I came to the conclusion that it is a more difficult task than I was expecting, linking my theme of love and sexuality to these different elements of mythology, as I have found that it is a very complicated thing to get down on paper in a clear and coherent way. In theory, the connections of these themes are there, but I am finding making these connections in words and justifying my thought process incredibly difficult. I partly believe that this is due to the lack of scholarship around this very specific topic, however it is also down to the subject itself, as we have little to no idea of what actually happened, rendering all theories assumptions without evidence. However, for my second blog post I will be concentrating on the theme of Mythology and how it is represented in children’s books. Considering my theme of this blog which is love and sexuality in mythology, this is not a topic which is synonymous with children’s literature, having said this I will be talking about how children’s mythology literature sensor the original mythology in order to make it appropriate for children. My first connection with this genre of mythology was in the lecture we had the other week. Set with the task of finding a child’s book on mythology, I was surprised with the examples that I found. I looked at two books initially one on Herakles by Kevin Crossley Holland, and another on Odysseus and the wooden Horse by Allan Drummond. What I found was incredibly interesting; both books were incredibly violent in both imagery and language with Drummond describing the battle as ‘Troy was ablaze and ten long years of war were over in one terrible night of killing’. I found this language to be very blunt and worrying in how it might affect how children perceive scenes such as this. As well as that, I found it incredibly interesting in how women were perceived in both books. In Drummonds work the character of Helen was portrayed as the typical damsel in distress having been ‘stolen’ from her husband by the evil Paris, waiting ‘in her high prison tower’ to be rescued. This portrayal of Helen is very a-typical from the more adult versions of the myth which typically show Helen to be manipulative and impulsive. Furthermore, in Hollands book the goddess Hera, in contradiction to her role as a fertility goddess, was portrayed as an evil witch type character whose only line in the book was ‘Bruise his bones! Break his back! I want Herakles dead,’ which very much juxtaposes with the more obvious connotations of her role. The story I want to focus on for this blog post is the story of Persephone and Hades. A lot of the more sexually violent myths tend to be avoided by the authors of children’s books; however, the story of Persephone and Hades is a love story that has been manipulated throughout the ages by a number of authors and scholars alike all of which vary how sexually driven this story is. Firstly, I’m going to start by outlining the contemporary version of Persephone and Hades which we can determine from the Homeric hymn to Demeter in which Demeter and her daughter Persephone were picking flowers in the meadow when Persephone was enticed by a Narcissus Flower ‘which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl’ which was a tool used by Hades to capture Persephone and drag her down to the underworld: ‘He seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot, And drove away as she wept. She cried with a piercing voice’. This contemporary version of the mythology clearly creates the image that Persephone was taken against her will. This poem suggests that due to the lust of Hades he used his brothers influence as king of the Gods and with his consent, Persephone ‘was given away by Zeus’. The will of Zeus and his ‘monopoly’ over women is a theme that repeats itself throughout Greek Mythology with the myth of Leda and Zeus who disguised himself as a swan or the myth of Europa and the bull who again was the King of Gods Zeus, a tale of which has many similarities to that of Hades and Persephone. The children’s story I have looked at as a version of this myth is the Goddess Girls collection – Persephone the Phony by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams. This book is set in Mount Olympus Academy in which Persephone and her friends are all students. It does follow the usual stepping stone of the original myth such as the Hades opening the earth to access the mortal realm as well as the Pomegranate orchard and Demeter’s protective mothering. However, due to the fact that it is a children’s book aimed at an age range between 9 and 12 there are some obvious rearrangements made to the myth. In this version of the myth, in an act of rebellion towards her mother the young Persephone seeks out Hades leading to the pair falling in love. The most interesting part of this book in comparison to the original Poem, is that after an argument with her mother Persephone ran away to the underworld: ‘Changing herself into an old woman, a favourite disguise of her mum’s, Persephone joined the throng at the river’s edge. Her body was solid compared to that of the wispy shades, but she hoped no one would notice. She waited until it was her turn, then approached Charon. “I’d like passage to the Underworld, please,” she said’ and upon arriving Hades in this children’s book was portrayed as the chivalrous hero claiming ‘You can’t stay here. This is no place for someone like you’ and insisted on returning her to her mother. In comparison to the contemporary version of the myth, this approach shows the love of Persephone and Hades to be mutual, as well as being able to teach the children that would read this book, lessons on responsibility. From the original poem there is an obvious sexual motive for Hades kidnapping of Persephone, due to the connection made to Zeus and the reputation that proceeds him. However, upon reading Susan Deacy’s ‘From ‘Flowery Tales’ to ‘Heroic Rape’: Virginal Subjectivity in the mythological meadow’ there is a lot of symbolic imagery within the poem to suggest the sexual motivation of the myth. In this paper Deacy states that ‘The mythological meadow is a place of sexual allure; whose sensual pleasures emanate from the visual appeal of the flowers combined with the heady scent generated by their profusion’ which would therefore make it the perfect place for Persephone to be ‘plucked’ as it were, by Hades from her mother’s embrace to the depths of the underworld, ‘with the narcissus produced by earth as the “snare” to enable the rise of Hades out of the chasm created by the plucking of the flower’ this location acts as the perfect metaphor for Hades intention for Persephone, in taking away her purity as the Narcissus flower is an object that represents desire, representing the story of Narcissus and his desire for his own physical appearance; the use of this flower then projects the ideas of desire and lust and obsession on to Persephone from Hades perspective. However, what is interesting about Deacy’s interpretation is that she implies that there is a reciprocation in this imagery which would make the ‘Kidnapping’ not a kidnapping at all but more of an adventure on Persephone’s behalf. This interpretation can be inferred from the line in the original poem that states ‘And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea. She [Persephone] was filled with a sense of wonder’ this sentence suggests that the earth underneath Persephone already began to show at least a crack of the opening and so her reaction of ‘wonder’ suggests that she was excited and intrigued by the possibility of what could emerge from the earth. And linking this back to the presence and role of the Narcissus flower the fact that Persephone is located in a meadow suggests that she is filled with the of desire that drew her to the Narcissus flower and therefore linking her to the ideas of lust and desire linked with Narcissus himself. This idea of the reciprocated love between Persephone and Hades is what fuels the theory by many scholars, this also inspires the twist used in children’s books like Persephone the Phony. The contradictory note between the evidence seen above and the story line of the children’s book is the sexual element. All the evidence of Persephone’s reciprocation is linked to the sexual desire channelled through the metaphor of the meadow and the Narcissus flower. What happens when it come to the story told in the children’s book is that these metaphors are removed. The reason for this is to sensor the story for the younger audience as for some reason the idea of sexual desire in children’s books would be unacceptable, however the motif of hell and death and suffering in the book are deemed perfectly acceptable with Holub and Williams describing the scenes in the underworld as ‘Shades bobbed around in its bubbling waters, writhing and screaming’. This imagery, very similarly to that of Allen Drummond are very dark and violent. This then brings up the question: why is it acceptable to expose children to violent imagery of death but not to the natural feelings of desire and attraction. I think that this is very much a question of social expectations and very much links to my previous blog post about Love and Sexuality in communities. A contemporary audience would have very much been more comfortable with the theme of sexual desire as the subject of sex was something that was openly discussed from a young age whether incorporated in to their mythological stories or witnessed in day to day society. Whereas a modern audience, and society, very much believe that sex is a subject that should not be promoted as it is believed that sex is very much a subject that should be restricted to an emotionally and physically matured audience.