As the Moon Climbs

Gender roles in Euripides’ Bacchae are manipulated, even reversed, over the course of the play. The self-proclaimed champion of good behavior is Pentheus, who opposes the worship of Bacchus not only on the grounds that he is not truly a god, but also that the allegedly false god incites his female followers to act outside the acceptable boundaries established for their gender. He is both right and wrong; the women, having left their homes and engaged in acts of violence, are violating standards that would have the women stay inside and avoid bloodshed. However, he accuses them of promiscuity and carnal sins that they do not appear to be enacting, and thus that particular charge falls flat, perhaps even reflecting his own disturbed mind more than that of the typical worshiper.

This shift in behavior is entirely controlled by Dionysus, who whips his followers into a frenzy in which they are capable not only of wild dancing but also of extreme carnage, tearing apart animals with their bare hands and eating the raw flesh. Their hair is unbound, their clothing primitive, and they are even described as nursing wild animals with their own breast milk. When they believe they are being attacked by the local men, they take their wands and use them like weapons, becoming stronger soldiers than the men of the village that they fall upon. When Pentheus is cornered in the tree, they literally tear it from the ground to get at him, exhibiting inhuman–and unwomanly–strength. Finally, the murder of Pentheus by his own mother is as far from the traditional role of a woman as can be imagined. It is difficult to picture a woman of the time doing such a thing without extreme provocation, and Euripides almost certainly presents these images for their shock value while being careful to ascribe them to spiritual fervor rather than any normal, natural emotions or behaviors. Indeed, the efficacy of their bare hands and wands in fighting the men can only be described as supernatural, and in no way characteristic of typical female potency.

On the other hand, Pentheus himself is coaxed into reversing his own gender in order to infiltrate the ranks of the maenads. Having been the stalwart male figure concerned with the piety of his city and the chastity of its women, arresting offenders and lording it over Dionysus in his guise as the stranger, Pentheus eventually becomes submissive and eager to follow the stranger’s instructions. This is manifested physically by his cross-dressing as a worshipper of Dionysus, with feminine robes and head coverings. There is even a humorous moment in which he worries that the clothes are not properly adjusted and Dionysus helps him. His ultimate fate, of course, is to have his transgressions punished by being torn to pieces by women, who are themselves asserting their strength and superiority over him, a man and ruler of the city. His eulogy as delivered by his grandfather Cadmus focuses, not on his civic deeds as a man’s should, but on his private household deeds as a woman’s might. In the end, the god’s presence retreats and Agave is returned to her normal self, left to come to terms, as a mere woman, with the manly murder she perpetrated while in the mad frenzy inspired by the god.

Having used the magic of the internet to do what we all do so well–namely, put all those pesky opinions of mine out there for all three of my readers to see–I feel like my ruminations on Hippolytus are somehow incomplete. There are people who disagree with me and I want to say things to them so they can say more things back to me, and so here we are, and by “we” I mean me, of course.

There’s no time machine to take sociologists or anthropologists back to before the common era with clipboards and questionnaires, so all we know about the ancient Greeks comes from the materials that have survived to today, either directly from the proverbial horses’ mouths or from other people who were around at the time. I say this as a preface because I am going to follow it up with a bunch of opinions that, grounded in evidence or not, are pretty much impossible to prove one way or the other. Add to that the fact that I am in no way a scholar of Greek history and society, and you’ve basically got a girl with a blog who has something to say and is probably going to get some of it wrong. All I know, I learned in school from a couple of cool guys who may also be wrong, but are at least better educated. All right, enough with the caveats.

So, one way or another, it seems like the gods were a part of Greek life: these people had temples and festivals and statues in their houses and we have all these plays that talk about the gods a whole bunch. They prayed to different gods for different reasons, and sometimes prayed to all of them to cover their bases, but they almost always prayed to Zeus in addition to whoever else warranted a special shout-out. But what could the gods do? Sometimes they could intercede on someone’s behalf, sometimes they couldn’t because another god was doing his thing, and sometimes it seems like they kind of threw up their hands and said, “Nothing we can do, it’s fated.” This is weird when you think about it, because they’re the gods, right? Why should they be bound by fate? Even Zeus apparently can’t get around things that are meant to be, and he’s the head honcho by most standards. But there he is, shrugging his godly shoulders and munching on ambrosia while the mortals get screwed.

Given that the Greeks definitely seemed to believe in destiny, it’s weird to think that they could also believe in free will. In the beginning of Hippolytus, Aphrodite herself shows up and says, “This is how things are going to go down,” and sure enough they do, so it’s tempting to shrug and eat some grapes and blame the gods or fate for the whole shebang. But that’s not what the characters do. They don’t lie around singing the Greek equivalent of “que sera, sera,” perhaps because they don’t get to hear Aphrodite’s helpful speech and so they’re blissfully unaware of the impending mayhem. But then again, what does it matter?

Therein lies the crux of the free will vesus destiny battle, or lack thereof: if you can’t know your fate, then in a sense, it doesn’t matter. You make choices, and those choices will lead you to your fate, but they were still your choices. It’s like being in a maze with a lot of twists and turns and dead ends, and you keep walking forward, trying to get out, picking a direction when you hit a crossroads and hoping for the best, but knowing all the time that the form of the maze has already been set and will lead to the same place no matter how you get there. The gods are above the maze, looking down, able to see all the paths and pitfalls, and sometimes they can move a wall or nudge a person in a particular direction, but they can’t pull the person out of the maze and put them in another one. And sometimes other gods are slipping in more traps, because they can do that too, and sometimes the gods are even right there in the maze at specific spots because they have their own fated role to play.

The actions of the play Hippolytus are manipulated by the interference of the gods, namely Aphrodite. She is the one who is angered by Hippolytus’ chastity, and so she makes Phaedra fall in love with him, knowing that he will reject her and subsequently bring about his own downfall. Because of this, it can be argued that human choice is futile, because the desires of the gods win out in the end. However, so many of the actions in this play are conceived and carried out by humans that their agency is undeniable, if predictable.

Phaedra is the somewhat unwitting pawn in this godly game of checkers; in the world of the play, she does not fall in love with Hippolytus of her own free will but is forced to do so by Aphrodite. However, she does not lose her ability to make choices, despite her enforced predicament. Initially, she chooses to starve herself to death in order to escape the bonds of passion with her reputation intact. Once her secret is revealed and she is reviled by Hippolytus, she then chooses to implicate him in her suicide in order to, once again, preserve her good name. Her suicide is also a choice that she makes. None of this adds up to futility; despite her motivation being at least partially imposed by a god, each action she takes is deliberate and yields the intended results.

The nurse is also resposible for making her own choices: first, to beg Phaedra to reveal her secret love, then to convince Phaedra to let her tell Hippolytus. Although Aphrodite may have relied on the nurse’s interference and have foreseen how she would act, this does not indicate any futility in the choices. To call the actions futile would imply that they would have no affect on the outcome of the play, when they were arguably the catalyst for the subsequent unraveling of events.

Theseus is the final actor, sealing his son’s fate by asking Poseidon to kill him. While his curse is rashly spoken, it is not externally imposed on him by any of the gods; Aphrodite expected and wanted it, but did not force him to do it. If anyone in the play lacks agency, it is arguably Hippolytus, whose death is brought about by Phaedra through no fault of his own, and who remains honest and faultless to the end. However, to say that human choice is futile throughout the play solely because of his tragic end is to discount the human actions that led to his demise.

The principle of helping friends and hurting enemies is central to Euripides’ Medea; her every action is intended to hurt those who she considers to be her enemies: Jason, Creon and Glauce. Conversely, she is enraged and the chorus is troubled by the notion that Jason has engaged in activities which are harmful to his near and dear ones, namely abandoning his wife and children for another woman. This perversion of the accepted ethical standard creates a dilemma for the audience: are we meant to sympathize with Medea and approve of her vengeful actions, or are we meant to be repulsed by the murders that she coldly plans and executes?

Several factors seem to argue for a sympathetic reading of the character, for the most part. First, a number of the other characters in the play–such as the nurse, Aegeus and the chorus–consider her to be a victim of circumstance and feel sorry for her. She herself repeatedly makes the compelling argument that she has given up everything for Jason–her home, her family, and to a certain extent her identity–only to have him repay her by tossing her aside like a used tissue. Jason himself, when he arrives to justify his actions, comes across as vain, haughty and callous toward his soon to be ex-wife and children. Creon also appears to be unduly harsh by banishing her and her children from his kingdom, although we later learn that his concerns were well founded, and Glauce is described as hiding her face and turning away from the children when they arrive to give her the gift that is supposed to win her good will. By making her enemies unlikeable, Medea is in turn rendered more pitiful. In short, Medea has helped her near and dear ones, but Jason has harmed them, and thus he becomes Medea’s enemy along with the king and princess.

However, one thing arguably blemishes the clear line between treatment of friends and enemies: Medea’s murder of her children. Within the context of the play, she states that she is killing them to harm Jason, which is consistent with the need to hurt one’s enemies. He is undoubtedly harmed by the action, as he is left alone without even his own flesh and blood to comfort him after the loss of his new bride and all the power and money that would have come with the marriage. Nonetheless, Medea is murdering innocent near and dear ones who have done nothing to deserve their fate, but merely had the bad luck to be related to an unscrupulous man and an intractable woman. Moreover, she is also harming herself, subordinating her own small measure of happiness to exacerbate Jason’s misery. Finally, the chorus does not approve of her actions, despite their prior support for her other revenge schemes.

Medea herself is a complex character; she is by turns a frantic, jilted lover, a caring mother, a pitiful suppliant and a cold, calculating killer. Which is the real Medea? Can they be reconciled into a cohesive person, and is that person sympathetic or not? If we accept that she has successfully managed to hurt her enemies, what does her victory say about the very notion of reciprocity? At what point does the cost of hurting your enemies become too high to be ethical? Would her actions be considered a form of justice, or merely retribution? Finally, given that she literally gets away with murder and escapes, leaving Jason to deal with the aftermath, can she really be considered a tragic hero?

Once again this year, I will be participating in Script Frenzy, put together by the people who are also responsible for NaNoWriMo. Much like its spiritual and literal predecessor, Script Frenzy involves writing a whole lot of words in a mere month, namely 100 pages of a screenplay, stage play, comic book script, or something similar. So what I am saying is, after my month-long absence, I may once again disappear until it’s time to wind ribbons around a maypole.

I rarely work in a complete vacuum, but this time even less so, as I’m writing the script with a partner. Our brains work in a similar enough way to facilitate collaboration but a different enough way to provide for a stimulating exchange of ideas. It is a Good Thing. I’m not sure how people usually work out the logistics of this kind of thing, but we’ve opted to split the scenes so that neither of us has to wait around for the other to finish up a section in order to move forward. Perhaps if we had more than a month, we’d be able to go back and forth in a more linear way, but them’s the breaks.

We shall see what unfolds.