Persephone as Methodological Impasse: Feminine Jouissance in Veronica’s ‘Two Stories’

Abstract

As we have seen in previous chapters, feminist discourses are at an impasse over post-feminist sensibilities, specifically over the Real of sexual difference. What the Persephone plot in Veronica Mars amplifies is precisely where this touches on feminine sexuality. Specifically, Veronica Mars shows us where the methodological impasses of feminist cultural criticisms speak of a moral foreclosure towards pleasure, for where the series explores the mystery of its heroine’s sexual initiation, it animates the foreclosure of the Real of the drives in critiques of post-feminist expressions of feminine sexuality. The heroine, 17-year-old Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell), is a witty, intelligent teen-sleuth who works in the family P.I. business ‘Mars Investigations’ after school. The scene of her sexual initiation is, as with Persephone’s in the Hymn, hidden from view as, drugged, Veronica cannot remember her first sexual experience, though believes it to have been rape. In an echo of Suter’s work on the Hymn (2005, 39), however, Veronica’s sleuthing reveals there are literally ‘two stories’ to her initiation: rape by a fellow student and, it is later revealed, consensual sex with an ex-boyfriend. How these two stories are interpreted is, as with the Hymn, shaped by the epistemologies of the era in which they are told.