Perspectives on Violence in Euripides’ Bacchae

Perris, Simon

doi:10.1163/156852511x505024

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…272 Weaver 2009. 273 As Seaford (2001) and Perris (2011) identify, 'the change (to violence) occurs because they are attacked' (Seaford, 2001: 205). The violence and resulting death exist as a retaliation to male invasion, and this further complicates the gender antagonism in this play.…”

Section: Euripides' Bacchaementioning

confidence: 99%

The Violence of These Women Blazes at Our Door: A New Approach to the Violent Rituals of Ancient Greek Women

Louverdis¹

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The religious experience of women in ancient Greece is a difficult reality to uncover. There is very little in the way of epigraphical and historiographical evidence that preserves the voice of women themselves and our evidence is heavily defined by the male authors of the time. This issue of inadequate evidence is further problematised when one is to consider the rare and extreme cases of violence performed by women within a ritual context. The traditional methodological approaches to these violent cases have often understood women via these ideologically androcentric accounts which tend to reduce the actions of women to aberrant and scandalously extreme outliers, unwelcome in their polis communities. This thesis aims to add to the existing corpus of methodological approaches by proposing a new lens for the interpretation of women’s violent ritual practices, one that attempts to re-legitimise the violent rituals of women as necessary components of their poleis and authentic aspects of women’s ritual reality. This lens understands that ritual violence might be best understood as a ‘rupture’ to the social fabric that encircles the institution of religious practice. Building on the valuable framework of the traditional ‘functionalist’ approach to women in religion, the theoretical schema proposed in this thesis synthesises two pre-existing methodologies. Barbara Goff’s lens of an ideological theory of agency proposed in her 2004 publication Citizen Bacchae, combined with Pierre Brulé’s ‘safety-valve theory’ of religion in his 2003 work Women of Ancient Greece, come together to accept that women could exercise agency within their ritual spaces in a way that served to reconcile their own subjugated position in society. When the agency exceeds the expectations of the androcratic polis (who administer the tangible aspects of ritual practice), however, the evidence of male unease directed toward these violent cases indicates that something more than simple female agential activity is taking place. Women’s violence in ritual, therefore, might be considered an agentially forced widening of the safety-valve boundaries, here defined as a ‘rupture’. By interpreting women’s ritual violence by way of a ‘rupture’ to the safety-valve, we stand to re-legitimise the rare and extraordinary violent rituals of women.

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Section: Euripides' Bacchaementioning

confidence: 99%

The Violence of These Women Blazes at Our Door: A New Approach to the Violent Rituals of Ancient Greek Women

Louverdis¹

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Ashes to Ashes: Is expression of female violence just too much? Putin’s Ashes by Pussy Riot Performance and short film (2022), www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni_CRPAw_5Q; 3.04 minutes

Lapid-Mashall

2023

Performance Research

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The Medium and the Messenger in Seneca’sPhaedra,Thyestes, andTrojan Women

Catenaccio

2022

Philologus

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The language of Seneca’s messenger speeches concentrates preceding patterns of imagery into grotesquely violent action. In three tragedies – Phaedra, Thyestes, and Trojan Women – the report of an anonymous messenger dominates an entire act. All three scenes describe gruesome deaths: the impalement of Hippolytus on a tree trunk in Phaedra, Atreus’ butchering of his nephews in Thyestes, and the slaughter of Astyanax and Polyxena in Trojan Women. In portraying violence, these messenger speeches repurpose language established in earlier scenes to realize and deform a dominant theme of each play: distorted sexuality, appetite, and moral dissolution.

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Perspectives on Violence in Euripides’ Bacchae

Cited by 4 publications

References 21 publications

The Violence of These Women Blazes at Our Door: A New Approach to the Violent Rituals of Ancient Greek Women

The Violence of These Women Blazes at Our Door: A New Approach to the Violent Rituals of Ancient Greek Women

Ashes to Ashes: Is expression of female violence just too much? Putin’s Ashes by Pussy Riot Performance and short film (2022), www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni_CRPAw_5Q; 3.04 minutes

The Medium and the Messenger in Seneca’sPhaedra,Thyestes, andTrojan Women

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