Persphone Essay

Rape: The Father-Daughter “Relationship” Approximately 1,000,000 Americans are victims of father-daughter incest. (The National Center for Victims of Crime, 2011). In the poem Persephone II by Carrza DuBose, a young girl is a victim of sexual abuse by her father. Throughout the poem, she constantly expresses that the man was her father and her lack of comfort with the situation at hand. Persephone never identifies her father; she merely refers to him as “him”. The use personification, similes and metaphors conveys what is going on without actually saying that she was a victim of rape and incest. Persephone II is broken into four stanzas with two lines in each, couplet. There is not a rhyme scheme in this poem. There is punctuation at the end of each line, except for line five where there is a semicolon. DuBose effectively expresses the theme of the father-daughter relationship through abduction, incest and abduction. Dubose successfully explores the theme of the father-daughter relationship through rape. The father raped the daughter in the poem. “Waiting: at the back door, stealing again and again what he stole already.” (Line 4) When the father creeps through the dark, he steals his daughter’s innocence and her body. One can conclude that he has raped her constantly. “But Persephone is not his wife; the one insult she could not accept and the father who did not know the difference.” (Lines 7-8) She did not like the fact that her father confused the roles of a daughter and a wife. He performs activities with her that one would associate with a wife or spouse. “Hard days involve him edging through the dark” (line 3). When he comes to rape his child, he edges through the dark to her room. Rape is not the only topic in the novel, also discussed is incest. The theme of the father-daughter relationship is also touched upon through the topic incest. According the Merriam-Webster’s’ dictionary, the definition of incest is sexual intercourse between persons so