Persephone in the Time of Anorexia. Poetics and Pathology of Slenderness and Food-Refusal in Myth, Psychoanalysis, and Contemporary Women’s Writing
The Greco-Roman myth of Persephone has experienced a curious afterlife in recent years: since the 1980s, it features prominently in medical research, in memoirs, and poems about modern eating disorders. Psychiatrists, poets, novelists, and patients keep connecting the goddesses to the conditions anorexia and bulimia. These pathologically informed rewritings turn Demeter into a helicopter mother, the pivotal pomegranate into a body-positive step towards recovery, and the sexual violence committed by the underworld god Hades into a romantic act awakening the repressed young Persephone to autonomy and mature sexuality. There is a certain logic behind these adaptations: food-symbolism and resistance through self-emaciation are already present in ancient versions of the myth. Seidler examines these versions with a focus on issues of food, bodies, eating, and fasting and their reception in modern mental health contexts from a critical perspective informed by medical humanities, gender, and reception studies.
Sophie Emilia Seidler is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Language & Literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Her research lies at the intersection of Comparative Literature and Classics. She holds degrees in both these subjects from FU Berlin, University of Vienna, and—thanks to a generous Fulbright scholarship—from UW in Seattle. Research exchange scholarships allowed her to spend some time at UC Berkeley in 2023 and at Stockholm University in 2019. She co-edited the volume Körperliche und pflanzliche Poetik. Florale Literatur zwischen Mensch und Blume (Bielefeld 2025) and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal eisodos—antiquity, reception, and theory. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, myth, poetry, feminist theories, psychoanalysis, mental health, asceticism, plant studies, critical posthumanisms, medical humanities, food studies, classical reception, and non-normative body-conceptions.
with Hannes Mittermair, »Einleitung. Blumige Körper und körperliche Blumen von der Antike bis in die Gegenwartsliteratur,« in: with Q. Cai, H. Mittermaier, and M. Fingado (eds.), Körperliche und Pflanzliche Poetik. Florale Literatur zwischen Mensch und Blume, Bielefeld 2025, pp. 7–22.
»Cato amator. Generic Hybridity, Monstrous Transgressions, and Elegiac Emasculation in Lucan’s Libyan Tale (Bellum Civile 9),« in: C. Schwameis and B. Söllradl (eds.), Gattungstheorie und dichterische Praxis in neronisch-flavischer Epik, Berlin 2023, pp. 69–90.
»Perséphone sur le divan. L’anorexie et la quête d’une agentivité féminine dans le mythe et la psychanalyse,« in: Cahiers du Genre 74, 2023, pp. 93–126.
»Bitches and Witches. Grotesque Sexuality in Ovid’s Scylla (Met.13.730-14.74),« in: Acta Iassyensia Comparationis 29, no.1, 2023.
»Faim d’individualité. Une poétique anorexique dans le mythe de Perséphone,« in: B. LeJuez and M. Zupančič (eds.), Le mythe au féminin et l’(in)visibilisation du corps, Leiden and Boston 2021, pp. 179-201.
More than a century after Freud’s Oedipus, the combination of psychiatry and Greek mythology is not quite common practice. Yet, recent decades have transported the goddesses Persephone and Demeter into modern mental health discourses.