Hades and Persephone is the Worst Trope Ever
By Jaylen Adams, Wisteria Magazine
I hate the Persephone and Hades romance trope. I can’t stand Lore Olympus, A Deal with the Elf King, and the other thousands of Wattpad rewrites. However, I don’t hate the myth. I hate the modern retelling for its continual villainization of female characters. It was an earthshaking story about love and its triumph, but not the love of an abductor and an abductee. This was a story about maternal love overcoming the will of Man and God… and it has since been perverted by patriarchy-influenced retellings that would rather write a bad man good than a good woman great.
To truly understand my loathing, we must first look at the material. Although generally referred to as the Abduction (or even Rape) of Persephone, the story first started out as the "Homeric Hymn to Demeter." Persephone and her handmaidens were in a meadow collecting flowers. While the spring goddess bent down to pick another, the earth split open. Out poured Hades, who drew her onto his horse-drawn chariot and dragged her to the depths of the cold Underworld. As the world closed up, Persephone screamed.
Demeter heard her daughter’s cry. Immediately, she began to search from the North to the South, the West to the East. When she learned it was her brother Hades who stole Persephone, she demanded Zeus tell him to return her. When her king denied her, Demeter let out a scream of her own, casting a blight on the land in which nothing could germinate or grow. Humans began to starve, cattle died off, and the gods were left without worship or sacrifice.
Olympus needs devotion to prosper, so Zeus begged her to calm down, to relent. Demeter refused. She would not let go of her fury, return to Olympus, nor let the fruit grow. Not until Persephone was returned to her. Thus, the King of Gods yielded to the wrath of a woman. He sends Hermes, the messenger-god, to the Underworld to retrieve the girl. Just as Persephone is leaving, Hades forces her to eat the seed of a pomegranate ("but he stealthily put in my mouth a food honey-sweet, a pomegranate seed, and compelled me against my will and by force to taste it"). She is therefore bound, as the laws of the Underworld demand, to spend one-third of each year under the earth with her abductor, and two-thirds with her mother in her home in the sunlight.
The focus of the story is on Demeter, Persephone, and their love. From the Iliad to the Odyssey, women are forced to adhere to the will of men. Helen of Sparta is stolen from her wedding bed. Penelope is to house a hundred poorly-mannered suitors or wed them. Briseis is fought over like cattle. Even the goddesses are abused, raped, and sold—Hera, Aphrodite, Nemesis, Aura, Nicaea, and many others. It was Demeter who broke the mold. She brought the King of Gods and the King of the Underworld, respectively, to heel. She freed her daughter with no help from other men but her own divine strength and sheer motherly love. Today, Tumblr poets and AO3 writers demonize her and glorify violent abduction.
Persephone did not hate her mother. Demeter was not overbearing and controlling. Persephone did not crave danger, did not want to be resigned to the cold down below. She did not willingly eat the pomegranate seed nor fall in love with Hades. Persephone was kidnapped, and Demeter saved her. Greek mythology is messy and complicated, but rewriting one of their most feminist interpretations to date? It is proof of how the patriarchy will persist even in accounts where we try to give women control. Erasing the trauma behind Persephone’s story does not empower her. It empowers her abuser and erases the strength of her mother. It romanticizes abuse, kidnapping, and assault... while demonizing the women who save the victim(s).It does not benefit the modern woman. It only benefits the man who would steal a young girl from her home, drive her away from her family, and convince her that it was all her own idea. The ancient Greek word for mother is "meter." Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, yes, but it is her nature as her namesake that was her true power.
