Persephone Issue No.19
January
Pouls.of.art
Issue no. 19
PERSEPHONE
From Founder's Desk
A very happy new year to all our readers! New years always bring so much new hope, new beginnings and are a time to reset our lives to suit our life’s path just a little better.
For us at Pouls.of.art, the new year is always so exciting because it means the launch of yet another new calendar, and this year we have worked very hard to bring to you an edition with some of our favourite literary heroines, which our team of literature enthusiasts have really put their heart and soul into exploring.
In this edition, we have picked up some of our most beloved pieces from this year’s calendar and explored them a little more, taking you through all the research that goes behind creating Artful calendar 2025 each year! Hope you enjoy reading this edition!

From Editor's Desk
Dearest gentlest readers,
Happy new year! For some reason 2025 sounds really serious but we got this! I really hope you like the first edition of “Persephone” this new year. It shares our work on literary heroines that shaped and influenced different genres throughout the history of literature.
I’d like to take this opportunity to invite you to share your thoughts with our community! Yes, we’re looking for original pieces in the following categories: writing, photography, artwork, and poetry. Send us your work to our official email along with a brief introduction by 15th of February, and you might see your piece featured in our next issue!

THE ART OF IRENE ADLER
A Visual Symphony of Power and Mystery
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name.” These words from Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia encapsulate the enigmatic presence of Irene Adler—a character so vivid that she transcends the boundaries of text and breathes life into illustrations, performances, and adaptations across time. In art and media, Adler’s visual depictions have mirrored societal attitudes toward intelligence, femininity, and power, offering a fascinating lens into her ever-evolving legacy.
From the very first story, Doyle’s description of Adler as an opera singer conjures an image of a glamorous, independent woman, poised and confident. Victorian illustrators, tasked with bringing her to life in serialized publications, often emphasized her elegance—a woman dressed in elaborate gowns, her posture regal yet approachable. These early visual interpretations framed Adler as both a woman of high society and a mysterious figure operating outside its constraints. Her costumes often hinted at duality: lavish materials for the stage and practical, understated attire for her escapades, emphasizing her adaptability and intelligence.


Fast forward to the 20th century, and Irene Adler began to take on new visual identities as film and television adopted her story. Each adaptation brought unique visual storytelling choices, reflecting contemporary ideas of intrigue and empowerment. In the 2009 and 2011 Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr., Rachel McAdams portrays Adler with a blend of period-appropriate costuming and modern sensibilities. Her Victorian dresses are tailored for practicality, underscoring her role as a cunning adventurer, yet retain flourishes that highlight her allure.
McAdams’ Adler is a character who moves seamlessly between danger and sophistication, her visual presence reinforcing her dual identity as both love interest and adversary.

The BBC’s Sherlock (2012) took an even more modern approach, transforming Adler into a dominatrix played by Lara Pulver. This reimagining dressed her in sharp, seductive attire—black dresses, heels, and a memorable scene involving nothing but a strategically wielded riding crop. The choice to depict Adler in such overtly provocative clothing stirred controversy but also aligned with her characterization in this version: a woman who weaponizes her sexuality and intellect to navigate a male-dominated world.
For art enthusiasts, Pulver’s Adler represents the interplay between costume as armor and character as spectacle. Her wardrobe tells its own story, projecting dominance, vulnerability, and the fine balance of control she wields in her interactions with Sherlock Holmes.
CBS’s Elementary presented yet another reinterpretation of Irene Adler, merging her identity with Moriarty, Holmes’s arch-nemesis. Played by Natalie Dormer, this Adler/Moriarty oscillates between sleek, modern clothing that emphasizes her power as a criminal mastermind and softer, more romantic attire in flashbacks to her relationship with Holmes. Here, visual storytelling is key: the juxtaposition of her past and present wardrobe highlights the transformation from lover to nemesis, adding layers to her character’s motivations and illustrating her evolution from vulnerability to calculated control.

In all these adaptations, Adler’s visual portrayal has been a reflection of her time. But perhaps what makes her so compelling to artists and audiences alike is how she continues to embody the tensions of her origins. In Doyle’s Victorian world, her depiction often played into the era’s fascination with con women and femmes fatales, figures like Mary Carleton or Lydia Gwilt, whose charm and cunning captivated Victorian imaginations while also stoking fears about women’s growing independence.
Today, Adler’s depictions still walk this fine line. While the anxieties surrounding her character have shifted—from Victorian fears of women stepping outside their prescribed roles to modern debates about agency, empowerment, and objectification—her essence remains the same. Irene Adler is a muse for artists and filmmakers because she is more than a character; she is an archetype, a mirror reflecting our evolving ideas of power, intellect, and femininity. Art enthusiasts can find endless inspiration in the way Adler has been visually reimagined over time. Her image always tells a story—one of defiance, adaptability, and the enduring allure of a woman who will always remain “the woman” in Sherlock Holmes’s world.
CAN THERE BE JANE WITHOUT BERTHA?

Ever since I read Charlotte Brontë’s iconic novel Jane Eyre, it has been my first response to the question “Which is your favourite book?” Brontë composed her novel in the mid 19th century and from a very different social and cultural context. However, the way the protagonist endured emotional and physical turmoil throughout her life and still managed to never let her self-esteem go down is awe-inspiring.
I’ll have to confess that I never really gave a thought about the madwoman of the setting until I did a second perusal of the text during my graduation. Suddenly I started feeling weird about everything I had held dear to my heart about Rochester! Soon enough I was introduced to Feminism, Gynocriticism, Postcolonialism, and my entire approach towards texts altered.
Jane Eyre has inspired one of the most profound texts of gynocriticism, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. This article, however, intends to talk about a text written prior to this. While Rochester’s insane wife, Bertha Mason, locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall, was the primary obstacle in the fulfillment of Jane’s love story, the tragic image of Bertha didn’t satisfy the Dominic-born Jean Rhys, who in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea treats Bertha as the protagonist.
“She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her a life,” opined Rhys. The shift in perspective of different characters, their relationship, and social dynamics is intriguing. Just as Bertha doesn’t have a voice in Brontë’s novel, Rhys doesn’t allow Jane a voice in her colonial take on the story even though she appears in it. Bertha, named as “Antoinette” in Rhys’s work, declares, “There is always the other side” which becomes the crucial factor throughout the text.
Critics often claim Bertha as the other side, the doppelgänger, the suppressed version of Jane. There are multiple encounters between the two that support this argument. Mirrors play a significant part in this throughout the entire work and always reveal to Jane a visage of herself that she does not recognize.
Even Jane’s own surname, “Eyre,” comes from the name of a historic house in which a madwoman lived! Such literary symbolism has also been employed by Rhys in portraying a doomed marriage between Rochester and Antoinette, who stopped in a village named “Massacre” on their journey to the honeymoon house.

It is, however, important to mention that in introducing the postcolonial theory to the novel, Rhys also distanced herself from Brontë. Antoinette knew from a young age about the life of imprisonment that looms over the West Indies. As a French Creole, her marriage to Rochester attempted to provide for her social mobilization, but those efforts went in vain.
While in Jane Eyre, Bertha sets Thornfield Hall on fire and leaps to her death, in Wide Sargasso Sea, we never actually see Antoinette doing any of this except in her dream. Antoinette must have suffered the same fate, but her death doesn’t allow Rochester to redeem himself.

Poulomi Bose’s interpretation of Jane Eyre, the timeless literary heroine whose journey is marked by resilience, integrity, and a strong sense of self-worth, has been re-envisioned with the personification of Bertha Mason.
This is what makes her painting more captivating. It’s inspired by an encounter between the two characters in the novel. Juxtaposed against a fluid backdrop, this painting of Jane and Bertha’s reflection in the large mirror symbolizes the wild, untamed part women are capable of manifesting against society’s confinement.
The work attempts to focus on “the act of looking at oneself as a means for finding out one’s essence or identity and sometimes even taking the charge of creating it.” I’m certain that every woman, if given a chance, will be able to connect to this!

ART INTERPRETATION
The painting "The Death of Chatterton" by Henry Wallis shows the last moments of young poet Thomas Chatterton in his small London room. The teenage writer lies dead on his bed, with morning light washing over his pale face through a small window. He’s wearing clothes from his time period (the 1700s), and his arm hangs down beside the bed, showing he’s no longer alive.
The room itself is a sad sight – papers are scattered everywhere, probably his poems and writings, and there’s a small bottle of poison nearby that tells us how he died. Wallis painted this scene using deep, rich colors – especially in the red bedcover – which stands out against the cool blue light of dawn.
He arranged Chatterton’s body almost like a statue, making the whole scene feel very dramatic. The painting does more than just show a sad moment; it tells the story of a young writer who felt so hopeless that he took his own life at just seventeen years old. Every detail, from the messy papers to the way the light falls in the room, helps us understand both the historical event and the deeper story of a talented young person who died far too soon.
The painting became famous because it perfectly captured what many people at the time thought about artists – that they were often misunderstood and suffered for their art.

MISS HAVISHAM’S RAPUNZEL
Here is another tale of a sweet maiden who was locked away by her adoptive mother, on the pretext of being protected from the big scary world outside, until she realises that her mother was just hoping to harvest her beauty and powers for her own selfish gains; and, on this realisation, she decides to make a run for it.
The two figures that lingered their way into my brain while writing this description were Rapunzel and Estella. While possessing seemingly different personalities, Rapunzel and Estella would be that friendship duo who have completely opposite tastes in everything but still somehow seem to bond better than 90 percent of the modern-day couples.

Now, unsurprisingly, there is plenty they can bond over. One could be, being raised by self-centred adoptive mothers possessing similar temperaments and a chronic need for control. As Rapunzel drops the lore about her magic hair and a woman’s sad obsession with staying young, Estella brings in the grim realities of women’s commodification and heartbreak in Victorian England. Both feel equally used by their attachment figures, who manipulated them into staying locked away physically and emotionally respectively, from the wider world outside.

It is, however, at some point, that Rapunzel would realise that she has much more to sympathise for in Estella’s case as the emotional havoc caused in her case is more serious. While a comparison of the severity of their circumstances would be dismissive of their individual struggles, Rapunzel was still able to preserve her innocence and purity i.e. her feminine traits and thus was “rewarded” with a happy marriage at the end of the tale.
Estella, on the other hand, having been turned into a cold and emotionally unavailable object of desire, unconsciously rejects the feminine ideals of innocence and helplessness. She is aware of the power she yields through her beauty and is lethal when it comes to breaking men’s hearts. This leads to her being “punished” with an abusive marriage with Bentley Drummle in the novel.
While Rapunzel gains autonomy the moment she is saved by her prince, Estella is never truly able to free herself from the chains that Miss Havisham locked her heart away in. She lacks the agency to make decisions for herself and ends up as a mere tool for revenge for Miss Havisham and the embodiment of Pip’s great expectations.

Despite being a victim of her circumstances, Estella emerges as a stronger female character in contemporary times as compared to Rapunzel. This is because Estella refuses to be a passive object of desire according to traditional norms. At some point, she is also able to recognise the harm caused by her upbringing and takes ownership for the same.
Estella’s journey reflects her reclamation of power, showing that she is not defined by the men who desire her or the roles imposed upon her, but by her ability to confront and challenge her own emotional conditioning. Estella can also be seen as a more realistic version of Rapunzel, since it is not possible to emerge from long-term confinement and manipulation while remaining as untainted and innocent as Rapunzel manages to be.
In the end, Rapunzel presents hope to the little girls while Estella is a vessel for the female rage produced by the dismissal of the “human” behind the little girls raised in a patriarchal society.

MASTERS OF THEIR OWN DESTINY
Both Eowyn and Katniss are iconic warrior heroines in their own right. Though seemingly not quite the mirror image of one another, the thing that binds them is how both women fight to assert their agency and choose their destiny in a society that puts them in a box and expects them to follow a path laid out for them.

Though both wanted to ultimately protect their loved ones, their motivations for fighting weren’t the same. They belonged to very different backgrounds which affected their psyche and the way they view conflict and survival.
Katniss fights to survive. Her motivating factor has always been to protect Prim and to meet their basic needs. After the death of her father and the emotional abandonment of her mother, she inevitably had to step up to play the role of the guardian of the house. In Prim she sees the innocence that she lost. But Katniss is someone who faces reality and accepts it. She doesn't dream of revolution like Gale does. Yet she becomes the face of the revolution, The Mockingjay. And the very family she tries to protect gets taken away from her.
Eowyn on the other hand seeks battle. She is a noble shieldmaiden who never had to think about where her next meal would come from. Her father died in battle and she watched as her mother died of illness. The kingdom was on the brink of a war and the King Theoden – her uncle, was weakened by the despair and evil words of Grima Wormtongue. She felt helpless in the face of that. She didn’t want to be another passive spectator but is forced to be so as she is forbidden to go to battle and is asked to stay back to protect the children and women.
In her mind, only a warrior could save her kingdom. When she meets Aragorn she sees in him everything she wants to be – a glorious warrior and a protector. And she ends up falling for him. She relentlessly pleads with Aragorn to let her join him in his journey and for the King to allow her to go to battle as she is trained in combat. But when the one who mattered to her the most, the King, refuses, she realised that asking for permission would take her nowhere.

Deciding not take no for an answer, she goes to the battle of the Pelennor Fields in disguise. She barely survives after killing the Witch King in order to save Theoden, who ultimately perished without knowing it was Eowyn who saved him. She refuses to let powerful men decide her fate and goes for what she always wanted, i.e. to be in the arena fighting with the people. Once when asked what scares her she says, “A cage…to stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”

Though woven from different threads, the psychological journey that both women take and the toll of war on them shows how they are ultimately just human beings and that war doesn’t have any favourites.
Katniss belongs to an impoverished section in district 12 where they go days barely being able to put together a meal. She is plagued by the death of her father, riddled with self doubt and is divorced from the softer side of her as she had to grow up fast and survive harsh realities alone.
She is not very connected to people, unless it's Prim. Which is why she is blind to the advances of Gale and gets violently defensive while misreading Peeta’s care for her. Yet it's Peeta’s kindness and protection that ultimately thaws her heart, “That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred.
I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.”

Katniss volunteered in place of her sister at the Reaping to protect her, yet it thrust her into a world from which she never returned whole. And with her assassination of President Alma Coin, she realises no one truly survives the games. The odds are never really in your favour. She is left traumatised, abandoned and badly injured by the end of it all. She renounces the role of the pawn they wanted her to play. In the end she returns to a quiet family life with Peeta, something she never imagined for herself, yet after all she has been through, she chooses it for herself. Eowyn too at the end realises that the glory and sense of control that she thought the battlefield would bring her, was ultimately an illusion. She realises that she had been naive to the horrors of war and her own purpose. She had achieved what she wanted to but the price was too steep. Faramir’s devotion and outlook changes her too. She says to him, “I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.” What’s significant is that this time it's an informed decision. Not because that's what everyone expects from her or that's all a woman is good for, but because this time she chooses it for herself.
NOT IN HOGWARTS ANYMORE
Children’s literature often carries nostalgia and whimsy, but its influence extends beyond age. Iconic characters like Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Katniss from The Hunger Games, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, leave lasting impressions. These stories contain universal themes, moral complexities, and artistic depth that resonate with adults as they do with children.
With our 2025 Artful calendar, we paid a tribute to literary heroines who embody courage, wit, and defiance. Children’s literature often goes beyond its intended audience. At its core, these stories explore themes of identity, resilience, love, and the triumph of good over evil.
Take Alice from Alice in Wonderland. For children, it’s a fantastical tale of talking rabbits and curious adventures. For adults, Alice’s journey reflects the courage needed to navigate life’s uncertainties and question societal norms. Similarly, The Wizard of Oz enchants young readers with its colorful world, while for older audiences, Dorothy’s quest becomes a metaphor for self-discovery and finding strength within.
The Harry Potter series is another example of literature that grows with its audience. While kids revel in the magical escapades, adults find deeper meaning in its themes of sacrifice, prejudice, and moral complexity. By revisiting these stories, adults not only rediscover the wonder of childhood but also uncover meaning and intricacies.

Though woven from different threads, the psychological journey that both women take and the toll of war on them shows how they are ultimately just human beings and that war doesn’t have any favourites.
Katniss belongs to an impoverished section in district 12 where they go days barely being able to put together a meal. She is plagued by the death of her father, riddled with self doubt and is divorced from the softer side of her as she had to grow up fast and survive harsh realities alone.
A Heroine for Every Chapter
Our Artful calendar 2025 focuses on literary heroines like Jo March from Little Women, who continues to inspire generations with her defiance of societal expectations.
Katniss Everdeen, from The Hunger Games, symbolises survival and rebellion in the face of oppression. On the darker side, we have complex figures like Lady Macbeth, who grapples with ambition and guilt, and Bellatrix Lestrange, a character embodying chaos and loyalty in equal measure.
Children’s literature is not confined to childhood. It is a reservoir of inspiration that grows with us, offering solace, adventure, and wisdom at every age. Through our calendar, we invite you to rediscover these heroines and the enduring power of the stories they represent.
