Hymn To Demeter Analysis

Hymn to Demeter Analysis
After exploring the hymn further, it is understandable that it was created to fit a diverse audience. Its story creates a comforting hope for women, as well as showing their place in society, because it introduces the concept of fertility and marriage. Women can identify through Persephone and Demeter because they develop a relationship that depicts what fertility is.It introduces how Persephone came to receive her role as a goddess. After the mother-daughter relationship is modified in the end of the story, Persephone spends two thirds of the year with her mother and one-third in the underworld with Hades. Helene Foley, translator and editor of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, depicts Persephone as the girl that arrived at maturity when she was violently forced tomarry her uncle, and also as the traditional wife that had an arranged marriage (33). These translations suggested by the Foley create an overview of how women in Greek culture were exposed to marriage and fertility. They also suggest how Persephone’s fertility is reflected in the symbolism of the seasons.
The poem begins with a violent abduction scene that evolves to the separation of Demeterand Persephone, wife and daughter of Zeus. In this scene, Persephone is attacked while picking flowers for her father, who arranged her marriage with Hades: “… as she played with the deep-breasted daughters of Ocean, plucking flowers in the lush meadow—roses, crocuses, and lovely violets, irises and hyacinth and the narcissus… the lord, Host-to-Many rose up on her with his immortal horses, thecelebrated son of Kronos; he snatched the unwilling maid into his golden chariot and led her off lamenting” (lines 5-20). According to Foley, the flower picking indicates that as a woman, she was ready for marriage, (33-34). But why did the poem show a violent abduction, if the abduction itself is a symbol of independence towards her mother? Whether Persephone was violently kidnapped or not, shehad a forcibly arranged marriage by Hades and Zeus. This indicates that women are not the only element to fertility and marriage, and men have a huge control over women when it comes to the arrangement. In Greek culture, once a woman had reached maturity, like Persephone, they were given a fixed marriage. Foley depicts the abduction story as a symbol of Persephone’s maturity, “the fact that motherand daughter are separated at the time of abduction suggests that Persephone is moving toward maturity and independence from her mother” (32). It foreshadows a tragic consequence, by the separation of Demeter and her daughter, and leads to how ignoring women can bring a halt to all fertility.
The moment Demeter found out the truth about her daughter being abducted by her father, she wasemotionally destroyed. She began a painful, mourning process far away from the gods, which forced a journey of different cities that eventually lead her to Eleusis, where she agreed to raise a child. It might have been that she did it to recuperate what she had lost, the absent of her own daughter. It is as though her own fertility and desire to take care of a child was destroyed yet again when shefailed to raise Dephomoon, the mortal child. With great anger, she brought forth a famine upon the mortals. She was determined to sacrifice anything to regain what she had lost: her motherhood. The gods allowed Demeter to see her daughter for her to be at peace when she threatened to destroy the mortal race with a famine. Her madness was what created that halt to fertility in Earth.
Demeter waswilling to sacrifice the human race in order to regain her relationship with Persephone. In the poem, the gods couldn’t afford to lose the mortals because they needed their worship and sacrifices; without each other they wouldn’t survive. Demeter’s fertility was restored the moment she recovered her mother-daughter relationship; it gave her power over men as well as a goddess. In marriage, women play...