In the Hellenic Hymn, the sun and the moon are the first to hear Persephone’s laments when she is kidnapped. Apart from the resemblance between the novel and the myth, Hardy also divides the novels into phases which reminds of the moon symbolism in Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, the source of the Greek myth (Rowan-Brooks, 2018). However, not only do the d’Urbervilles disregard the petition for help but, Alec, the heir to the family, rapes Tess who ends up bearing his child. Her parents firmly believe that Durbeyfield is a corruption of the original surname and that they also should have been part of the noble family in the past. The tragedy of Tess begins when her ignorant parents force her to request financial support from a local family with a noble surname, d’Urberville, after becoming bankrupt. Despite not being the first Victorian writer to tackle this task, his perception excels at representing the feeling of lost innocence and youth which are “shackled by brutally unsympathetic male energies” (Radford, 2007, p. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy presents the story of the young Tess Durbeyfield, which is a dramatic appropriation of the story of rapture and quest that is inherent to the myth. Consequently, Demeter only makes plants bloom and grow when she is with her daughter, and for the rest of the year, she allows nothing to develop (McGuire, 1966). In the end, Zeus forces Hades to return Persephone, but the wicked god serves her some pomegranate seeds which compel forever the young girl to spend half the year in the underworld. This event would mark the start of a relentless pursuit around the earth by Demeter to recover her adored daughter while refusing to make the harvest grow. Demeter was the goddess of agriculture and the loving mother of Persephone who would be abducted by the king of the underworld, Hades. In Ancient Greece, the Demeter-Persephone myth was used to explain the alternation and passing of the seasons during the year. Hardy was a true admirer of classical legacy and he reviewed carefully the mythological work of the nineteenth century, which led him to constantly include references to Greek gods, such as Dionysus or Apollo in his work (Bullen, 2019). Regarding the Persephone myth, it had acquired great popularity thanks to authors, such as Tennyson with his poem Demeter and Persephone or the Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed the myth on several occasions. In this way, Victorian authors adopted a mythical approach to fiction “not to imitate the world but to reconstruct it conceptually” (Bonaparte, 1999, p. The use of myths in nineteenth-century literature was more than just an ornament and had an essential role to combat the two crises of the age: on the one hand, the crisis of faith which secularized society and dated back from the Enlightenment and, on the other hand, the cataclysm caused by empiricism, a philosophical theory which condemned humankind to skepticism and reduced human knowledge to sense perceptions, the only phenomena considered to be real non-subjective experiences.
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