Saturday, March 3, 2007

Averno response

Most of Gluck’s piece seems to be set in a contemporary time period – she references modern things such as electric chairs (yikes!). However, in her narration about Persephone, the time period is left ambiguous. The tone of the piece is a little bit dark, especially due to the death-related content, but at the same time it is very contemplative. The narrator has a very reflective voice and is observant about the world around her. She seems to value her time to think, especially when surrounded by nature: “When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia. Summer nights, my parents permitted me to sit by the lake; I took the dog for company” (23). The Persephone narrator conveys more disdain for the earth than I would have pictured – “everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer” (50). The last line on page 16 reads “a character in Hawthorne,” which I assume refers to the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, although I don’t know specifically what character. I didn’t really feel like I found a passage that I would describe as “second guessing.” The author does describe things in a variety of different ways, but I felt it seemed more like an elaboration, a method of representing a train of thought, which is what a lot of the piece seemed like to me. The difference between the two sections seems to be about the general theme of each – the first section discusses more sexual and relationship things, while the second sections turns more towards the idea of death. This is represented in the Persephone the Wanderer sections. In the first, Gluck writes “Persephone is having sex in hell,” while in the second, she opens with “In the second version, Persephone is dead. She dies, her mother grieves- problems of sexuality need not trouble us here.” After reading Gluck’s interpretation, it definitely made me rethink the idealized aspects of the myth: perhaps Persephone wasn’t so pure and enchanted only by nature; maybe the horrible fate of being taken from her mother was more like freedom than imprisonment. The questions that Gluck poses in her description of Persephone (“Is she at home nowhere?”) are thought provoking in making you question a widely accepted belief, both about the myth of Persephone as well as other things that you just accept as truth.

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