"How Sweet the Kill": Orgiastic Female Violence in Contemporary Re-visions of Euripides' The Bacchae

"How Sweet the Kill": Orgiastic Female Violence in Contemporary Re-visions of Euripides' The Bacchae ALLISON HERSH - The air is bright with adrenaline, we are permitted anything and this is freedom, in my body also, I'm reeling, red spreads everywhere ... Now there are sounds, gasps, a low noise like growling, yells, and the red bodies tumble forward and I can no longer see, he's obscured by anns, fists, feet. A high scream comes from somewhere, like a horse in terror .. .I - The story of women who kill is the story of women.2 In her essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Adrienne Rich defines "re-vision" as "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.'" It is precisely the significance of the female author "entering an old text from a new critical direction" which seems central to the feminist re-visionary project, as the need to come to terms with "old texts" is a vital part of creating new ones. Indeed, confronting the extent to which textuality has historically been determined by patriarchal conventions clears a space for the representation of the diversity of female experience, enabling women to invoke the classical injunction to "know thyself," not through the distorting lens of male fantasies but rather through the lived experiences and the generative imagination of women authors. As Rich explains, "We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.'" And perhaps nowhere is this attempt to "break [tradition's] hold" through the power of re-vision more salient, more intriguing or more chilling than in contemporary feminist re-visions of Euripides ' The Baeellae. Contemporary British playwrights Maureen Duffy and Caryl Churchill have each re-conceived and re-presented Euripides' drama within a revised historical comext in their respective plays, Rites and A Mouthful ofBirds. Both of Modem Drama, 35 ([992) 409 4IO ALLISON HERSH their re-visions radically critique Euripides' portrayal of orgiastic female violence and instead present two very different. and yet complementary. models of female violence which advocate the possibility of female transcendence and which give verbal and physical representation to women. As Katharine Worth has observed: "From Rites in I969 to A Mouthful of Birds in I986. women playwrights have displayed remarkable theatrical inventiveness in reshaping the images of women handed on to them by their male predecessors.'" But Duffy and Churchill have not merely re-fashioned classical images of women in their re-visions - they have elucidated a complex politics of female violence which far exceeds the formal confines of The Bacchae. In so doing. both Duffy's play Rites and Churchill's play A Mouthful ofBirds. co-authored with David Lan. vehemently reject classical dramatic convention as well as the systems of representation implicit within The Bacchae. Accordingly. neither Duffy nor Churchill seeks to identify with Euripides but rather to contest his representational authority by re-casting the elements of The Bacchae within the seemingly incongruous frame of female experience, and by situating elements of female experience within the seemingly incongruous frame of The Bacchae. This is not to imply. however. that Duffy and Churchill advocate identical feminist politics but. quite conversely. to suggest that each playwright's revisionary project effectively incorporates strategies of re-vision in order to inscribe The Bacchae within a feminist frame and to infuse the Bacchic text with a feminist politics. By drawing upon the conventions. imagery and iconography of Euripides' text. each playwright presents a revised model of female violence as a means of critiquing patriarchal structures. These structures are. by their very nature. associated with violence through what Teresa De Lauretis aptly refers to as "the violence of rhetoric.'" In fact. as De Lauretis explains, "the representation of violence is inseparable from the notion of gender, even when the latter is explicitly 'deconstructed' or, more exactly. indicted as ·ideology...·, Thus representation. violence and gender are all revealed to be related and. to some degree. conftated issues within textuality which finds its origins in patriarchal systems of discourse. And...