As we saw in Chapter 1, the twentieth century has frequently been characterised as an infernal one, both by writers who lived through its worst horrors and – since it is by no means clear that we have emerged from it – those who are currently reflecting on it retrospectively. Against that background, I have tried to show that descent narratives can function either as the means of constructing an escape route from, or alternatively discovering a radical shift of perspective on, this historically infernal condition. However, in the traditional katabatic narrative, such descent journeys are not equally available to all. Female characters, by definition, are usually excluded from descent because they are already in the underworld; indeed, the underworld is symbolically what they are. Narratives of the Orpheus myth, for example, usually dispatch Eurydice to the underworld in the opening lines or paragraphs, if she is not discovered there already from the outset; in a sense, she has always already died. Or, as Cavarero wryly observes, ‘Orpheus inaugurates the stubborn tradition [of love poetry], which wants the loved woman to be a dead woman’ (Relating Narratives, p. 94). While certain non-Western myths (such as the descent of Inanna to wrest power from the underworld goddess Erishkigal) ascribe the heroic role to a female character, it is only quite recently that mythic descent heroines have begun to gain currency in Western literature and culture.