These Are Strange Times, My Dear by Wendy Willis

Author:Wendy Willis [Willis, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781640091528
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2019-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Then she slew man and beast in the furrow

With an instant epidemic, throughout the island.

She broke up the ploughs with her bare hands,

Forbade the fields to bear a crop

Of any kind. She made all seed sterile.

This island, that had boasted its plenty

Throughout the world, lay barren.

As soon as the blade showed green—the grain died.

Floods, heatwaves, and tempests

Sluiced away or dried and blew off the tilth.

The bared seeds were collected by birds.

Ceres’s negotiating position was seriously strengthened by her relentlessness, so Jupiter—the mightiest of the gods and Pluto’s brother—arranged for Proserpina to return to the world of the living. But unfortunately for Ceres, Proserpina had violated one of the conditions of the underworld by eating seven seeds of a pomegranate. As a result, she was allowed to come back to the surface for only half the year. For the other half—one month for each seed she had eaten—she returned to Pluto and the underworld, dividing both her time and her nature between dark and light, between cold and warmth, between sunny meadows and the depths of hell.

It’s a stark tale. Proserpina is kidnapped, raped, and held hostage by the king of the underworld, and that is nasty, violent business. Though I had probably heard the story sometime before I arrived at university, I didn’t study it seriously until I read Metamorphoses as a freshman. That was the same year I was sexually assaulted by a classmate. And that was a nasty, life-changing business as well. One I didn’t want to be reminded of in honors literature. And one I don’t want to be reminded of now. And one I don’t want to write about in an essay that you and my children and parents and co-workers might read. But I do write about it because I know that I am one of the 20 percent of American women who will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. And I write about it because my identity—including my identity as a survivor—has changed over those years, and so has my relationship to the myths of Metamorphoses.

In the nearly thirty years since, I’ve turned to the tale of “The Rape of Proserpina” and its Greek counterpart again and again despite the horrible bluntness of title and the violence at the center of it. The story—like all great metaphors—keeps opening up. As a young woman, I found sisterhood in the brutalization of Proserpina. It wasn’t just the rape that was familiar, but the sudden descent into darkness despite all my efforts to stay in the light. It was also the confusion of connecting to a deep, sometimes frightening, inner life while being expected to be smiling and presentable in the outside world. Later, it was the tug-of-war between being a daughter and being a wife.

In recent years—for obvious reasons—it’s been Ceres I look to for comfort. Of course, I worry myself sick about my own daughters’ safety and whether some dark lord will pluck them out of my motherly nimbus. But Ceres is so much more than a doting mother.

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