the problematics of motherhood in twentieth century women's fiction

14
of Demeter and Persephone is an unwilling one, it is neither
a question of the daughter's rebellion against the mother,
nor the mother's relection of the daughter The myth
lndlcates that each daughter, even in the millznia before
Chrlst, must have longed for a mother whose love for her and
whose power were so great as to undo rape and bring her back
from death And every mother must have longed for the power
of Demeter, the efflcacy of her anger, the reconciliation
wlth her lost self
1.5.2. One comes across such strong mothers In the
Germanic folk epic Das Nibelungenlied and ln the figure of
Clytemnestra in the Greek eplc trad~tlon In the former
eplc, although Krlemhild's relatlonshlp to her mother Uta 1s
a close one, Krlemhild does not refrarn from relectlng her
mother's advlce and chooslng her own course of actlon, she
relects the maternal role to whlch she was expected to
crnflne herself Similarly, in the Greek epic, Clytemnestra
becomes the antlchesis of the nurturing mother figure,
turnlng her back on the maternal role as she seeks vengeance
on her husband Agamemnon
1.5.3. In Medleval literature, mothers are conspicuous by
thelr absence From Chaucer and hls contemporaries, nothlng
1s known of the work and actlvltles of medleval women, nor
1s there any clue concerning the relatlonshlp between a