In her 2006 poetry collection Averno, Louise Glück writes a series of poems based on the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone.
This myth was originally intended to explain the changing of the seasons. Generally, the myth states that Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, an earth goddess or Mother Earth. One day, when she was alone in a meadow, Hades, the god of death, appeared and stole her away to the underworld so that she could become his wife.
Demeter was so outraged by this that she plunged the earth into never-ending winter. Eventually, Demeter and Hades come to a compromise that Persephone would spend half of the year with her mother and the other half with her husband. Following this, the earth was warm and full of life during the seasons when Persephone was with her mother, and cold and lifeless during the months she went back to Hades.
There have been many retellings and new interpretations of this myth over the years. Glück’s Averno retells this myth from various perspectives in an attempt to highlight and examine the sexism implicit in the story; in her retelling (and in many other contemporary retellings), Persephone’s lack of agency in her own story and often implied sexual assault at the hands of her husband Hades are brought to the forefront.
The poem “Persephone the Wanderer” addresses feminist concerns like the objectification of women and sexual assault. In the first of these poems, Glück writes: “Persephone/returns home/stained with red juice/like a character in Hawthorne,” which bring in the idea that women who are raped are seen as lesser, as stained by what has happened to them.
In the later poem “A Myth of Innocence,” Glück connects Persephone’s perspective to another idea critiqued by feminism: the idea that women who are sexually assaulted were actually asking for it. In another poem, “A Myth of Devotion,” Glück enters Hades’ point of view to show his objectification of Persephone and his lack of understanding of her as a victim of his obsession. Overall, Averno remixes the Greek myth in order to bring about a new perspective, one that encourage readers to address sexism in literature and our culture as a whole, as this myth remains popular even today.
Glück’s intent in writing this poetry collection is an example of Dustin W. Edwards’ concept of reappropriation, which refers to remix texts that “challenge, invert, counter, or draw attention to oppressive discourse” (47-8). Averno is an example of the second kind of reappropriation that Edwards discusses in his article, which is “a re-using of a text to expose its damaging effects” (48). I think this kind of remix encourages people as media and content producers to look at the things they produce from different perspectives, and to understand the many different ways their work may be interpreted by others. I agree with Emily Dilworth’s post, where she says that today remix is often used to make social statements that call attention to injustices or issues.
Word Count: 502
Works Cited
Edwards, Dustin W. “Framing Remix Rhetorically: Toward A Typology of Transformative Work.” Computers and Composition, 2015, pp. 41-54, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R14bK4dhIzjJxcf7UncUB9qq2EveaMLX/view.