Literature Essays

Literature Essay on Fertility Myths in Modern Literature

Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, itself strongly influenced by the genial work of J.G. Frazer, has become the main reference for whom wishes to study myths of fertility.

More importantly, because it also constitutes the avowed basis for T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, this anthropological masterpiece provides scholars with a solid background for the study of fertility and motherhood myths in previous, but even more so, subsequent literature.

Weston’s work uses, even more than Frazer’s The Golden Bough, literary references in order to structure and back up the general arguments brought forward. This examination of literary sources, especially Arthurian, makes the book particularly valuable for a better understanding of the mythic heritage that lies behind Western literary treatment of motherhood and fertility themes.

But it is also important as it marks a change in the use of myth in artistic works – as T.S. Eliot’s poem demonstrates – and forces us to analyse subsequent usages of ‘female’ myths as being a conscious borrowing from a source that has been thoroughly examined.

What this means is that a ‘post-Westonian’ author referring to fertility myths is doing so in the light of Weston’s work and their treatment of it no longer proceeds from an unconscious cultural heritage or from what Jung called ‘the collective unconscious’.

Therefore, From Ritual to Romance is an indispensable tool for the analysis of modern mythopoeia, especially that centred on female issues.

Weston’s book, it is true, is a straightforward analysis of the Holy Grail mythology that leaves little space to the imagination. What it demonstrated, however, was crucial as it challenged previous conceptions of mythology and culture (especially Christian) as being entirely patriarchal and male-driven.

The recurrence and continuity of fertility rites and beliefs in Western cultures offered a somewhat disturbing picture of our moral ancestry, a portrait that showed irrefutable signs of base sexual or reproductive instincts as well as the important, or even dominant, position of motherhood in myths and rituals.

‘There is no doubt’, Weston argues, ‘that a ceremonial “marriage” very frequently formed a part of “Fertility” ritual, and was supposed to be specially efficacious in bringing about the effect desired’.

A predominant feature of these fertility rites, Weston demonstrates, is the marriage of the Gods, and its parallel, the marriage of earth (usually female) and rain (usually divine or male). These rites have taken different shapes and aspects, but they all seem to point in the same direction.

The ritual marriage, usually a festive or magical performance, often involves symbolic acts of sexual intercourse between a maiden (in physical shape) and a natural element symbolising nature and its divine character.

Other performances see the act recreated by priests and priestesses, which often results in the figurative birth of an ear of corn or a similar symbol of natural fertility. This association between human and natural fertility is central to Weston’s work.

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