Exploding Myths of Female Desire for the Twenty-First Century: The Bacchantes of Euripides, Proust, and Minard

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Notes

¹ Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece was published in stages between 1913 and 1927. It charts the narrator-protagonist’s apprenticeship to writing a novel, the novel that we are reading; but along the way, it undertakes a minute, painstaking, often satirical, always revealing analysis of the workings of desire in all of its forms, be that social, aesthetic, or sexual, the last of which includes heterosexual, homosexual, and lesbian desire. The title of the second volume is A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin as Within a Budding Grove]. There have been several translations of Proust’s novel into English. The translations included here are from the Moncreiff edition which was subsequently revised and updated by Terence Kilmartin, as detailed in the works-cited list.

² The term “frenzied women” is the accepted translation of the Greek word for the maenads or bacchantes. These latter terms are often used interchangeably, but a common distinction is that the term “maenads” is used in Greek mythology and “bacchantes” in Roman mythology.

³ Foucault’s panopticon has its origins in the surveillance towers created to manage the spread of the plague and subsequently the physical structure from which guards can watch, from all angles, every inmate in the prison. The inmates are aware of the surveillance without knowing exactly when they, over others, are being watched. They therefore internalize the awareness and anxiety of being watched even when they are not the object of the gaze. See Foucault 1995.

⁴ Girard elaborates a theory of triangular desire in which the certainty of possession decreases the value of the loved one in the lover’s eyes, whereas the uncertainty of possession exponentially increases their appeal. Often it is the presence of a third party – a rival in love – that increases the lover’s anxiety about the possibility of possessing the loved one and thus increases their value in his eyes (Girard).

⁵ “O when will I be dancing,/leaping barefoot through the night,/flinging back my head in ecstasy,/in the clear, cold, dew-fresh air—/like a playful fawn/celebrating its green joy/across the meadows—/joy that it’s escaped the fearful hunt—/as she runs beyond the hunters,/leaping past their woven nets—/they call out to their hounds/to chase her with still more speed,/but she strains every limb,/racing like a wind storm,/rejoicing by the river plain,/in places where no hunters lurk,/in the green living world/beneath the shady branches,/the foliage of the trees” (Euripides 73–4).

⁶ “She seized his left arm, below the elbow,/pushed her foot against the poor man’s ribs,/then tore his shoulder out. The strength she had—/it was not her own. The god put power/into those hands of hers. Meanwhile Ino,/her sister, went at the other side,/ripping off chunks of Pentheus’ flesh,/while Autonoe and all the Bacchae,/the whole crowd of them, attacked as well,/all of the women howling out together./As long as Pentheus was still alive,/he kept on screaming. The women cried in triumph—/one brandished an arm, another held a foot—/complete with hunting boot – the women’s nails/tore his ribs apart. Their hands grew bloody,/tossing bits of flesh back and forth, for fun./His body parts lie scattered everywhere—/some under rough rocks, some in the forest,/deep in the trees” (Euripides 95).

⁷ ECWC is the name of the bunker/cellar.