The Homeric Myth Of Demeter And Persephone

The majority of Horror film and books are suffused with female monsters, with many of these female monsters developing from ancient myths. Yet literary criticism has tended to focus more on the woman as the victim of the monster, rather than the woman-as-monster. The majority of monsters in classical mythology are female and the Homeric myth of Demeter and Persephone is a primary archetype for the classical myths that have informed the horror genre’s construction of the feminine. The myth recounts the abduction and rape of the maiden Goddess Persephone by Hades the King of the underworlds. As David Greven states that the grief of Demeter, Persephone’s mother presents a crucial precedent for the recurrent theme of the return to origins in horror and provides a basis for the representation of the maternal figure in modern horror. As Freud states in his 1925 essay “Some psychological consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes” that a pervasive fear of the mother exists, as an archaic that threatens to overpower her child and smother the child into her own primal system . Indeed the figure of the monstrous mother is a

Although the psychiatrist contends that Norman preserved his mother after murdering her in an attempt to recant his crime and bring her back to life, the image of the bird controverts this assertion. As Norman explains to Mary that he does not agree with stuffing dogs or cats because they are “not passive to begin with” .As Creed states that the stuffed birds in Norman’s parlour are birds of prey that Norman has immobilised at the very moment when they are most menacing and dangerous . Similarly, Norman associates his mother with the deadly passivity of a monstrous bird of prey, waiting to strike its next