The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature

This book explores the myth of Persephone and Demeter as it informs the development of a long discourse about civilization, the development of children, child psychology, and fantasy literature. The pattern in the myth of girls who descend into underworlds and negotiate a partial return to the earth is a marked feature of girls’ literature, and the cycle also reflects the change of seasons and fertility/death. Tracing the parallel between the myth and girls’ literature enables an understanding of how female development is mourned but deemed necessary for the reproduction of culture. Blackford looks at the function of toys in children’s literature as a representation of the myth’s narcissus, combining this approach with classic interpretations of the myth as expressive of female psychology, mother-daughter object-relations, hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rituals, transition from matriarchal to patriarchal order, and excursions into the creative/artistic unconscious. The story of Persephone’s separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is explored as an expression of ambivalence about female development in works such as Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King, Alcott’s Little Women, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Burnett’s The Secret Garden, White’s Charlotte’s Web, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Meyer’s Twilight, and Gaiman’s Coraline. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.

Holly Blackford (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley), is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden, where she teaches children’s and American literature. Her recent books include Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls, 100 Years of Anne with an "e": The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (ed.), and Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities.