‘Demeter and Persephone: A Re-Telling’. Explained…

In my re-telling of Demeter and Persephone I was attempting to create a sense of humour within what is a very dark and sombre story. In order to achieve this I employed some unusual, and perhaps rather innocuous, motifs for example, Hades became a pie, and the underworld became a biscuit shop. I tried to keep the overall tone of my writing relatively simplistic in order to capture a jokey and jovial style. The descriptive passages were lively and I tired to write about recognisable instances rather than focussing on conceptual themes. For example, by describing the underworld in terms of the retail world, it is a comparison everyone can relate to. (After all, we have all been shopping but few of us have moseyed round with the un-dead… although anyone who has been to their local Iceland has had an experience akin to some kind of hell). Yet putting such an ordinary comparison into a re-worked Greek myth transforms it from the mundane into something rather surreal.

I also aimed at presenting my story as a fairytale. I divided it into short chapters, included a picture at the end, utilised an epistolary format to break up the block text and used LaTeX to format it so that it looked relatively professional. By deliberately trying to fashion my story into a child’s fairy tale I was trying to play with the idea that myth and folklore appear ‘natural’.

My re-telling reads more sarcastically than it reads sadly. By consciously leaving out the sorrowful themes – such as grief, separation, loneliness – I hoped that it would add more emphasis to the ridiculous nature of the compromise that Persephone is pushed into against her will. By making light of a grim plot I hoped to make the reader feel uncomfortable so that they might be forced into questioning aspects of my story.

I hope that explains my story successfully and that I have managed to make sense! I would also like to add that I very much enjoyed reading other people’s versions in all the different forms they took.