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Mothers and Daughters have been much on my mind in this past year. In my own journey, I am seeking to understand my mother, myself as daughter (one of four), myself as mother of a daughter, and the entire complicated process of what it means to ‘give birth to oneself. A comment about the Demeter-Kore myth by Adrienne Rich brought me back to the work of Margaret Atwood, a writer whose work I have long admired. In her chapter on ‘Motherhood and daughterhood’ in Of woman born, Rich discusses Atwood's novel Surfacing as ‘a strange and complex version of the Demeter-Kore myth’ (RICH, 14, p. 240). Re-reading Atwood's three novels (Edible woman, 1969; Surfacing, 1972; Lady Oracle, 1976), I found that the myth pertains significantly to all of them; and that interpreted in this light the novels yield insights into the mother-daughter relationship that help me clarify my own sense of self, insights that I hope this study will make available to others.
The myth of Demeter and Persephone inspired the Eleusinian mysteries and celebrated for some 2,000 years in Greece. The mysteries probably began in the middle of the second millennium B.C. and ended in A.D. 396 when Alaric, king of the Goths, invaded Greece. Subsumed by Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries, these myteries and their illumination of particular aspects of human experience through the archetypal mother-daughter relationship have been largely lost to us.
Jung, lamenting this loss, wrote
It is immediately clear to the psychologist what cathartic and at the same time rejuvenating effects must flow from the Demeter cult into the feminine psyche, and what a lack of psychic hygiene characterises our culture, which no longer knows the kind of wholesome experience afforded by Eleusinian emotions (JUNG, KERÉNYI 10, p. 226).
Perhaps we have lost these benefits because the myth is essentially