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she makes her way past  all those dark people to a spot where her brother, Laurie,  steps out of the
shadow.
There are a couple of other odd features here. For one thing, on her way to the lane, Laura is
gratuitously accosted by a large dog  running by like a shadow. Upon getting to the bottom, she
crosses the  broad road to go into the dismal lane. Once in the lane, there s an old, old woman with a
crutch sitting with her feet on newspaper. On her way in and out Laura passes individuals and small
knots of shadowy figures, but they don t speak to her, and the one by the old woman (she alone
speaks) parts to make way for her. When the old woman says the house is indeed that of the dead
man, she  smiles queerly. Although Laura hasn t wanted to see the dead man, when the sheets are
folded back, she finds him  wonderful, beautiful, echoing her admiration in the morning for the
workman who stoops to pick and smell the lavender. Laurie, it turns out, has come to wait at the end of
the lane  almost as if he can t enter  because  Mother was getting quite anxious.
What just happened here?
For one thing, as my student respondents note, Laura has seen how the other half lives  and dies. One
major point of the story is unquestionably the confrontation she has with the lower class and the
challenge that meeting throws at her easy class assumptions and prejudices. And then there is the
story of a young girl growing up, part of which involves seeing her first dead man. But I think something
else is going on here.
I think Laura has just gone to hell. Hades, actually, the classical underworld, the realm of the dead. Not
only that, she hasn t gone as Laura Sheridan, but as Persephone. I know what you re thinking: now he s
lost his mind. It wouldn t be the first time and probably not the last.
Persephone s mother is Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, fertility, and marriage. Agriculture,
fertility, marriage. Food, flowers, children. Does that sound like anyone we know? Remember: the
guests admiring the flowers at Mrs. Sheridan s garden party go about in couples, as if she has in some
way been responsible for their pairing off, so marriage is in there. Okay, the long version is in Chapter
19, but here s the lightning-round version: fertility-goddess mother, beautiful daughter, kidnap and
seduction by god of underworld, permanent winter, pomegranate-seed monkey business, six-month
growing season, happy parties all round. What we get here, of course, is the myth explaining the
seasons and agricultural fertility, and what sort of culture would it be that didn t have a myth to cover
that? Highly remiss, in my book.
But that s not the only thing this myth covers. There s the business of the young woman arriving at
adulthood, and this constitutes a huge step, since it involves facing and comprehending death. The
myth involves the tasting of the fruit, as with Eve, and the stories share the initiation into adult
knowledge. With Eve, too, the knowledge gained is of our mortality, and while that s not quite the point
of the Persephone story, it s sort of unavoidable when she marries the CEO of the land of the dead.
So how does that make Laura into Persephone, you ask? First, there s her mother as Demeter. That
one is, as I suggested, pretty obvious, once the flowers and food and children and couples are
considered. Moreover, we should recall that they live on this Olympian height, towering geographically
and in class terms over the ordinary mortals in the hollow below. In this divine world the summer s day
is perfect, ideal, as the world was before the loss of her daughter plunged Demeter into mourning and
outrage. Then there is the trip down the hill and into a self-contained world full of shadows and smoke
and darkness. She crosses the broad road as if it were the River Styx, which one has to cross to enter
Hades. No entry is possible without two things: one must pass by Cerberus, the three-headed dog who
stands guard, and one must have the admission ticket (Aeneas s Golden Bough). Oh, and a guide
wouldn t hurt. Laura has her confrontation with the dog just outside her garden gate, and her Golden
Bough turns out to be the gold daisies on her hat. As for guides (and no traveler to the underworld
should be without one), Dante in the Divine Comedy (1321 A.D.) has the Roman poet Virgil; in Virgil s
epic, The Aeneid (19 B.C.), Aeneas has the Cumaean Sibyl as his guide. Laura s Sibyl is that very old
woman with the queer smile: her manner is no stranger than that of the Cumaean version, and the
newspaper under her feet suggests the oracles written on leaves in the Sibyl s cave, where, when the
visitor entered, winds whipped the leaves around, scrambling the messages. Aeneas is told to only
accept the message from her own lips. As for the knot of unspeaking people who make way for Laura,
every visitor to the lower world finds that the shadows pay him or her very little mind, the living having
nothing to offer those whose living is done. Admittedly, these elements of the trip to Hades are not
native to the Persephone myth, but they have become part and parcel of our understanding of such a
trip. Her admiration for the deceased man s form, her identification with the grieving wife, and her
audible sob all suggest a symbolic marriage. That world is dangerous, though; her mother has started to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]