Persephone is a mythological figure, the queen of the underworld. The myth of her abduction represents the personification of vegetation, which shoots forth in spring and withdraws into the earth after harvest.
What are the roles of Persephone? Persephone has no name until the moment of her abduction. Before that occurs, she is a daughter, her name is Kore (the maiden), belonging to her mother. The moment of her rape is the separation from her roots and from her mother. The mother laments her departure, and the earth shrivels. The pain is enormous, as the mother must accept that her daughter no longer belongs to her but to a man, who gives her the “seeds of a pomegranate.”
Persephone is a “liminal” figure, standing in a middle stage of a ritual, where she no longer holds her previous status (identity) but has not yet begun the transition to the status she will hold when the ritual is over. She stands at a threshold, in between ways of constructing her identity, time, and space. She is in a constant battle, shifting between two worlds: light and darkness, heaven and earth, the abyss of the soul, and the struggle for purity and clarity of light.
Persephone is a grotesque figure. Her femininity is castrated and divided. She lives a freedom within limits and borders. Her body is in danger, as she tries to survive and endure trauma, which is socially and culturally identified with masculinity. Her answer to this is the adaptation of male characteristics, such as embodied power and strength. She is neither male nor female but a person embodying the characteristics of a contemporary human.
Coming from a country that geographically is a crossroads between West and East and having traveled and lived in more than 40 countries, I have observed that female subjectivity has been constructed through practices of systematic hypocrisy. Over the last 50 years, the role of women has changed, and while feminist and sexual revolutions have brought positive change, they have also introduced challenges and negative shifts in the behaviorisms of both sexes.
What are the roles of the contemporary Persephone? Is she a mother? An acclaimed, successful worker, artist, or intellectual? A woman who can seduce and meet the looks and demands of the 21st-century ideal?
Female identity is not necessarily determined within the strict framework of time, space, or gender. Society creates roles, prescribing them as ideal or appropriate behavior for a person of a specific sex. The world of media creates a woman—a body as a commodity. Researcher and writer Christy Adair points out that women’s bodies are distorted, reduced to commodities through physical exercises, diets, and general management.[1] There is intense competition to achieve the “perfect” body, improve performance at work, and wear a mask that no longer fits reality.
In Western society, we are surrounded by paradoxical messages about the body. On one hand, we are told to keep fit and in shape. On the other, physical education is often perceived as less “sophisticated” and significant than intellectual work. These restrictions drive the need for artists to create works that reflect on female identity.
Persephone reveals the landscape of a human mind, trapped in a body that moves through time and space—between Heaven and Earth.
[1] Adair, Christy, Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens, The MacMillan Press Ltd, London 1992, p. 54.