S02E51 The Pomegranate Seed by Edith Wharton

Get a great discount on my Horror Stories For Halloween audiobook & ebook bundle https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween (https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween) The Pomegranate Seed The pomegranate seed is a reference to the myth of Persephone and Demeter. Winter and Spring and the Lord of the Underworld. In a sense Mother and daughter are the same, and one aspect of the woman spends time in the world of the dead, while the other walks the world of the living. Kenneth disappears to see about ‘their passages.’ It is clear that it is his passage over the river Styx to the underworld that he finally arranges. He has been so attached to the ghost of his late wife, that he cannot escape her as she dominated him in life. He wants to escape, he wants to live with his new wife and have new experiences, but he is simply not strong enough to make it so. Charlotte represents the living, mortal world while Elise Ashby represents death. In that sense it is a story about a choice that all of us have to make: to live in this world and be of it and do what work it sets before us or spend our time dreaming of the underworld whence we came and to which we shall return. Deep for a Monday morning, I feel. However, Wharton’s skill as an observer of human behaviour also shines in this story, and for most of the time it is the skilful chronicle of that commonplace (sadly) or married life—the suspicion that our lover’s heart is tethered elsewhere. Trivial, but profoundly upsetting. Charlotte spends a lot of time arguing this when then that way that her husband is having an affair, trying to convince herself in a way that rings very true. Old Mrs Ashby plays the role of the mother goddess who loses her son in this case to the Underworld. This doesn’t totally fit. But she is on the side of life, despite her age, and she supports Charlotte and regrets her son’s attachment to his late wife. In construction there are four parts. We begin with a scene of Charlotte’s unsettledness, standing