Chopin, Kate - Andrew Crosland (essay date winter 2001)
Andrew Crosland (essay date winter 2001)
SOURCE: Crosland, Andrew. “Kate Chopin's ‘Lilacs’ and the Myth of Persephone.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 14, no. 1 (winter 2001): 31-4.
[In the following essay, Crosland explores Chopin's use of the Persephone myth in her story “Lilacs.”]
The myth of Persephone provides a framework for Kate Chopin's 1894 story “Lilacs,” a tale of ambiguous good and evil subtly defined through mythological allusion. Chopin's use of myth in her other writing, the prominence of mythology in the literary magazines of her day, her familiarity with authors who employed it, and evidence in the story itself all argue for her reliance on it in “Lilacs.”
Critics have shown that Chopin used mythology in her most studied work, The Awakening. Lawrence Thornton bases his analysis of the novel on the myth of Icarus (138); taking another approach, Rosemary F....
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