Demeter and Persephone, I think.

I think that I just told it in the most obvious way for me, quite personally and so perhaps less challenging of the ‘original’. Having left home quite suddenly at a relatively young age, I identified with the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of Persephone, but for this to be the case she had to be at the decisive centre (!) of the story rather than a pawn around which to make the rest of the story play.

I was particularly interested in the mother-daughter relationship and the extreme closeness that holds it. I wanted to look at what happens to its intensity when it is forcibly separated, particularly when the separating force is internal and not imposed from without (as is implied in the original versions), and so in my version Persephone left of her own inquisitive impulse. I saw a lot of complexities in that movement and enormous emotional confusion, especially a kind of unrequited guilt and a certain nostalgia which is coloured by both her own complicity and the forever-irreversible nature of separation. I wanted her to have a certain agency and a power in that propulsion.

I tried to show the unspoken emotional understanding between them, conveyed almost in a physical way from body to body, particularly when the relationship is so confined and intensified, when one psyche seeks refuge in another. I hoped that it would be read not as a criticism of Demeter, whose strength I hope I conveyed, but rather as a display of the precariousness (this is complimentary to her immense strength, not in opposition of it) of her position both physically and emotionally, but more importantly, that it might pose a question about the possibility of protecting innocence. I thought it was particularly interesting to consider the processes and decisions which go into how the other, particularly a loved other, is protected. There is always a sacrifice in every decision, I wanted to show, particularly through the character of Persephone, the certain sense of inevitability with which painful decisions are made: decisions which are taken that are violent to the self, and in this case, to the mother. I think that the idea of protection is hugely difficult anyway and when it is set in a parent-child dynamic it is all the more charged, i particularly wanted to demonstrate the two-way nature of the desire to protect, and so Persephone’s pain and concern for Demeter has the same element of wanting to protect. This notion of protection coupled with guilt is explored both in Demeter and Persephone. There is a lot of guilt in my story which is associated with the power of decisions and actions and a certain empathy of how these actions resonate for others and how all of these factors do not synchronise. I wanted to question whether guilt is just futile. It is the most self-attacking of emotions, which is why I wanted Demeter’s silent conveyance of her pain and past to Persephone to be understood as inevitable and not to be judged, it wasn’t a failure on her part, rather, i thought that the emotion and intention was quite beautiful: was a strength, not a weakness. Both Demeter and Persephone have a lot of power in my story and I think that the main point is regarding the difficulty of managing that power when the desire which motivates decisions is fragmentary, this is in direct opposition to the ‘original’ which seems to suggest that choice isn’t really an issue, that it is simply a case of actions being made either in the name of the morally good or the morally bad.

I wanted to look at the creativity which can at times come out of depressive states. Of course this is already there in the main plot of the story, but the creativity of springtime in the traditional version is born of the joy which overrides the depression, whereas I wanted to show another creativity in more direct correlation with Persephone’s own depression: she created a kind of poetic counter-cycle. I was inspired in this by Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun in which she inquires into incidences of creativity from melancholia and other supposedly non-conducive states, I was particularly interested in Dostoevsky’s epilepsy which Kristeva dedicates a chapter to, and to which he infers in The Idiot. Again, i saw the creativity as testament to the strength of the characters and hope that a destructive creation wasn’t automatically branded negatively.