SOURCE: Tyler, Lisa. “Mother-Daughter Passion and Rapture: The Demeter Myth in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing.” In Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, edited by Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin, pp. 73-91. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Tyler asserts that Virginia Woolf and Lessing use the Demeter myth “in their fiction to subvert the traditional heterosexual romance plot.”

In her now classic work on motherhood entitled Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich laments Western culture's loss of the “mother-daughter passion and rapture” once celebrated in the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone (237). In order to appreciate Rich's lament, it is necessary to recall the events first described in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the oldest known version of the myth, which opens with the young Persephone at play with her friends in a flower-filled meadow. When she reaches to pluck an...