 Women and women's issues dominate Mary Shelley's drama — no male characters appear, with the brief exception of Ascalaphus. However, as Romanticist Marjean Purinton argues, there is a strong masculine presence in the play even without male characters, suggesting "the ubiquitous presence of patriarchal power in the domestic sphere". Although the myth is fundamentally about rape and male tyranny, Shelley transforms it into a story about female solidarity and community — these women are storytellers and mythmakers who determine their own fate. Ceres's love — a mother's love — challenges the power of the gods. Shelley tells the story almost entirely from Ceres's point of view; "her play elegiacally praises female creativity and fecundity as ‘ Leaf, and blade, and bud, and blossom. ’" Shelley writes active, rather than passive, roles for Proserpine and Ceres. For example, it is Ceres's anger, not her grief, that brings "winter's blight". However, Proserpine's abduction is prefigured in the story of Arethusa and, as literary scholar Julie Carlson points out, the women can only join together after Proserpine has been abducted.
