Z. M. Asafzah
The Rape of Persephone can be found in its earliest, most complete form in the Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter; then by the Roman poets Ovid in Metamorphoses: Book V (1563) and Claudian in De Raptu Proserpinae (1723). Homer (translated by Gregory Nagy) describes Persephone, the immortal daughter of Demeter, playing in a field and gathering flowers when, with the blessing of Zeus, the king of the underworld Hades abducts her “against her will, put her on his golden chariot / And drove away as she wept. She cried with a piercing voice / calling upon her father [Zeus], the son of Kronos, the highest and the best.” Demeter, hearing Persephone’s cry, is driven mad with grief and goes searching for her stolen daughter with little luck as, obeying Zeus’ orders, no one in the immortal or mortal realms would tell her the truth. When Demeter wreaks havoc and refuses to send the harvest of earth to Olympus, Zeus orders Hermes to bring back Persephone to her divine mother. And the messenger god goes swiftly to the underworld and “he found the Lord inside his palace, / seated on a funeral couch, along with his duly acquired bedmate, / the one who was much under duress, yearning for her mother, and suffering from the unbearable things / inflicted on her by the will of the blessed ones.” Hades allows Persephone to leave, but not before secretly feeding her pomegranate berries, binding her to the underworld. Zeus rules that the goddess may spend two-thirds of the year with her mother, but return to Hades every winter.
Ovid and Claudian embroider the myth with more details. Ovid describes the inciting incident: Venus orders her son Cupid to strike Dis’ (or Pluto, the two names by which Hades was known to the Romans) heart with his arrow and to fall in love with Proserpine (Persephone’s Roman self). And so “while Proserpine was playing in this glade, […] Dis, almost in a moment, saw her, prized her, took her: so swift as this, is love. The frightened goddess cries out to her mother, to her friends, most of all to her mother, with piteous mouth.” On the other hand, according to Claudian, once upon a time Pluto threatened war over his rage at being consigned to being the only god king without wife or children, when the Fates persuaded him to ask Jupiter to provide him with a bride. Jupiter decides to give his and Ceres’ only daughter, Proserpine, to him and orders Venus to help kidnap Proserpine while Ceres is away. This she does, dressing Proserpine beautifully and taking her to a meadow to gather flowers, where Pluto soon arrives on his chariot to steal her. And the goddess protests, “beating her arms in lamentation and calling in vain remonstrance to the clouds” to her divine Father. Ovid and Claudian follow their stories with Ceres’ characteristic grief and rage at the loss of her daughter, demanding her return by holding the world’s harvest in ransom.
The tale in classical antiquity is not simply a story of rape—Persephone’s story is a fundamentally female story. Although rape was considered a capital offense in Ancient Greece, the violation was primarily against the patriarch and his property and authority, and the non-consent of the victim carried no legal weight. In Roman law, raptus was defined as abduction and while it did not inherently include sexual violence—differentiated with the legal term stuprum—it was still a kidnapping of an unmarried girl to be married against her will and her consequent marital rape. The contradiction in Ancient Greece and Rome lies in the fact that women legally had no protection against these violences, but female trauma engendered by such acts was culturally acknowledged and sympathized with, as is evident in the story of Persephone and Demeter. The Ancient Greeks held a three-day festival called the Thesmophoria that celebrated the reunion of Persephone with her mother every year. This was a women’s festival in which mothers and their married daughters reconnected and celebrated the joy of their reunion. Modern retellings remove Demeter and Zeus from their classical roles as the betrayed mother and the apathetic patriarch, in order to turn it into a modern romance.
The central tenet of Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera musical Hadestown is that it tells a “tale of a love from long ago.” The story is a retelling of the “love story” of Orpheus and Eurydice, but entwines the Greek gods Hades and Persephone and their “love” story into its lore. A decade-in-the-making production, Hadestown has seen multiple iterations of its main cast’s characterisations, undergoing major rewrites before its ultimate Broadway theater debut. Throughout all its changes, however, Mitchell maintains a fundamental revision for her female protagonist Eurydice and the goddess Persephone: she excludes the incidents of rape that are key to their stories in classic mythology. This choice has been heralded as an important feminist revision, converting the female characters from “hapless victims” of sexual assault into empowered characters able to rise out of their definition of suffering.
The popularity of romance novels like Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury et cetera, and the internet famous webtoon Lore Olympus, demonstrate the fondness of modern audiences for the rehabilitation of Hades as a misunderstood and ostracized god and, accordingly, the transformation of the rape of Persephone from victim to powerful queen of the underworld. Hadestown follows suit and additionally does the same for the Orphic myth. This revisionist mythmaking in pop culture, especially of the rehabilitation of Hades’ image into a new Darcy-eseque sexy god, has led to general audiences projecting modern values onto the classical Greek myths now taken out of context. In and of itself, the paradigm shift is born out of a desire to challenge gender stereotypes, and a desire for female characters that are not inactive objects, nor whose stories are exclusively about violence and distress.
In Hadestown, where Persephone and Hades are a middle-aged god couple, Persephone is aged up even in their first meeting, no longer a virgin maiden but “a beautiful lady” as she is described in ‘Epic I.’ Persephone’s verses in ‘Chant II’, in which each god speaks to their mortal counterpart in Orpheus and Eurydice and bitterly warns them about the trappings of love, were eventually cut before the production went to Broadway, but they showcased her perspective of when she fell in love with Hades. Her characterisation completely converts the original abduction and rape into a romantic encounter:
Love was when he came to me
Begging on his bended knees
To please have pity on his heart
And let him lay me in the dirt
[…] That’s when I became his wife
And what was Demeter’s revenge and rebellion against Zeus, Hadestown turns into a representation of Hades and Persephone’s love:
The lady loved him and the kingdom they shared
But without her above, not one flower would grow
So King Hades agreed that for half of each year
She would stay with him there in his world down below
But the other half, she could walk in the sun
This second change provides a major plot point for the story in Hadestown. The gods’ collapsing marriage and growing distrust of each other results in climate change in the mortal realm, as Hades allows Persephone less and less time to spend outside of Hadestown, and Persephone smuggles more of her harvest out of the mortal world and into Hadestown to undermine Hades’ control. Their crumbling relationship and its effect on the climate of the mortal world is showcased in ‘Chant’ as Persephone returns to the underworld and sings her discontent at the unnatural state of Hadestown. Persephone is consumed by her need to escape Hadestown, and is unable to see her husband’s fear of losing her or his efforts to please her. This is undergirded by Hades’ attempts to keep her from leaving “the comforts of her gilded cage,” establishing a dynamic of control and toxicity. Persephone is no longer a victim of sexual violence, but her life is still under the thumb of her coercive husband.
What allows the story to deepen into a real depiction of love in marriage is the multidimensionality Hades is allowed to have in response to Persephone. Changed from a rapist into a man in love but plagued by doubts, the musical provides a psychological profile of the god king that raged for a wife and lover in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae—his anger is made explicable as insecurity and loneliness. Making submission and vulnerability the expression of love that defined Hades as a “young lover” of Persephone makes the goddess’ own bitterness and loneliness explicable, but removes fear from the narrative. Persephone’s dislike of Hades’ greed and ostentation makes her feel distant from her husband.
The change made to the myth of Persephone and Hades was a narrative decision, as their love story is meant to be a foil to the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But one wonders if there was a missed opportunity for the characterisation of Persephone in not including the context of abduction in her history. Tyler Dean in Reactor writes, “It may seem counterintuitive that erasing the violence of Hades and Persephone’s first meeting centers, rather than erases, the agency of the goddess of the underworld. But where our standard interpretations of the myth lend themselves to tales of domestic abuse, spousal rape, and forced marriage, Mitchell’s version allows Persephone to be defined by something other than her suffering.” But why does being a victim of sexual violence reduce the definition and characterisation of a woman to her rape? Does her nonconsensual removal from her homeland not lend texture to Persephone’s bitterness at being forced to return to her distant husband, centering her rage at being caged as a marital conflict that Hades must address? Does her agency in circumventing the laws of Hadestown not remain an act of protest? Does her influence over Hades diminish in believability only because she began her love story with a rape?
It would also make Persephone a truer foil to Eurydice, who willingly goes to Hadestown in the musical, unable to bear the harshness of a life of mere survival. Unlike Persephone, the rape of Eurydice is not entirely removed. Sexual violence is alluded to in her ballad ‘Flowers’ where she describes: “I trembled when he laid me out / ‘You won’t feel a thing,’ he said, ‘when you go down’” as well as in the outro at the end of Act I, where Hermes ominously proclaims that “a lot can happen behind closed doors” as Hades leads Eurydice inside his office to sign her contract. However, these implications have no story significance, so we can conclude that the allusions were simply easter eggs for the Greek myth.
The earliest version of Orpheus and Eurydice is a story within a story. In Virgil’s The Georgics: Book IV (29 BCE), the poet Orpheus’ anguish at losing his wife, the nymph Eurydice, is being relayed to Aristaeus, the satyr who rapes her: “[Eurydice] in her haste to shun thy hot pursuit / Along the stream, saw not the coming death, / Where at her feet kept ward upon the bank / In the tall grass a monstrous water-snake.” This rape is removed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Book X (1563) in which Eurydice dies from a snakebite during her wedding to Orpheus, a tragic accident. The musical makes reference to this in ‘When the Chips are Down [Intro]’ with Hermes calling Hades a “rattlesnake” who offers Eurydice promises of peace and safety in Hadestown. Eurydice, no longer a passive victim of fate, consciously decides to descend to Hadestown and leave Orpheus behind.
Mitchell’s Eurydice and Orpheus have their fatal flaw in common: they seal their fates with their succumbence to doubt. The consummate survivor, Eurydice, a “hungry, young girl” doubts that her idealistic lover will be able to keep her safe from the cruelties of the world and falls prey to Hades’ seduction—and Orpheus is disillusioned from his journey into the underworld and his new burden of knowledge of “how the world is” instead of the optimism of “what it could be” that he begins the play with, and allows doubt to creep in at the final moment. As in Ovid, Eurydice accepts her double death with “no complaint to [Orpheus] (for what could she complain of, except that she had been loved?)” and the narrative loops to the beginning of the musical.
Arguably, removing Eurydice’s rape allows Eurydice to ascend from being the fridged woman into a story about the hard choices a woman has to make to exist in this world. But once again, one wonders how allowing Eurydice’s rape to remain part of the narrative may have lent texture to her character arc. Perhaps, it would allow the possibility of exploring how consenting in a situation where one has demonstrably less power in the dynamic leads to violence, lending a cruel reality to Eurydice’s line in ‘Flowers’: “Men are kind, until they aren’t.” However, making Hades the one who rapes Eurydice would have rendered defunct the central conceit of the king of the underworld being a powerful but misunderstood and lonely god—and therefore broken the heart of Hadestown. It is, after all, meant to be a love song.
This discussion is not intended to be a critique of the revisionist choices Mitchell made to create Hadestown and its mythic narrative; the musical is a succinct and successful tale about love, doubt, hardship, and a harsh critique on the senseless capitalist machine. Its thematic discourse through the metaphorical characters of Hades and Orpheus, and the anachronistic, metaphorical world setting where the underworld is an industrial mining town, allows the Greek myths to become a relevant criticism of contemporary capitalist society.
However, this author invites readers to question and wonder about the possibilities allowed to exist in female stories. When we read female characters and look for their acts of strength and agency, where do we see it? And where do we see lack of agency? The rape may have been incidental in the story of Persephone, and of Eurydice, but it was fundamental to the female experience in antiquity.
Hadestown itself is proof that we have passed the age of third-wave feminism where we may simply provide the subjectivity of the gendered Other, reduce male counterparts to one-dimensional stand-ins for the patriarchy, and consider that feminist criticism. In our revision of ancient women and their stories, is it feminist to allow rape to blot out the idea of minds and agency of survivors? What would Persephone and Eurydice look like as rape survivors who are not limited to their victimhood or their rape, but informed by those experiences? Perhaps the world is not yet ready to allow rape victims to absorb their pain and turn it into power, but being a rape victim is not emblematic of female weakness. Women’s stories and women’s lives often include sexual violence and victimization, and it is wholly possible to find strength and agency in such stories.
Z. M. Asafzah is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of British Columbia, where she is at work on a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared most recently in Small World City.
Instagram at @asafzah_.
Featured photo: Anais Mitchell as Eurydice in Hadestown, Somerville Theater, November 2011 (by Dan Tappan, Flickr)
