carolinepmannDemeter and Persephone in Tori Amos’ From the Choir Girl Hotel
Note: This essay is a written version of the interview I gave on Drive All Night: The Songs of Tori Amos in December 2020.
Singer and pianist Tori Amos wrote her 1998 album, From the Choir Girl Hotel, in the aftermath of a miscarriage. Her miscarriage and experience of motherhood become the central themes of the album, told as a journey through a watery underworld. Amos’ work has always been notorious for excavating grief and trauma; she famously narrates her experience being raped in her song, “Me and a Gun,” on her first solo album. Choir Girl represents a development in Amos’ persona, as she navigates her fraught metamorphosis from puella rapta to would-be mother.
Tori Amos’ song worlds are full of female figures both mythic and real. The women are used as friends, as archetypes, and as alternative identities for Amos to try on to explore aspects of her self. On the album’s final track, “Pandora’s Aquarium,” for example, Amos describes the experience of being guided by Pandora to examine her situation while recovering from her miscarriage in Florida. Amos says, “[Pandora] told me, ‘You need to dive into this one, Tori, because your healing is there. Once you go, it’s a whole new journey, but you’ve got to metaphorically leave this little dock and come with me to find out what’s really in this ocean of feelings’” (Daley, 1998). With Pandora as her guide, Amos must open the jar of her troubles. The lyrics “She dives for shells / With her nautical nuns” describe Pandora probing the depths on an album full of water imagery.
It is tempting to explore the ways in which the mythic Pandora informs a reading of this song. In the myth, as told most famously by Hesiod, Pandora was sent as a punishment to men, given to them as a trick from the gods, but actually the source of all human disease and toil. It is not surprising that Amos is seeing Pandora, an ambiguous figure in myth, as an ally in understanding her own suffering. In the song, Pandora says, “Line me up in single file / With all your grievances.” Pandora is prepared to take on blame; she is used to it. Amos is under no illusions about Pandora’s history and her suitability for this dark task.
However, what Pandora releases in Tori’s underwater world ultimately relates not to the story of Pandora’s jar, but to another myth altogether. Amos sings, “I am not asking you to believe in me / Boy I think you’re confused / I’m not Persephone.” She is referring to the myth of Persephone, a virgin goddess who was abducted by the underworld god Hades through deceit and trickery. The most famous ancient versions of this story, from Ovid and the Homeric Hymns, describe Persephone picking flowers with her friends, when she is either betrayed by another goddess or simply the unfortunate object of Hades’ obsession. The god arrives through a fissure in the earth and drags her down to the underworld. On the surface, it makes sense that Amos would identify with Persephone; Amos had experienced sexual violence herself, and written about it. Yet the message in this song is clear: she is not Persephone, even if others might mistake her for that goddess.
In her 2005 autobiography, Amos explains, “I also had to realize that I am more aligned with Demeter than with Aphrodite, or even Persephone, who seemed like an archetype that I could claim. Even though there is a violation and a rape involved in my life, that story isn’t my core” (Amos and Powers, 2005). Amos does not explicitly state that she is adopting the persona of Demeter anywhere on Choir Girl, though she does comment upon it in interviews, indicating that the identification was conscious. In an interview the morning after a concert, Amos said “I was very much Demeter last night…” (Perdotto, 1999).
The identification is perfect on multiple levels. Firstly, the myth of Persephone is really the myth of Demeter. In the most prominent ancient accounts of the story, Demeter is a far more active character than her daughter. After Persephone is raped by Hades, Demeter begins a worldwide quest to find her daughter. Choir Girl is an album about Amos trying to become a mother. Her miscarried child, whom she figures as a daughter (like Persephone), is lost. In the first track of the album, “Spark,” Amos asks, “Are you sure where my spark is,” as she searches for the girl. As for Demeter, Amos’ search is all consuming, and as for Demeter, the quest is futile since the child is in the underworld. On Choir Girl, Amos comes to terms with herself as a mother, and as part of this process she remakes her self image into a Demeter.
The mother seeking a lost daughter component of the Demeter myth is the most directly applicable to Amos’ work on this album, and seems to be the element to which she is drawn most directly in 1998. However, two other elements are arguably, if less directly, at play. The first is destructive power. In her despair, the mythic Demeter annihilates human agriculture with droughts and storms, nearly killing all people. Amos is not an agent of destruction on Choir Girl, but she has always been attracted to archetypes of powerful goddesses. Her third album was called Boys for Pele, taking the volcano goddess as its name. The second is Demeter’s interest in eroticism. At one point in her myth, Demeter is disconsolate when she meets a strange, bawdy woman called Iambe. Iambe is depicted in art as a woman whose face is located by her navel and is associated with off-color humor. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Iambe is the only person who can make Demeter laugh. Though Choir Girl is an album about anguish, Amos also includes the dance track “Raspberry Swirl,” which itself is unabashedly off-color. Tori’s Demeter still knows how to have fun, too.
In the subsequent decade, Amos continued to develop the persona of Demeter in her work, introducing the goddess explicitly in her 2007 album, American Doll Posse. On that album, she develops five “dolls,” stage characters who are alternative selves based on Greek goddesses who are updated for the 21st century. One of these dolls is called “Tori,” and is essentially the “real” Tori Amos’ normal stage persona. Tori’s doll is identified with Demeter (and Dionysus), while Persephone is given to another doll.
For Amos, mythical women, whether Greco-Roman or not, provide lenses onto the experience of being a woman, which she sees as inherently fragmented. One of Amos’ constant refrains is that she wants to “marry the Marys,” referring to Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, the virgin and the whore. Women in Amos’ work always contain a plurality. It would therefore be incorrect to say that in Choir Girl, Amos becomes Demeter rather than Persephone, as she always embodies both. However, on that album about loss and shifting identity, Amos’ Demeter self is ascendant.
Amos, Tori. 1998. From the Choirgirl Hotel. Atlantic Records.
Amos, Tori and Ann Powers. 2005. Tori Amos: Piece by Piece. Broadway.
Daley, David. 1998. Tori Amos: Magic and Loss. Alternative Press. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1998-07_AP.html.
Elijah, Jason. 2019. Pandora’s Aquarium: Tori Amos From the Choir Girl Hotel. Toriphoria, yessaid.com. http://www.yessaid.com/lyrics/1998fromthechoirgirlhotel/12pandorasaquarium.html.
Lustig, Jay. 1998. “The Never-Ending Tori: Tour Sharpens Amos’ Songwriting Skills.” New Jersey Star Ledger. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1998-11-20_The_Star-Ledger.html.
Peradotto, Nicole. 1999. “Famous Amos: Tori on Myths, Music and Alanis Morisette.” Buffalo News. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1999-08-29_Buffalo_News.html.