Pentheus torn apart by the Bacchae
Friday
Like most of America, I have many thoughts about yesterday’s Senate Judiciary hearing, but one thing that stood out was male histrionics. The hearing proved that, when white men find their privilege challenged, they get hysterical. We saw this not only in Judge Kavanaugh but in various of his supporters, most notably Sen. Lindsey Graham.
One meme currently making the rounds juxtaposes shots of Hillary Clinton and Kavanaugh with the captions,
–Cool as a cucumber for 11 straight hours of questions;
–Shouting and crying in the first 20 minutes of questions;
–And they say women are too emotional to handle important political jobs
Alexander Schwartz of The New Yorker summed it up very well:
What we are seeing is a model of American conservative masculinity that has become popular in the past few years, one that is directly tied to the loutish, aggressive frat-boy persona that Kavanaugh is purportedly seeking to dissociate himself from. Gone are the days of a terse John Wayne-style stoicism. Now we have Trump, ranting and raving at his rallies; we have Alex Jones, whose habit of screaming and floridly weeping as he spouts his conspiracy theories is a key part of his appeal to his audience. When Kavanaugh is not crying or shouting, he uses a distinctly adolescent tone that might best be descried as “talking back.” He does not respond to senators. He negs them. His response, when he is asked about his drinking, is to flip the question and ask the senators how they like their alcohol; his refusal to say whether or not he would coöperate with an F.B.I. investigation brings to mind a teen-ager stonewalling his parents.
Schwartz says the phenomenon is recent, but Kavanaugh’s bullying temper tantrum in yesterday’s hearing reminded me a lot of Pentheus’s temper tantrums in Euripides’s The Bacchae, written 2500 years ago.
Pentheus returns to Thebes to discover that the women have fallen under the spell of Dionysus and are out dancing in the mountains. Seeing them slip the bonds of patriarchal control sends Pentheus into a fury, even while he contends he is the rational one. If he had his way, women would be back inside the home bending over their looms.
Of course, if Kavanaugh had his way, women would surrender their reproductive choices to his law and they wouldn’t question him forcefully in judiciary hearings.
Teiresias, the city’s seer, at one point admonishes Pentheus about his desire for control:
Do not mistake the rule of force
for true power Men are not shaped by force.
Nor should you boast of wisdom, when everyone but you
can see how sick your thoughts are.
Defending his decision (and that of Pentheus’s grandfather) to dance with the women, Teiresias tells Pentheus,
Old as we are, I promise you we’ll dance.
And nothing you can ever say will make me
turn against the Gods. For you are sick,
possessed by madness so perverse, no drug can cure,
no madness can undo.
Bacchae is an interesting play to read these days given all we’re learning about (or being reminded of) 1980s and 1990s alcohol consumption. Dionysus is, of course, the god of wine, and there are positive descriptions of wine consumption in the play. Again, Teiresias:
Next came the son of the virgin, Dionysus,
bringing the counterpart to bread, wine
and the blessings of life’s flowing juices.
His blood, the blood of the grape,
lightens the burden of our mortal misery.
When, after their daily toils, men drink their fill,
sleep comes to them, bringing release from all their troubles.
There is no other cure for sorrow.
The play makes an important distinction, however. Character, Teiresias says, enters into alcohol consumption: for the virtuous, wine is a blessing, for the vicious, a curse. Himself repressed and tormented, Pentheus believes that the women are having debauched orgies in the forest:
In the middle of each female group
of revels, I hear,
stands a jar of wine, brimming! And that taking turns,
they steal away, one here, one there, to shady nooks,
where they satisfy the lechery of men,
pretending to be priestesses,
performing their religious duties. Ha!
That performance reeks more of Aphrodite than of Bacchus.
And further on:
I’ll put a stop to this orgiastic filth!
Teiresias corrects him:
It is not for Dionysus to force women to be modest.
As in all things, moderation depends on our nature.
Remember this! No amount of Bacchic revels
can corrupt an honest woman.
The 1980s partying that we’re hearing about was not automatically a bad thing, just as college partying today is not. The problem was (and is) lack of moderation, especially when excess is joined with toxic masculinity. There’s nothing toxic about the Dionysisan rituals, however, as we see in the chant of the Bacchae:
Your ground flows with milk,
flows with wine, flows with nectar from the bees.
Like smoke from a Syrian incense,
the fragrant God arises with his torch of pine.
He runs, he dances in a whirl of flame,
he rouses the faithful
crazing their limbs with his roar,
while he races the wind,
his soft hair streaming behind.
And his call resounds like thunder:
“Go, my Bacchae, go!”
And further on:
It is then, that a girl like me
knows happiness. When she is free,
like a filly playfully prancing
around its mother,
in fields without fences.
Unfortunately, female pleasure is irrelevant to Kavanaugh and Pentheus, both insecure men who bolster their self esteem by asserting themselves over women. It becomes clear, as the play proceeds, that Pentheus’s public presentation as a respectable king is a mask for lascivious desires that he has pushed under. Dionysus, because he represents our natural side, understands this about him, which is how he is able to entice him into becoming a peeping Tom.
The transformation appears to come out of the blue, but in Pentheus’s very belligerence we see that the longing was there all along:
Dionysus: How would you like to see them
all cooped up together in the hills,
having their orgies?
Pentheus: Would I? I’d pay a fortune in gold for that.
Dionysus: Why, what gives you such a passionate desire?
Pentheus: Mind you, I would be very sorry
to see them drunk….
Dionysus: But for all your sorrow
you will be delighted to see them, will you not?
Pentheus: Oh, yes, very. I could crouch beneath the pines silently.
We see lascivious fascination with sexuality in Kavanaugh’s adult past as well. While working with special prosecutor Ken Starr, he wanted to ask President Bill Clinton very explicit questions:
He was “strongly opposed to giving the president any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship”, he wrote, unless Clinton “resigns” or “confesses perjury”.
He then suggested a list of questions. One was: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
Another: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated in her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
Kavanaugh also suggested asking Clinton “if Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?” and “If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she be lying?”
Kavanaugh urged that it was the function of the independent counsel to “make [Clinton’s] pattern of revolting behavior clear.”
When I have taught the play, my students often compare Pentheus to those rigid “family values” politicians who, we discover, have mistresses or are closeted gay men. My Tennessee representative Scott Desjarlais, one such Bible thumper, actually paid for his mistress’ abortion. The Catholic judge who rails against abortion has been credibly accused of a rape attempt and, unlike the woman, refuses to endorse an FBI investigation into the matter.
At the end of the play, the Bacchae catch Pentheus peeping at them and tear him limb from limb. If the GOP chooses to ignore Kavanaugh’s women accusers and rams him onto the Supreme Court, a pink wave may proceed with a similar dismembering in the midterm elections.
