Demeter’s Lamentation and Baubo’s Mockery

Abstract

The chapter serves as an interlude between two comparative chapters on wedding lamentation and wedding mockery. It presents an analysis of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, exploring the function of lamentation and mockery as responses to the marriage event in an epic tale that recounts the abduction-marriage of Persephone by Hades and Demeter’s search for her abducted daughter. The chapter argues that lamentation and mockery are common responses, by the disempowered, to the simultaneous destruction and creation of social bonds and forms of community that occur during marriage.