Myth and Realism in Rita Dove’s Bistro Styx

The Bistro Styx is a poem from Rita Dove’s book Mother Love that retells the
classic Greek mythology of Demeter and Persephone with interesting analogies.
In the poem the mother Demeter is looking for her lost daughter Persephone
who has been kidnapped by the modernism of Paris, which can be seen as Hades.
Dove has masterfully added her own touch to the classic myth and given it a
more realistic ‘more than myth’ touch to the poem.

The poem is an allusion to the alienation between mothers and daughters in the
modern day society and how modernism has deceitfully blinded the poet’s own
daughter so much so that the poet seems to have lost her daughter forever. In
this way the Hades of modern civilization can be seen as much more dangerous
than mythical Hades as the mother seems helpless to recover her daughter, not
even for half the year as in the myth. Dove has masterfully fused the European
Mythology with contemporary American culture to provide us with a view into
the realities of the contemporary American family. Carolyne Wright mentions
about the refreshing take on the classical Greek myth and how Dove has
remained ingenious in making the myth in some ways, her own.

There is great ingenuity in unifying mythic structure, erratically rhymed son net form that
also functions as homage to Rilkey’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus', the sequences entry thereby into
the tradition that Dove in her introduction calls "Demeter/ Persephone cycle of betrayal and
regeneration." Ultimately my own admiration of Mother Love is mere cerebral than
anything—perhaps because classical Greek myth has never possessed much emotional
resonance for me. What seems most original in this sequence is Dove's ability to perceive,
through din clutter of contemporary overlays of reality, the clean lines of ancient story, and
its continuing power to fascinate.

By personifying the poem into the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Dove
has been successful in translating the message of the myth by making us look
at the myth through the windows of a contemporary society which is very
cohesive and brilliant. Moreover, this also expresses how the principles that
governed the ancient societies are still prevalent.

In the process of remaking/retelling the story of Demeter and Persephone, Dove

has carved her own niche in the branch of Mythopoiesis. Not only has Dove
retold the classic, she has in fact remolded the previous myth into one which is
completely applicable to the present world. In fact, Dove’s modern ‘myth’ has
more relevance to the context than the older myth of Demeter and Persephone
can ever have. The fact that Dove has successfully and individually carved out a
brilliant outlook into the present day anomaly and dilemma is

However the beauty in Dove’s poem is that she can express the heart of the
matter without being too generic and that she can adopt a style according to the
necessity of the poem, as Pat Righelato mentions:

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner, former poet laureate of the United States, is a writer who
has always avoided categorization, opening doors between otherwise distinct artistic spaces.
Indeed, one of the ways she comes to mind is in a doorway, securely in the old
neighborhood, in family, in the local and specific. Yet she has, from the beginning, stepped
through doorways, tested herself, and explored what is beyond as an international poet at
home in symposia in Berlin, Brazil, Israel, and South Africa, a much-traveled cosmopolitan
figure welcomed and admired in many countries…
…It might seem surprising to link her most closely With Lowell and Ashbery, but she is like
them in that her poetry is, in its entirety, a critique of American culture: like Lowell, she
reveals history through the prism of the family; like Ashbery, fascinated by the materiality of
the painted canvas, she accepts materialist culture as the medium of contemporary existence.
Like both, she seeks new Ways in which to express the autobiographical.

Dove is not a mythical writer but she did not hesitate in making a myth the
edifice for her poems in Mother Love because doing so could help us relate to
the poems even more. Still, in doing so, Dove has produced a fine
contemporary myth similar to Joseph Campbell’s claim that modern myths
must be created as the present society and culture has outlived much of the
mythologies of the past.

Furthermore, we can see traces of neo-feminism in The Bistro Styx. Dove

inquires into the Black mother’s existence in the American historical context.
The loving and caring mother in the poem is somewhat aghast looking at the
state of her daughter and how the daughter seemed to have forgotten the
essence of being a female and the joy of being a mother. She wants to save
her daughter from the peril but is helpless. Althea Tait talks about the socio-
cultural context in which Dove has written her poems in Mother Love:

Furthermore, a very unromantic reality that contradicts the ethos of slave narratives such as
Harriet Jacobs and subsequent Black women's club movement philosophies is that some
Black women did not desire to become mothers intentionally or even after they were
burdened with the outcome of lust and greed. The purpose of this argument is to reject
reifying romantic notions of Black motherhood or other motherhood while giving attention
to the conditions of Black women who actively chose or resigned to mother with fierce love.
Dove's discussion of Black mothers in Mother Love speaks to the historical discourse on the
forbidden nature of love and mothering for those Black women, who cared for the children
they did or did not have designs for or for those Black women whose choices to mother were
mitigated by conspiratorial objectives to diminish a race through steriliza tion.

We can sense the divide here that has been caused not just by generational
gap but also by race and culture. The daughter is reluctant in living life as an
honorable mother and seems far more satisfied in indulging in material
existence. Could we ask whether the luxury were designed specifically for
that purpose? To make a young Black daughter impervious to the sacrifices
her mother made? It is evident that these conditions were the designs of the
society and that to blind the daughter from seeing past the veils of lust and
tyranny in the end was an attempt to diminish the Black race. By taking over
the young Black daughters and luring them into the modern day trap of
materialism, the modern society was robbing the young Black women off
their shot at becoming a respectable mother.

Dove hence in Bistro Styx has set a mythical and a social viewpoint befitting
her present day society (modern society) and we can still find its relevance
today. Also the realistic tone in her writing style separates Bistro Styx from
being stereotyped as only mythical writing. The poem definitely has a fresh
take on how the modern day myths could sound like.