The lost girls : Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination, 1850-1930

357 Pages·2007·1.95 MB·English

by  Demeter.

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Studies in Comparative Literature 53
Series Editors
C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

The Lost Girls
Demeter-Persephone and the
Literary Imagination, 1850-1930
Andrew Radford
Amsterdam - New York, NY
2007
Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2235-5
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents

Acknowledgements 6

Introduction 7

1. Excavating the Dark Half of Hellas 16

2. Divine Mother and Maid in Victorian Poetry 49

3. Hardy’s Tess: The Making and Breaking of a Goddess 87

4. ‘Gone to Earth’: Mary Webb’s Doomed Persephone 138

5. E. M. Forster and Demeter’s English Garden 172

6. Lawrence’s Underworld 224

7. Salvaging the Goddess of Wessex 274

Afterword 330

Select bibliography 334

Index 350
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank many of my friends and colleagues, who have taken a
lively interest in this book, talked me through its chief concerns, invited me
to present its arguments, and urged me towards its completion. I am grateful,
first of all, to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Glasgow for giving me
not only a collegial working environment but also research leave at a crucial
stage. For their attentive and trenchant reading of portions of the manuscript I
am indebted to Brian Donnelly, Roger Ebbatson, Anthony Leyland, Mark
Sandy and Ve-Yin Tee. Hilary Grimes assiduously combed the manuscript
for errors and other infelicities and provided invaluable assistance in
formatting the book for the publishers, Rodopi Editions.
Early versions of chapters 3, 6 and 7 appeared under the following titles
and I am most grateful for permission to reproduce the revised material here:
‘Hardy’s Tess, Jane Harrison and the Twilight of a Goddess’, The Thomas
Hardy Journal, 21 (Autumn 2005), 27-57; ‘The Making of a Goddess:
Hardy, Lawrence and Persephone’, Connotations: A Journal for Critical
Debate, 12 (2-3) (October 2004), 202-32; ‘Defending Nature’s Holy Shrine:
Mary Butts, Englishness and the Persephone Myth’, Journal of Modern
Literature, 29 (3) (Summer 2006), 126-149. The editors and readers who
commented on these articles gave me confidence to pursue this project. I
have benefited greatly from the opportunity to present some of this work to
receptive and critically astute audiences at the Universities of Glasgow and
York.
The jacket/cover image, ‘Marble Statue of Demeter’ (Greek, carved
around 350BC, from Knidos in southwest Asia Minor) is courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum.
Introduction

How are we to get back […] Demeter, Persephone, and the halls of Dis? […] We’ve got
to get them back, for they are the world our soul, our greater consciousness, lives in.1

D. H. Lawrence’s impatient plea supplies a critical lens through which to
inspect a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the
myth of Demeter’s loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter
Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God
of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. Lawrence
relished and contributed to the tangle of ancient origins, narrative
applications and scholarly conjecture that has shaped the myth. Voluminous
research already documents how Demeter-Persephone imbues William
Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell and Ezra Pound’s Cantos.2 The myth is also
deployed to mark phases and transitions in the female life cycle in individual
poems by H.D., Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Margaret Atwood.3 Yet
relatively few commentators have addressed in any sustained way to what
extent the myth impinged upon British literature of this period, or whether an
artistic cult of Demeter and Persephone emerged in the mid-nineteenth
century, which modernist fiction inherited, revised, and amplified.
This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts
by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence,

1 D. H. Lawrence, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers
of D. H. Lawrence, ed. and intro. by Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 357.
Lawrence’s invocation is reminiscent of Miranda (a portrait of the poet H.D.) in Miranda
Masters, a fictional account of John Cournos’s early career in England: ‘“I want to see the old
gods back!” said Miranda in nervous, quavering tones, as if it were a personal matter, a matter of
life and death. “They are not dead. They are but in hiding, waiting to emerge when their time
comes!”’. See Cournos, Miranda Masters (New York: Knopf, 1926), p. 6.
2 Lilian Feder discusses Pound’s use of the Demeter-Persephone myth with further bibliography.
See Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); also Guy
Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays by Guy Davenport (New York,
1981), pp. 141-64.
3 For references to Demeter and Persephone in H.D.’s longer poems, such as Helen in Egypt and
Trilogy, see Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1981). In Robert Lowell’s ‘The Mills of the Kavanaughs’, the
protagonist Anne Kavanaugh, the widowed inheritor of the estate, thinks of herself as
Persephone, ‘the goddess’. See The Mills of the Kavanaughs (New York: Harcourt, 1951), pp. 2-
3. In Sylvia Plath’s ‘Two Sisters of Persephone’, the two Persephones in the worlds above and
below become alternative and constricting destinies for woman: the spinster office worker
computes in the dark ‘problems on / A mathematical machine’, while her sister ‘sun bride’ grows
‘quick with seed’ and ‘bears a king’. See The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath, ed. by Ted Hughes
(New York: Harper, 1981), pp. 31-32.
The Lost Girls
also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary
Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and to
restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists
are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian
archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the
first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical
scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek
art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature.
In Harrison’s writings the Hellenic past seemed an ever-accessible present
ready to serve very contemporary personal and cultural imperatives.
Harrison’s theories about concrete language creating vivid ideas rather than
exemplifying preconceived ones; her stress on the importance of desire as a
motivating force behind art, marking a decisive shift from personal to
collective emotion; her eloquent insistence on the need for the crusading
modern artist, like an ancient ritualist, to circumvent or transmute private
personality by identifying not only with a group but with the environment,
affect nearly all the novelists included here.
While Webb and Butts have been largely overlooked by recent academic
criticism, their wider fates could not have been more dissimilar. Webb’s
fiction was ridiculed by the London cognoscenti, and parodied by Stella
Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). But in April 1928 Stanley Baldwin,
then Prime Minister, spoke at a dinner of the Royal Literary Fund,
mentioning Webb in glowing terms and chiding the press for the undeserved
oblivion into which she had fallen. Baldwin was a cousin of Rudyard Kipling
and a man with some literary pretensions of his own, so his remarks were
heeded, and a Mary Webb revival began.4 Her novel Gone to Earth (1917) –
selected by Rebecca West as ‘Novel of the Year’ – was filmed in 1950 by
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and much of her fiction remained in
print for years before Virago initiated a more methodical policy of reprints in
the 1970s. The BBC even produced an adaptation of Precious Bane in the

4 In his regular book page for the London Evening Standard of 3 May 1928, Arnold Bennett
wrote that the ‘resuscitation of books out of a state of suspended vitality is a fine game. Mr
Stanley Baldwin has just been playing at it – with the novels of the late Mary Webb. I receive
with polite reserve the pronouncements of Prime Ministers about imaginative literature. As a
rule, either their taste has been distorted by terrible experiences in public schools, and resembles
a bicycle after it has been run over by a motor lorry, or they have been too busy conscientiously
misguiding the destiny of fifty million human beings properly to nourish their taste. [...] But Mr
Stanley Baldwin has made no mistake about Mary Webb. […] Precious Bane however, can
scarcely count among those of Mary Webb’s novels which are in a state of suspended vitality. It
has been reprinted every year since its original publication [...] Mary Webb has power; she could
create beauty; and she is truthful concerning human nature. All I would say against her is that her
writing is somewhat mannered. If Mr Baldwin’s remark has a sequel in the shape of a uniform
edition of the Webb novels he may go down to posterity’.
8
Introduction
1980s. Mary Butts by contrast did vanish from sight – she still has no entry in
a number of standard reference works – but this was partially because her
work was stylistically challenging for the reading public at large, printed in
relatively modest runs and lacked a high profile champion.
Ann Suter, in her introduction to The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An
Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (2002), remarks that ‘[o]ne of
the most interesting aspects of working on the Homeric Hymn […] has been
to see how often its story is misrepresented in scholarly and popular
literature’.5 My examination of a constellation of texts from Walter Pater to
Mary Butts cheerfully extends and revels in this venerable tradition by
indicating how British writers ‘misrepresented’ the mythic material to re-
imagine their own society and to confront – often with fierce panache – the
proliferating meanings of race, regionalism, gender, history, class, and
narrative form. My goal is not to tailor an ultimate definition of literary myth,
nor do I explain why the modernist avant-garde’s attempt to ‘make it new’
involved an ironic turn to purported historical and cultural origins, looking so
far ‘backward’ in time and place for its inspiration. I am more preoccupied by
literature that exists on the margins of both the modern movement and myth
so as to furnish a fresh, albeit partial, reassessment of all three. Rather than
fashioning a teleological argument that moves lockstep through the decades, I
propose chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone
through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth
and new insights into the work of particular writers.
While so-called ‘high’ modernists such as Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, and Pound
all have well-documented connections to myth, others writing along the
formal and historical peripheries of the modern movement divulge complex,
though largely uncharted, relationships as well. Mary Webb and Mary Butts
variously reinvent the classical story of ‘Mother’ and ‘Maid’ as part of an
intricate political and philosophical commentary which seeks to reclaim,
consolidate, and enshrine the countryside as a locus of memory, evoking a
specifically historicised English past to countermand moribund metropolitan
values. Pinpointing the exact textual sources of myths these authors read is
less important than acknowledging the fact that these culturally diverse
writers share general allusions to Demeter and Persephone as recognisable,
archetypal and iconographic images in fin-de-siècle Britain. Because this
myth is part of a general cultural tradition promoted through narrative, it is
unlikely that these writers were specifically inspired by a single textual
source.

5 Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 1.
9