How is that Persephone post wrong if you dont mind me asking?
IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED!!!!
Okay so under the cut are pics of the original post just so we can keep track of what is being discussed. This is gonna be a long post and I hope that isn’t too off-putting! This is just a rly complex topic and I wanna explain my objections better than I did on the original post!
Okay so, admittedly I was being a little over the top with my initial comments here, but it’s because I wrote my undergraduate thesis on modern interpretations of the Rape of Persephone myth (which got published here) and it drives me up the fucking wall to see people treat Classical myth this way.
Because here’s the thing, there is nothing wrong with reinterpreting and retelling ancient myths to suit modern contexts. In the academic world this is known as Reception Studies and it’s really fucking cool!! I am 100% supportive of Reception!! But people who participate in Reception need to be honest about it. You can’t claim that your modern, feminist retelling of a myth is accurate to the ancient source material, because that will give your audience an inaccurate understanding of the past. Ancient Greece was incredibly misogynistic and Persephone was not an empowered female character, and here’s why!
So, OP dustypurple says that their version of the myth is the “real, original version of it,” and likewise thealienonbroadway also claims that “this is the original, before it was altered to scare Greek/Roman girls into submission.” So here’s the thing, there was no original, “pre-Greek/Roman” version of this myth, BC THIS MYTH IS INHERENTLY GREEK IN ORIGIN.
The earliest recorded source we have for the Rape of Persephone myth is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (which you can read here). Here’s a summary of this Greek hymn from my thesis:
And here’s a discussion of the traditional Roman version by Ovid (read full text here):
aaaaaaand here’s a section explaining why the textual evidence from these two versions of the myth strongly indicates that Persephone was raped and not just kidnapped.
So, yeah, I hope those summaries show why OP’s version of the myth is definitely not the “real, original version” of the myth. Persephone did not choose to go to the Underworld, Hades was not a passive figure in this myth, and Demeter was not being unreasonable (”throwing the temper tantrum of the millennium”) when she demanded the safe return of her kidnapped and raped daughter.
So just to get a few things straight, the ancient Greek and Roman versions of the Rape of Persephone myth probably were meant to scare women into submission through the way Persephone is raped and Demeter is forced to compromise with Zeus. But there’s no secret, “original” feminist version of this myth where Persephone chose Hades and the Underworld.
Now, that doesn’t mean that modern people can’t rewrite this myth and ship these characters however they want. But to claim that their version of the Rape of Persephone is somehow the ~original~ and to imply that anyone who tells the “version of the myth that’s commonly known and taught” is sexist because they’re ignoring the ~true feminist version~ is utter bullshit.
