Proserpine (play) - Legacy and Reception

Legacy and Reception

As feminist literary critic Susan Gubar argues, Mary Shelley’s drama is part of a female literary tradition, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, H.D., Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing, which has responded to the story of Ceres and Proserpine. These writers use the myth as a "way of dealing with their experience of themselves as daughters growing up into womanhood and potential motherhood....they use the myth of Demeter and Persephone to re-define, to re-affirm and to celebrate female consciousness itself." Poets such as Dorothy Wellesley, Rachel Annand Taylor, Babette Deutsch, and Helen Wolfert as well as Mary Shelley portray the procreative mother as a heroine who creates an arena for nurturing relationships that challenge "the divisions between self and other" that rest at the centre of patriarchy. Feminist poet Adrienne Rich writes that "the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy", and it is this tragedy that Mary Shelley discusses in her play.

When A. Koszul first published a transcription of Proserpine in 1922, he argued "that the little classical fancies which Mrs. Shelley never ventured to publish are quite as worthy of consideration as her more ambitious prose works". However, his "Introduction" to the play speaks mostly of Percy Shelley and his contribution to Mary Shelley's works. In fact, as he explains, he decided to publish in order to contribute to the Percy Shelley centenary. Since their original publication, neither Midas nor Proserpine has received much critical attention. Critics have either paid attention only to Percy Shelley's poems, or have ignored the plays altogether. Literary critic Elizabeth Nitchie writes that the plays are "distinguished only by the lyrics that Shelley wrote for them", and Sylvia Norman contends that they "do not really call for analytical and comparative study". While Frankenstein has remained a powerful cultural force since its publication, Mary Shelley's other works have rarely been reprinted and scholars have focused almost exclusively on Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and Mary Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, with the publication of works by Mary Poovey and Anne K. Mellor in the 1980s and The Other Mary Shelley in 1993, more attention has been paid to Mary Shelley's "other" works, such as her dramas.