Thread by @postclassics

~Not One Person Asked For This And I Don't Care~

An in-depth look at every instance Stephenie Meyer explicitly references the Hades/Persephone myth in her Twilight Saga novel "Midnight Sun":

To preface: I, a mythologist who looks at a large quantity of media produced about Persephone on a regular basis, and who grew up a few hours from Forks, WA and read this series obsessively as it was coming out when I was in middle school--was COMPLETELY blindsided by this.

I bought this novel for two reasons--the first being nostalgia, and the fact that I waited YEARS for this book to come out (which is the novel of Twilight rewritten from Edward's perspective instead of Bella's) back when it existed as uploaded chapters on Meyer's website.

The second--I busted out laughing at the bookshop when I realized what book was and the fact that it had a pomegranate on the cover and I cracked /what I thought was a joke/ to myself along the lines of "lol looks like persephone reception's officially the mainstream" and I...

...like I'm genuinely at a loss for the experience that I went through reading this book for the first time (in its entirety--I read the first 12 chapters back in the 00s) and realizing that I was actually going to have to talk about it for my research. So without further ado:

PAGE 187: "Suddenly, as she ate, a strange comparison entered by head. For just a second, I saw Persephone, pomegranate in hand. Dooming herself to the underworld. Is that who I was? Hades himself, coveting springtime, stealing it, condemning it to endless night..."

"...I tried unsuccessfully to shake the impression. She washed her bite down with more Coke, and then finally looked up at me."

SO, first thing's first--Edward's initial comparison of Bella to Persephone comes at the Port Angeles restaurant La Bella Italia on their first "date"

Bella interrogates Edward's strange behavior to confirm that he is a vampire. At this instance, he does not know that she's in-the-know. Furthermore, he's having her eat so that she won't go into shock, and the mushroom ravioli and Coke that she's eating...

...are inevitably paid for by Edward, so it is in a sense "his" food that he's coercing her into eating, similar to Hades in the Hom. Hymn to Demeter.

But also...mushroom ravioli=pomegranate seeds was truly a level of inspired that I don't...I can't...

Y'all there ain't words.

PAGE 297: "I wondered again how I could make this happen--be with her without negatively impacting her life. Stay in Persephone's spring, keep her safe from my underworld."

Edward is musing this while he asked Bella a question about her future, paralleling vampirism & Hades.

(Hades both the god and realm) It's this parallel that continues through the novel and inevitably because the rationale for why Edward plans on leaving Bella in New Moon (a book that tells a somewhat inverted Persephone narrative, especially with the October-January sequence).

PAGE 309: "One too many pomegranate seeds, and she was bound to the underworld with me. No way back. Springtime, sunlight, family, future, soul, all stolen from her."

Continuing this motif, the above quote is in response to Edward telepathically catching a glimpse of one of...

...Alice's visions of Bella becoming a vampire in the future. And even though Bella is happy in each vision, Edward is convinced that she would only ever regret this decision and mourn it, inevitably coming to resent him (again, foregrounding the Hades/Persephone of it all).

PAGE 357: "This was a dangerous path to even hint at. Hades and his pomegranate. How many toxic seeds had I already infected her with?"

We've made it to the meadow scene folks, where Edward shows Bella his true sparkly self, echoing the mythic meadow Persephone is abducted from.

They discuss their inability to keep away from each other, and as Edward continues to reveal his truths to Bella and she embraces them, he wonders at his vampiric impact "infecting" her. Perhaps to a point where her future is set quite literally in stone as a vampire.

PAGE 459: "It brought her as much pleasure to be in my world as being in hers brought me. A flicker of unease twisted my expression. I thought of pomegranate seeds for the first time in a while. It felt right to have her here, but was that just my selfishness blinding me?"

Edward brings Bella to his home, further into his world--and I'd like to note here that it's Edward's PESSIMISM that casts him in this Hades role. He so deeply believes that the existence of vampires is fundamentally wrong that he can't "damn" Bella to living a cursed existence.

He mentions multiple times throughout the book that he would LIKE her to be a vampire and stay with him forever, but that's just his SELFISHNESS. He frequently dismisses Bella's open communication with him about it and there's a lack of trust that reminded me of another parallel:

Persephone gets a curious little epithet when Hades speaks to her in the Homeric Hymn, δαΐφρων (daiphron) "wise/learned-of-mind" and after he grants her freedom, she has the epithet περίφρων (periphron) "wise/prudent" and later taking on the connotation of "overconfident".

It is ironic that she receives these epithets (in lines 359 and 370 respectively) because in lines 371-4 are when Hades surreptitiously "infects" (to borrow Edward's terminology) Persephone with his seeds (yes, all reproductive puns intended in antiquity).

I mainly bring this up in relation to Midnight Sun because one of the driving plot elements is that Edward's special vampiric gift is telepathy, yet Bella is the one mind that is completely silent to him, giving her a specific advantage with him no other human OR vampire has.

And it is partly because of this that Edward has difficultly trusting Bella--he can't "cheat" and listen to what she's thinking outside of her verbal communication. He finds ways around it like listening to her talk in her sleep, etc.

There's a tension both in the Hymn and MS around knowledge--who possesses it, what it looks (or often sounds) like, what it means to make informed decisions, and how we represent our decisions on an individual v collective basis. It particularly drives Edward in the end:

PAGE 603: "Because what would hurt Bella the most? I couldn't escape the truest answer. Pomegranate seeds and my underworld. Hadn't I just witnessed a brutal example of how badly my world could go wrong for her? And she was lying here broken because of it."

Past the climax of the book where Bella is nearly killed by another vampire and Edward has successfully kept her human by sucking the vampire venom out of her bloodstream in time, they find themselves at an impasse. Bella wishes to join Edward's world and he's deadset against it.

What's interesting about this shift in perspective with Edward is that from Bella's perspective, it took on a much more Christianizing lens around heaven and hell, angels and demons (echoing Meyer's own Mormon background?) and indeed, Edward prays to "Bella's" God in the end.

From Edward's perspective we get a far more classical take--though both sticking to the traditional conventions of Western literature in regards to which ideologies Meyer layers over her narrative. The most we hear from Bella's POV re: classicisms is comparing him to David.

Along the lines of whiteness and marble (which come up quite a bit throughout the series) I think (but I'm actually not sure, would love to be corrected!) that the statue on the title page is Canova's "Psyche revived by Cupid", another representation of love and underworlds.

There's been an interesting shift around the H/P myths in the digital age--I brought this up back in March at the Res Difficiles 2.0 conference--what do we do with the 2010s Tumblr canonization of the H/P myth that classicists don't want to acknowledge?

https://twitter.com/opietasanimi/status/1374732752084295682?s=20

Between the Tumblr canonization of H/P and the rise of @used_bandaid's Lore Olympus, there have been some interesting inroads to a more...let's say Byronic Hades, then he's been interpreted in the past. And I HAVE to wonder if Meyer herself was impacted by all of this.

Because to bring things full circle, I remember when the first 12 chapters of MS were leaked back in the 00s, I remember reading them, and for the life of me, I can't remember a single H/P reference in them (even though the first one I quoted was from the first 12 chapters).

And I only know that I would have definitely remember it because around the time I was reading Twilight was around the time I myself went through a H/P obsession, and nothing would have given me more euphoria than the two connected back when I was 13.

We classicists are still trying to figure out language for these new digital epistemologies precisely because they are so new and popping up at such an accelerated rate.

I don't QUITE know what to do with Meyer's though...and part of the reason is because of the nature of MS.

That is, it's a retelling of the first book in a series from an alternate perspective, so much of what she's added to this one can retroactively apply to the rest of the series because she's written it later--do I now have to count the Twilight Saga as H/P reception?????

I don't have concrete answers, but it's definitely intriguing, and I would encourage other classicists who study myth not to turn their noses up at the pop-myth interpretations showing up in the most recent decade. We've just gotta find better ways of talking about them.
--Ψ

Also many thanks to Β for making these rad banners for this thread! 🖤❤️🖤❤️🖤

*many thanks to β (urgh, multi-script keyboards y'all)

ALSO--wanted to make the point that it's kinda hilarious Edward wonders how many "toxic seeds" he's "infected" Bella with, given that he impregnates her with his ~venomous~ seed in Breaking Dawn during their honeymoon.