyst might recount a
session with a patient; there are facts interspersed with interpretations and conclusions drawn
on the appropriateness and function of the myth.
In discussing Demeter’s famine on the earth at the loss of Persephone, the speaker
claims that:
this is
consistent with what we know of human behaviour,
that human beings take profound satisfaction

in doing harm, particularly
176 Glück, 13
177 Glück, 15
178 Ibid
179 Ibid
39
unconscious harm:180
Demeter is immediately a mother suffering from Jung’s hypertrophy of maternal instinct,
willing to destroy everything in order to preserve her identity as mother.181 That she takes a
perverse pleasure in it reflects more on what the analyst thinks of humanity’s capacity for
destruction than Persephone’s.182
The speaker continues by discussing the pomegranate seed episode of the myth and
the controversy over whether Persephone willingly partook of the food and what it would
mean if she did. That her intentions are “pawed over by scholars”183 signifies that she is still
objective, a young, innocent daughter who has no capacity to make her own decisions, who
may have been duped to “cooperate in her rape/or [be] drugged, violated against her will.”184
Even so, her actions are not without consequences:
[…]the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—185
Just as Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter was branded an adulterer because she accepted her
female sexuality, so too is Persephone after lying in bed with Hades. Neither woman can ever
return to her previous state because she performed a sexual act unbecoming to her position.
The speaker goes on to consider whether Persephone, like Hester, no longer has a
“home” to which she can return. She considers the bed of Hades and the Underworld, but
then wonders if Persephone is just
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?186
180 Glück, 16
181 Jung, 88
182 Gosmann, 222
183 Glück, 16
184 Ibid
185 Ibid
186 Ibid
40
Persephone’s continued wanderings between Hades and her mother are what make her so
indistinct;187 she “is just meat” in “an argument between the mother and the lover.”188
In a turn to directly speaking to the reader, the speaker, as analyst, remarks that the
myth is not a literal myth; it is intended to be psychoanalysed as elements “of a dilemma or
conflict.”189 She equates them to the divided soul, “ego, superego, id,” and “a kind of diagram
that separates/heaven from earth from hell”190 without defining which character represents
which aspect.
Snowing and its whiteness, equated with purity, forgetfulness, desecration, and safety,
become significant to Persephone’s definition of herself. The snow only appears when
“Persephone is having sex in hell” and although she does not see its beauty, she knows that
“she is what causes it.”191 A hard burden to bear, that nature, the beauty she sees in the
world,192 dies whenever she experiences pleasure.
But when the speaker comments that Persephone knows that the world is run by
mothers, who can no longer control her, she sees in her pleasure a sense of freedom, for “she
has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter,”193 and she is not simply a daughter
anymore. But, because she still has not come to terms with this aspect of her personality
completely, she is doomed to forever “drift between earth and death/which seem,
finally,/strangely alike.”194 Demeter and Hades, rather than serving as opposing forces,
become the same.
Finally, the speaker comes to a conclusion about what Persephone’s eternal cycle
means for the human soul; like the rift Hades makes to take Persephone from the field, there
is a break in the psyche.195 Demeter, as the representative of earth and the conscious mind,
wants Persephone (the self) to forget that rift, to stay firmly on the side of awareness and the
superego. Hades, as the representative of the Underworld and the unconscious, has shown the
self something she can never forget, and so she can never return to that untainted state.196 The
poem ends with a question to the reader about which he or she would choose: staying
unaware in one’s awareness or learning the truth in the dark unconscious?
187 Gosmann, 223

188 Glück, 18
189 Glück, 17
190 Ibid
191 Ibid
192 Glück, 9
193 Glück, 18
194 Ibid
195 Gosmann, 227
196 Gosmann, 228

41
The poems which make up the rest of Averno are to be viewed as the speaker’s
continued descent into the unconscious, like Persephone’s descent into and ascent from the
Underworld. In this way, the poems are meant to be read sequentially, providing an ever
deepening understanding of the speaker’s unconscious as viewed through the mythic
archetype. “Prism” begins this descent, following its namesake in form: twenty fractured
scenes reflecting different perspectives on the same topic. Still utilizing free association, the
speaker delves into her own unconscious to highlight how the mother archetype (as
connected to the personal mother) drives one’s actions. The world, the conscious mind, is
always changing depending on the situations in one’s life, and when one delves into the
unconscious memories, as she does, what is remembered is more like how “one takes in/an
enemy”197; analytic, objective, without emotion, “Meaning: I am master here.”198
Her first memory concerns a definition of love, “it’s like being struck by lightning,”199
a feeling of complete shock which overwhelms the senses. However, the speaker immediately
realizes that what was remembered as having been said by her sister was just a statement
parroted from her mother. Love, as seen through the relationship of her mother and father,
was not a one-time survivable experience, as a lightning strike, but more like death in an
electric chair; her mother’s identity died when she married the father.
And yet, the speaker hints that the mother knew this and resented him, a fact which
shown like “steady lines of silver” in her mother’s advice:
“You girls,” my mother said, “should marry
someone like your father.”
That was one remark. Another was,

“There is no one like your father.”200
Marriage becomes equivalent to “growing up” in the speaker’s memory, a necessary
end because “the voice of the child was tiresome.”201 The voice that constantly questioned,
constantly explored, constantly challenged, is meant to be quiet when a girl marries. The
speaker recalls a post-coital scene in summer, when Persephone is supposed to be on earth in
the land of mothers/superego, and remembers the feeling of contentedness, not longing, not
desire, just the numbing feeling of contentedness in the arms of a lover.
197 Glück, 20
198 Ibid
199 Ibid
200 Glück, 21
201 Glück, 22
42
She interrupts this memory with a comment on shapes and patterns, reminded as she
was by the constellations of the summer scene. As with free association, shapes develop into
“the light of the mind […]/blocked by earth, coherent, glittering.”202 Her conscious mind, her
superego, telling her “now plant, now harvest,”203 in an effort to dictate her every move, plan
her future for her, just like a mother would.
The speaker returns to the stars but in a different memory, one which calls forth the
discomfort her parents felt at her childhood insomnia. She discusses the way silence was
better than conversation, the way she “preferred to live with the dog.” The boats, with their
female names, were like all girls; “they were going nowhere, […] nothing to be learned from
them.” Like most children, the speaker comments that her parents just did not understand her;
when she tried to articulate what it was she felt and was thinking, they just tried to “fix the
spelling.”
Love becomes an assignment in the speaker’s free-association. How one does so is
entirely up to the person, but the point was to make it stick, model it off another myth,
another story, conform to what people already know. But “being struck by lightning was [not]
like being vaccinated” for the speaker; instead of becoming immune, warm and dry on the
earth, she became addicted to the shock, the overwhelming emotion of it all.204
But when the author of the assignment for love is female, the beloved becomes
“identified with the self in a narcissistic projection,”205 often as either an escape from the
mother or in identification with her.206 Like Persephone moving from Demeter to Hades and
back again each year, “time was experienced/less as narrative than ritual.”207 Women fall in
love because they have to and continue to do so until they satisfy this narcissistic projection;
“what was repeated had weight.”208
But, as the speaker’s recognizes, to repeat the cycle for the sake of repeating just
deceives the self into thinking it is happy instead of facing the truth; that there are “too many
roads, no one path—//and at the end?”209 Easier to stay on the path already set with an ending
already known, like Persephone’s journey where the destination and dates have been
established for eternity, than to forge one’s own path into the unknown.
202 Glück, 23
203 Ibid
204 Glück, 24-25
205 Glück, 25
206 Jung, 89-91
207 Glück, 25
208 Ibid
209 Glück, 26
43
The speaker returns to the doubling of Demeter and Persephone as archetypes:

17.
The self ended and the world began.
They were of equal size,
commensurate,
one mirrored the other.
18.
The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind.
The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.210
The conscious mind can never let the ego stay within the id; to do so would encourage a lack
of restraint, a path which inevitably had “certain endings [which] were tragic.”211 One had to
return to the earth on occasion, like Persephone, or the darkness of the unconscious would
take over.
“Prism” ends with the speaker realising that every time she gave herself to a man, she
was attempting to escape the “earth.” And whenever she awoke from the darkness of her
senses and pleasure, whenever she was reborn the next morning, it was a stranger by whom
she slept.212 The pleasure and wholeness she felt dissolved once the desires of the id were
satisfied, the same way Persephone feels when she leaves Hades each year.
Where “Prism” discusses the speaker’s free associated connections between her
mother, her concept of love, and her unconscious, “Crater Lake,” discusses the body, soul,
and death. These become represented as the three divisions of the psyche while also being
described in conjunction with the three divisions of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades.
Demeter, as the body and the superego, is defined, for a reason which the speaker does not
know, as “good,” while Hades, as death and the id, is “evil.”213 The soul, in its attempt to
satisfy “good,” sides with the body; anything which could possibly harm the body will harm
the soul, and vice versa. But by “turning against the dark,/against the forms of death/it
recognized,”214 the body “made itself afraid of love.”215 Without access to those unconscious
desires, those aspects of one’s self that represent the self, the soul can never be whole:
210 Glück, 26
211 Glück, 25
212 Glück, 27
213 Gosmann, 231
214 Glück, 28
215 Ibid
44
Once I could imagine my soul

I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died.216
Yet her “body persisted./Not thrived, but persisted”217 like Demeter and the earth
above when Persephone “died” and went to Hades in the Underworld. One must be able to
reconcile the body with death in order to thrive. And like the memory this concept calls forth
in the speaker, that of the snow-capped mountains during summer, bringing all three together
brings a sense of peace, one which the speaker attributes to artists because they can “give
voice to these impressions”218 in a way practical thinking cannot. This peace is often disrupted
by the “body” by declaring the soul “dead,” which leads to forgetting one’s self. As shown
when the speaker asks how her soul died,
The silence answers
if your soul died, whose life

are you living and
when did you become that person?219
The unconscious is ready to bring forth what has been repressed and presents the conflict of
forgetting explicitly: without knowledge of her entire self, the speaker, like Persephone, will
never be whole. She will always be a shadow, a wisp moving between worlds.
In response, “Fugue,” is the speaker’s self-analysis, presented in another set of short,
fragmented scenes developed through free association. She begins with identifying her role
whenever she and her sister played “House” as children: “I was the man because I was
taller”220 and like all families, the mother, played by the speaker’s sister, would make the
domestic decisions and birth a baby. The man in the traditional nuclear family, as Jung states,
has no real interaction; he is reduced to the role of seducer and conqueror.221
But the speaker’s soul appears as a “winsome stranger,”222 an entity outside herself;
her “dead sister/[who] waited, undiscovered in [her] mother’s head”223 or attached to “the
216 Glück, 29
217 Ibid
218 Ibid
219 Glück, 30
220 Glück, 31
221 Jung, 184.
222 Glück, 31
223 Ibid
45
man/[she] pretended to be, playing with [her] sister.”224 Because the speaker had refused to
acknowledge the full extent of her soul, she found ways of projecting outward, and her
unconscious, at her request, reminds her of these projections to highlight the parts of her
identity that she has repressed.
As dream imagery is important to the field of psychoanalysis, Glück presents the
speaker’s two dreams about the mother as objectively as possible, offering no real
interpretation. Conclusions are withheld in order to get to the deepest meanings of the
images.
I had a dream: my mother fell out of a tree
After she fell, the tree died:
it had outlived its function.
My mother was unharmed—her arrows disappeared, her wings
turned into arms. Fire creature: Sagittarius. She finds herself in—
a suburban garden. It is coming back to me.225

Multiple elements of the mother archetype present itself in this first dream. That the
mother was in a tree at the start signifies the tree as phallus, for the tree can be both phallic
and feminine, but considering “it had outlived its function”226 when the mother leaves, it leans
toward a phallic representation of the father. After the mother gives birth, she is no longer the
angel she was but has become a “fire creature: Sagittarius”227 a symbol of destruction and
protection.
Her second dream begins: “we are at war./My mother leaves her crossbow in the high
grass.” Exactly who is at war is left ambiguous, for the speaker does not seem to know the
answer at this point, but as the dream progresses, the ambiguity becomes part of the process
in that she is both standing with her mother (she is the only one who can pick up the
crossbow once her mother has dropped it) and against her (as her childhood becomes closed
forever during the battle). In the classic conflict of a female’s life, the speaker is desperate
both to separate and identify with her mother.228 This is signified even further by the next
image of her dream: her mother’s bow becomes a harp whose string cuts into her hand. If she
“moves the harp,/[she] will bleed to death.”229
224 Ibid
225 Glück, 32
226 Ibid
227 Ibid
228 Foley, “Mother/Daughter Romance” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

46
The speaker then begins to interpret her dreams, realizing that the tree, the blood, the
harp were all symbols of her “body,” her superego, her mother complex which was keeping
her from making the decision to become her own person. As she realizes that her memories
are perverted (“I was the man because I was taller.//But I wasn’t tall—/didn’t I ever look in a
mirror?”230), called forth to keep her from turning towards “death” and the unconscious, she
becomes like Orpheus who has lost Eurydice, and her “music began, the lament of the
soul/watching the body vanish.”231 She had finally reached wholeness.
The second part of Averno is paralleled to Persephone’s ascent back to the realm of
the earth, back to her mother. But not without consequence, for as “The Evening Star,”
suggests, the darkness has helped her come to terms with her mother’s destructiveness:
Tonight, for the first time in many years,
there appeared to me again
a vision of the earth’s splendour:
[…]
And the light, which was the light of death,
seemed to restore to earth
its power to console.232

Only through traversing the darkness has the speaker been able again to see her
mother as the nurturer. That the light which brings this comprehension is that of the planet
Venus, representative of love and the cause of Persephone’s abduction (as told by Ovid),
brings the mythical cycle and the speaker’s psychoanalytic one full circle. Without Venus’
aid, this Persephone may have never been able to understand her mother, and herself, so
completely.
In “Landscape,” the speaker approaches the slow ascent to consciousness through
various natural landscapes and their symbolism with the human psyche. “A stranger has tied
his horse to a chestnut tree,”233 the speaker begins, describing the sounds and sights of the
landscape through a semi-free association, the speaker remarks on the way coming into
contact with “death,” in whatever form, changes depending on the approach. Where “a little
dog trails his master,”234 the speaker remarks that she remembers it “used to rush
229 Glück, 34
230 Glück, 35
231 Ibid
232 Glück, 39
233 Glück, 40
47
ahead/straining the leash, as though to show his master/what he sees there, there in the
future.”235 The dog’s responses to the man’s frantic calls seem to the speaker to be laden with
comfort, “as though this thing we fear/were not terrible.”236 When the man leaves, the speaker
remarks that the whole scene becomes a memory, much like the aspects one comes into
contact with during analysis. A person leaves changed but still whole.
The speaker returns to a psychoanalytic approach, setting it in the heart of winter, “a
time/of waiting, of suspended action.” The past, present, and future are connected with
images of winter: the past, a cloud hanging over the head, moving away as time passed; the
present, that which was lived; the future, moving “under the ice[…]/If you fell into it, you
died.”237 Like the past which cannot be reached and the future which should not be heralded,
the speaker advocates action in place of waiting. Only action will allow the clouds to move
and the ice to recede. It is not an easy battle to fight:
[…]Some days
there was no wind. The clouds seemed

to stay where they were,
[…]
Some days the lake was a sheet of glass.
Under the glass, the future made
demure, inviting sounds:
you had to tense yourself so as not to listen.238
That the speaker chooses to present the past as above rather than behind and the future as
below instead of ahead is also indicative of a psychoanalytic reading; for to live too much in
what has already caused disturbances or to live too much in the unseen unconscious is to miss
out on the beauty of what is happening in one’s life. Only when one has finally let go of all
the conflicts and painful memories can the clouds clear and the sky finally be “only blue, blue
everywhere.”239
The landscape changes to describe a scorched wheat field and creates a parallel
between the girl who set fire to it and a person who finally eliminates one’s neuroses; both
234 Ibid
235 Glück, 40
236 ibid
237 Glück, 42
238 Glück, 43
239 Ibid
48
can only be successful because the time is right. A person who successfully completes this
task, who successfully unites with herself, may look back on this field of memories and ask
“how could I live here?//But it was different then,/[…]the earth behaved/as though nothing
could go wrong with it.”240 Like the earth of the previous section, this earth had to be “killed”
in order to be “reborn.” “The deadness [had to be] in place already/so to speak” or it would
not have been as easy to complete. Trying to clear it out too soon or waiting until it was too
late can only cause suffering.
Persephone finally arises from the Underworld. “I fell asleep in a river, I woke in a
river”241 she begins, again evoking an archetypal image of the mother as water. The speaker,
as Persephone, recalls “how harsh these conditions are/[…] not obsolete/but still, the river
cold, shallow.” After a time in the Underworld, the brightness and barrenness of the world
she awakes to seems empty, “dignified, complacent, dissolving hope.”242 The experience of
the Underworld begins to disappear as the sun rises over the dry and coarse ground, and she
realizes finally that “there was no night./The night was in my head.”243
As the darkness and whiteness of the winter envelope Persephone, the speaker
comments on how the setting seemed familiar “I have been lost before, I have been cold
before./The night has come to me/exactly this way, as a premonition—.”244 She realizes that
the night from which she awoke was a night to which she can return, and rather than lament
that fact, she decides she’d rather not be the mythic archetype but “a human
being,[…]Otherwise,/I would not know how to begin again.”245
“A Myth of Innocence” describes the narrative details of the Persephone myth as a
series of memories, memories coloured as they are by her experience in the unconscious. As
in the myth, Persephone is alone in a field, but in contrast to the Homeric Hymn or Ovid, she
is already at the pool through which Hades takes her, looking:
[…] at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.246
240 Glück, 45
241 Glück, 46
242 Ibid
243 Ibid
244 Glück, 48
245 Glück, 49
246 Glück, 50
49
Rather than describe Persephone as a girl on the verge of adolescence, she is a girl who
desires to be free of the power of her mother. She even recognizes Hades in the reflection of
the pool, and instead of shying away from him or resisting in fear, she almost prays for his
appearance, for Helios, her uncle, to watch as she is whisked away in an embrace rather than
through abduction.247
But the Persephone of Averno is a much more perceptive one than is allowed in the
mythic narratives, for she acknowledges that the moment she went into the pool, the moment
she accessed her unconscious, she was changed:
The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.
[…]
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.248
“Archaic Fragment” presents the speaker attempting to love herself through loving the
world. The pool of “Myth of Innocence” has become a mirror upon which the speaker
practices an exercise in positive affirmations, “tap[ing] a sign over the mirror:/You cannot
hate matter and love form.”249 When this does not work, she attempts to be like Demeter and
“taped a sign over the first sign:/Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments—,”250
reminding herself of elements in the world she needed to love: “dirt, food, shells, human
hair.”251 But because these are not the speaker’s elements, because these are elements of the
mother archetype and the superego, the exercise does not work, and the scream of the mirror
after she has “rent the signs” signify the message that it is only through the self, the body, the
ego can one truly be happy, or as close to happy as one can get.
“Blue Rotunda” is another free association poem about the attempt to return to the
state of “when you were a child,”252 except one cannot. Once a woman has moved past that
state, once a woman has loved, she is no longer a girl, and no amount of looking into the pool
will provide enough of a reminder to reabsorb the reflection. The speaker reduces the mythic
narrative of Persephone into short, three stanza fragments of a girl’s longing to recapture her
childhood. She comes to terms with the fact that this process must be done “in the right
247 Glück, 50-51

248 Ibid
249 Glück, 52
250 Ibid
251 Ibid
252 Glück, 54
50
order/not touching the father/until you solve the mother,”253 as it is with the oedipal stage of a
girl’s life. When she does get back to her childhood, as symbolised by the black space of a
crossword puzzle like the darkness of the unconscious, she realises that, like the girl in the
pool, she can never go back in. “You can see out, but you can’t go out—”254 No matter how
fondly or incredulously one looks at her past, it will always be like the clouds, just out of
reach.
Like “A Myth of Innocence,” “A Myth of Devotion,” presents another voice lacking
in the mythic narratives, that of Hades’. His actions in the Underworld, beyond the presenting
of the pomegranate seeds in the Homeric Hymn, are never described, but one has to wonder
what he did in order to get Persephone to eat willingly in the Underworld, considering the
common mythical knowledge that eating while there would doom one to remain for all
eternity.255 Glück offers her own interpretation of how he must have won Persephone’s heart:
he created a mock earth in the Underworld which he slowly removed in order to get her
adapted to the darkness.256
As in psychoanalysis, which peels off layers of the conscious mind to reach the
unconscious beneath, Hades’ plan desires to accustom Persephone to a world without her
mother’s presence looming over her like a superego. But, as Hades quickly recognizes, his
world is superficial; projecting the wrong images outward only makes them seem that much
more ridiculous. So when she finally comes into his arms, rather than speak sweet words to
her, he chooses the truth: “you’re dead, nothing can hurt you.”257 And as all things must die in
order to be transformed and born anew, he (and the speaker) sees in this statement a germ of
that “promising beginning” in which Persephone can be reborn.258
“Archaic Fragment” presents the speaker attempting to love herself through loving the
world. The pool of “Myth of Innocence” has become a mirror upon which the speaker
practices an exercise in positive affirmations, “tap[ing] a sign over the mirror:/You cannot
hate matter and love form.”259 When this does not work, she attempts to be like Demeter and
“taped a sign over the first sign:/Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments—,”260
reminding herself of elements in the world she needed to love: “dirt, food, shells, human
253 Glück, 56
254 Glück, 57
255 Eliade, 290n.
256 Glück, 58-59
257 Glück, 59
258 Ibid
259 Glück, 52
260 Ibid
51
hair.”261 But because these are not the speaker’s elements, because these are elements of the
mother archetype and the superego, the exercise does not work, and the scream of the mirror
after she has “rent the signs” signify the message that it is only through the self, the body, the
ego can one truly be happy, or as close to happy as one can get.
The title poem of the volume, “Averno,” is begins by repeating what the speaker has
already learned:
You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on—
something you have no choice about.262
As before, die has the connotation of a psychic “death,” that of going into the unconscious
and seeing what has been repressed there, but die also has the literal connotation, as seen in
the images the speaker presents of her children mocking and ignoring her, taking what she
says to indicate a descent into senility. The speaker feels alone in her knowledge of what it
means to live, not merely exist, in the totality of one’s self, and as the end of her literal life
comes closer, she wishes to unveil all that she has repressed, all the desires and impulses she
has held back in service to her body. Her children, though, see only her age and not her
message: “you’re all of you living in a dream.”263 Only in the Underworld, the darkness is life
truly lived out.
“Averno” then returns to the scorched field of “Landscape.” The field, instead of
being the past which should be swept away, becomes the memory which the speaker is
attempting to recapture but cannot. It is “covered with snow, immaculate”264 which “leaves no
mark on the earth.”265 Where the speaker in “Landscape” saw “a fresh start”266 in the destroyed
field, the speaker, now aged, remarks on that idea condescendingly. She has nothing to leave
her children, no memories to share with them; without memories, how else can a mother live
on?
The field then comes to represent not just memories, but childhood, too, and Averno,
both the literal place and the figurative pit through which all women fall from girlhood:
On one side, the soul wanders.
261 Ibid
262 Glück, 60
263 Glück, 61
264 Glück, 62
265 Ibid
266 Ibid
52
On the other, human beings living in fear.

In between, the pit of disappearance.
Some young girls ask me

if they’ll be safe near Averno—
[…]
I say, as safe as anywhere,
which makes them happy.
What it means is nothing is safe.267
Averno is not just a lake in Italy in this poem; it is representative of all the pits girls must fall
into in order to become women. They can attempt to leave their marks on the world when
they are young, but when they get older, only the damaged evidence of their complexes will
be left behind like the scorched field. Better to delve into the unconscious and burn the field
themselves; “Otherwise/it’s just forces we don’t understand/ruling the earth.”268
The speaker reveals finally that the field did begin to grow back after it was razed,
albeit messy and out of order. But nature, the speaker remarks, is like that; “it doesn’t have a
warehouse of memory.” Rather than assume that one’s life is over by the destruction of a
memory or a long-held conviction, one should think “I can live with this,/I can fight it after
awhile.”269 The earth, like the past and present, “didn’t know how to mourn, […] it would
change instead./And then go on existing without him.”270 The sooner a person comes to terms
with that fact about themselves and the world, the sooner one could move past the scorched
fields of disappointments piled up in the farm of the mind.
In “Telescope,” the speaker uses the relative distance of the stars to make the point
that one can never delve too deeply into the unconscious. No matter how close the telescope
of psychoanalysis might make things seem, there are still further “stars” of self to obtain.
There will always be some abyss that is harder to reach than the last, begging the use of a
better, more advanced lens. Part of the pleasure, the speaker implies, is in chasing those stars;
for, as the speaker says in the following poem, “Thrush”:
[…] in the end what you want
You’ll be able to see—
267 Glück, 64
268 Ibid
269 Glück, 68
270 Glück, 69
53
then you don’t need anymore

To die and come back again.271
Remembering is not required because one has already achieved the oneness sought.
The volume closes with the second “Persephone the Wanderer,” signifying a return to
the earth, the conscious. Here, the speaker comments not on Persephone’s experience; “she is
dead, the dead are mysteries.”272 Instead, Demeter’s reactions as a mother are discussed, not
analysed objectively as in the first version, but with all the emotions Persephone, as a patient,
would exude.273
We have here
a mother and a cipher: this is
accurate to the experience
of the mother as
she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks:

I remember when you didn’t exist.274
The child is an enigma, just as death is, but for the mother, the child is a piece of her, “a
branch of the mother’s body/that needs to be/reattached at any cost.”275 But Persephone does
not prefer the earth the way her mother does; in fact, she prefers death and the Underworld.
Having to recycle between two worlds each year, she reflects on the fact that she has only
known:
Two adults: death and her mother.
But two is
twice what her mother has:
her mother has
one child, a daughter.

A god, she could have had
a thousand children.276
271 Glück, 72
272 Glück, 73
273 Gosmann, 232
274 Glück, 73
275 Glück, 75
276 Glück, 74
54
And why does she only have the one child? Because Demeter has “no wish/to continue as a
source of life.”277 In birthing only Persephone, Demeter has internalized her death drive; she
does not want to continue being the goddess of fertility, only the goddess to Persephone, and
Persephone, in her rejection of her mother’s dominance, has turned to the very death drive
which gave birth to her and become Queen of the Underworld, the realm of the dead.
Demeter’s grief becomes less an expression of missing her lost daughter and more
one of desiring her lost power. Instead of wailing and lamenting like the lost bird of the
Homeric Hymn and Ovid, she is described as a politician who “remembers everything and
admits/nothing.”278 This “nothing” to which she admits is her jealousy at the very existence of
her daughter, referring to the birth as “unbearable” and her beauty, which surpasses
Demeter’s in its youthfulness, as “unbearable.” To Demeter, Persephone only exists as an
extension of herself, like an arm or a leg which needs to be returned in order for Demeter’s
body to be whole.
But as Persephone’s own voice begins to break through with the speaker’s,
Persephone’s choice to be Queen instead of Kore reveals itself in the way she describes her
mother’s realm as “small pester breezes” and “idiot yellow flowers.”279 She does not return to
her mother with a likeminded heart, as does the Persephone of myth; no, she is “haul[ed] out
again”280 each year, and the speaker wonders why. Did Persephone ever really grow up in the
myth or is her constant suffering just part of the narrative, an inconsequential detail
unsupported by the human psyche?
Persephone answers with her own voice in recounting conversations she has had with
Zeus while she was in the Underworld during winter. Knowing she would have to face her
domineering mother and the overbearing world of the superego, she would beg to know how
to endure it again. Like the scorched field, memories did not return without consequence. As
her father, his response is one of comfort; she will forget the unconscious and its desires, and
the earth and the embrace of her mother will again be like “the meadows of Elysium.”281 As in
the mythic narrative, her return to the hold of the superego returns her to the status of initiate,
of her mother’s kore. She will not remember the revelations of the Underworld until she
returns again the next year, replete with the same neuroses and complexes she shed in the
previous journey.
277 Ibid
278 Glück, 74
279 Glück, 75
280 Glück, 76
281 Ibid
55
Rita Dove and Louise Glück, through their different methods of exploring the female
unconscious, bring to light the importance of independence to the process of female
maturation. Where the mythic narrative and its rituals codify the female experience to one
regulated by bodily functions and the ability to procreate, psychoanalysis and contemporary
female authors have found, through identification with the mother-daughter pair as
archetypes, an ability to bring into focus the importance and connectedness of woman’s dual
identity as daughter and mother.
Dove’s treatment of the myth expresses woman’s need to realize that she does not
lose herself when she becomes a mother nor does she need to be perfect; it is okay to grieve
for her youth as long as she can realize that she will never again be that person.
Compartmentalizing one’s life into such dualities only forces the unconscious mind to keep
manifesting the “other” which the conscious mind represses.
Glück, in unearthing this “other” through psychoanalytic projections, presents the
“perfect mother” image as an imperfect and overbearing Demeter figure, one who actually
represents the death drive and projects it onto her daughter. Coming to terms with this death
drive is the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis, and by unifying one’s self with this projection,
woman can avoid repeating in her own family relations the repressive cycle of Persephone
and Demeter.
What the myth of Demeter and Persephone provides, then, is not so much a narrative
archetype which all women should follow but one from which all women should seek to
break. As shown by the recollections of both Dove and Glück, what the perfect mother
Demeter seems to represent is unnatural; she creates more psychological problems in her
child than she fixes. It is only when a woman is true to herself as woman, not as only a
daughter or only a mother, will she begin to realize her true potential as a human.
56
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UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, FILM, AND THEATRE STUDIES

Reconciling the Mother-Daughter Dyad in the Female Psyche:

Chapter 1: Demeter and Persephone in Myth and Psychoanalysis 6

Chapter 2: Locating the Kore within Mother Love 15

Chapter 3: The Unconscious Persephone in Averno 34

William R. Trask. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 289-291. Kindle.

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 52.

Demeter and Persephone in Myth

12 Foley, “Commentary” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter

22 Foley, “Interpreting the Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter

25 Defined as “young girl of initiatory age”; Lincoln, 224.

33 Foley, “Commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

34 Foley, “Commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

In Jungian psychoanalysis, Persephone and Demeter provide valuable archetypes

Kore/Persephone is generally thought to be this ultimate image upon which to associate a

52 Jung “Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” Essays

181, accessed May 8, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/crj/cls014.

58 Steffen, “In Conversation with Rita Dove,” in Crossing Color.

63 Rita Dove, Mother Love, (New York: Norton, 1995), xii.

21, 2014, http://0-www.jstor.org.serlib0.essex.ac.uk/stable/3299333.

(Winter 1996): 135-142. Accessed May 21, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299334,140.

69 Steffen, “Myths’ Remakes: Mother Love” in Crossing Color

71 Cook and Tatum, 346.

Chicago Press, 2010), 362.

she frequented the path by the river83

102 Jung, 88-89

104 Dove, 27.

105 Dove, 29.

through sighing the darkness…111

129 Steffen, “Myths’ Remakes: Mother Love” in Crossing Color

130 Hades in Dove, 31; Kahlo in Dove, 47

131 Steffen, “Myths’ Remakes: Mother Love” in Crossing Color

Let someone else have

let someone else suffer mosquitoes.

153 Gosmann, 219

156 Cushman, 131.

157 Gosmann, 219

160 Jung, 88-89

didn’t the night end,

175 Italian: Grand, painful; Glück, 12

device to refute/perception—At the intersection”176 between the conscious and unconscious.

that human beings take profound satisfaction

187 Gosmann, 223

195 Gosmann, 227

196 Gosmann, 228

That was one remark. Another was,

206 Jung, 89-91

The speaker returns to the doubling of Demeter and Persephone as archetypes:

213 Gosmann, 231

Once I could imagine my soul

if your soul died, whose life

221 Jung, 184.

a suburban garden. It is coming back to me.225

228 Foley, “Mother/Daughter Romance” in Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

its power to console.232

there was no wind. The clouds seemed

247 Glück, 50-51

256 Glück, 58-59

On the other, human beings living in fear.