such a woman feels as if she had all the time in the world to make
up her mind and thus can wait until something moves her. She lives
in a Never-Never Land, like Wendy with Peter Pan and the lost boys,
drifting and playing at life. If she is to grow, she must return to real
life. Wendy, of course, made this choice. She said goodbye to Peter
and returned through the window into the children’s room she had
left long ago, knowing that she now would grow older. The thresh-
hold a Persephone woman must cross is a psychological one.
To grow, a Persephone woman must learn to both make commit-
ments and live up to them. She has difficulty saying yes and follow-
ing through with whatever she has agreed to do. Meeting deadlines,
finishing school, entering marriage, raising a child, or staying with
a job are all hard tasks for someone who wants to play at life. Growth
requires that she struggle against indecisiveness, passivity, and in-
ertia; she must make up her mind and stay committed when the
choice stops being fun.
Between age thirty and forty, reality intrudes on a Persephone
woman’s illusion that she is eternally young. She may begin to sense
that something is wrong. By the biological clock, she is running out
of time to have a child. She may realize that her job has no future,
or she may look at herself in a mirror and see that she is growing
older. Looking around at her friends, she realizes that they have
grown up and left her behind. They have husbands and families or
are established in careers. What they do really matters to someone
else, and in some definite but intangible way they are different from
her, because life has affected them and left its mark.
As long as a woman’s attitudes are those of Persephone the Kore,
she will either never marry, or she will go through the motions but
not make the commitment “for real.” She will resist marriage because
she sees it from the archetypal perspective of the maiden, for whom
the model of marriage is death. From the standpoint of Persephone,
marriage was an abduction by Hades, the death-bringer. This view
of marriage and husband was quite different from Hera’s contrasting
model of marriage as fulfillment and from Hera’s expectation of her
husband Zeus as bringer to fulfillment. The Hera woman must know
the man and resist entering into a bad marriage by the positive ex-
pectations held by the archetype. Otherwise,
Goddesses in Everywoman