What I have decided to do for my research essay is the story of Hades and Persephone. I’m going to compare and contrast their story to a book called A touch of darkness by: Scarlett St. Clair and Phantom of the Opera. The book A touch of darkness is a romance/fantasy book about Hades and Persephone but there are some aspects that are a little different to the original. This story is in a city-like setting and Hades of course is in the highest position of the city and owns several buildings but one mainly is a gambling bar. Persephone does fear Hades but is also curious about what he’s like in person because she has never met the guy. She also meets Hades but he makes a bet with her on a game of poker. Of course she loses and has to follow whatever he asks. I’ll go further into it later on but that’s just the brief start of the book. The movie The Phantom of the Opera is about a phantom that lives under the stage in an opera house and has never been seen before. (His dungeon represents the underworld). There is also a rose in the storyline and placed in the story many times like during one of the performances and towards the end it displays the rose and the movie ends. There is also another lover in the movie that shows his affection for Christine but she fell in lust with the Phantom because of his voice.
The comparison between these two retellings is that Christine/Persephone fell for Hades/the Phantom. Both are dark, suspenseful, and thrilling. The female leads fall for the male leads and take them to their underworld/dungeon. The female leads were also warned by others to not mess with them but they go ahead and do see them. The little difference between the two is that in A touch of Darkness Persephone goes to the highest level of Hades club building called Nevernight. She goes up there, meets him and he makes a bet with her. She loses and is taken to the underworld. With Christine, her father passed away when she was a little girl and as she would age she would hear a voice. The Phantom’s voice was what she was hearing and believed it was the angel of music. Whenever she finished a performance, her dressing room got locked and her candles went out. He appears through her mirror and takes her through the mirror and to his dungeon.
Both of these retellings relate to the story of Hades and Persephone because they both abduct and attract the woman away from their actual world. Hades in the original story literally abducts Persephone in the flower field of Narcissus. Demeter, Raulf (Christine’s real lover), and Lexa (Persephone’s Best friend) were all concerned when the female leads were gone. They all disappeared into the male’s dominance world. Overall, I will be explaining about “darkness and the light” and “don’t judge a book by its cover”.
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Kell-read. “Review: A Touch of Malice by Scarlett St. Clair.”, September 22, 2021, https://www.kellread.com/blog-avenue/tag/a+touch+of+darkness
Leroux, Gaston. “Phantom of the Opera.” Penguin UK. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?
Mellenthin, Jessica. and Shapiro, Susan. “Hades.” Mythology Unbound: An Online Textbook for Classical Mythology. uen.pressbooks.pub, https://uen.pressbooks.pub/mythologyunbound/chapter/hades/
Mellenthin, Jessica. and Shapiro, Susan. “Persephone.” Mythology Unbound: An Online Textbook for Classical Mythology. Uen.pressbooks.pub, https://uen.pressbooks.pub/mythologyunbound/chapter/persephone/
Whitehead, Sarah. “Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in Her Short Stories.” Edith Wharton Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–25. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43513029?casa_token Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
