Finding Grace: An archetypal exploration of grace through the myth of Demeter and Persephone

Coleman, R. (2002). Finding Grace: An archetypal exploration of grace through the myth of Demeter and Persephone. (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2002). UMI No. 3077727.

This production-style dissertation deals with invisible presences—recalled through the myth of Demeter and Persephone—and remembered forward through Finding Grace giving it its identity, shape, and form. It explores what memories, dreams, and imagination have to say about motherhood now, about today's daughter and tomorrow's mother, ultimately uncovering a reality—intimately linked with the human body as a social construction—that is waiting to be discovered there.

Finding Grace is a novel-length re-visioning of the Demeter/Persephone myth, or more precisely, Demeter and Persephone as they appear in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Anne Blackwell is forced to watch as her daughter, Grace, is brutally violated by the same person who once assaulted her. Rape, in this particular instance, however, serves to underscore how rape is always a mother's tragedy but not necessarily the victim's. Forced into accepting Grace's fate as separate from her own, Anne is finally brought wholly into what it means to be a mother, while at the same time she finds grace in and through her daughter, Grace.

Though deeply tormented and still suffering, Anne accepts Grace's right to her own version of the rape, to her own story, which is ultimately a recognition and an acceptance, on Anne's part, of their separateness. Thus, she is returned to “common unhappiness,” to borrow a term from Freud. For Anne, to be returned to common unhappiness is to find grace. It means that a part of her personal anguish, her despair and anger, are released so that at long last, she is initiated into what it means to be a mother. She is finally willing to suffer humanly, to be a mother, to be a woman, to be an en-souled being in the full spectrum of all that means. She has descended to the underworld and by an act of grace, and through her daughter Grace, Anne has also been given the gift of ascent and is thereby returned to the creative burden of her own existence.