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

Introduction: Mythology in/as stealth mode

Hercules in dinner jackets and bacchantes on bicycles: improbable figures such as these populate the pages of Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] and offer striking examples of Proust’s mastery of the seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of ancient and modern to reveal unexpected truths (Topping). As famously noted by George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy, classical mythology has long served as a convenient shorthand for the educated Western reader. Indeed, for Steiner, this reader’s cultural consciousness has been fed on the myths of ancient Greece and Rome to such an extent that any disruption to the expected narrative may be deployed to arrest their attention and prompt reflection on what a deliberate rewriting, however slight, might signal. However, familiarity with classical mythology has diminished since Steiner’s text was first published, with classical mythology now unlikely to feature as prominently within the cultural capital of a twenty-first-century Western reader, as was the case for the reader of a century or more ago. This arguably limits the potential for subversive rewritings of the original myths; and yet, a reverse dynamic may come into play in which it is now the unfamiliar classical reference itself that is the signal for a perplexing otherness which calls out to be deciphered. The detective work this unsettling strangeness prompts enables new meanings and new truths for the twenty-first century to emerge by stealth and, potentially, to be harnessed to challenge our preconceptions, just as they did in the work of Marcel Proust. Building on this premise, the present discussion proposes that the changing resonances ascribed to the myth of the bacchantes in a selection of literary rewritings may provide a subtle means of questioning, even rewriting, the heteronormative rules or myths associated with female, and particularly same-sex, desire.

Proust’s Albertine: A fleeting bacchante

Proust’s “bacchantes on bicycles” are the “jeunes filles en fleurs” [young girls in flower] of the title of the second volume of his celebrated, seven-volume masterpiece which recounts the journey to authorship of the young narrator-protagonist who, at the end of the novel, realizes he must write a novel, the novel we have just read. His digressive path toward this realization is an apprenticeship, winding through the myriad shifting social constellations of his time, the many permutations of hetero- and homosexual desire, and the workings of the imagination, memory, and art, to name just some of the novel’s primary themes.

Central among the young girls who appear in the title of the second volume is Albertine who gradually emerges from the amorphous band of girls the narrator-protagonist first encounters while holidaying in the seaside town of Balbec to become the love interest whom he seeks desperately to contain.¹ Ultimately, she becomes La Prisonnière [The Captive] he tries frustratingly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to hold captive in the fifth volume, and the trauma of her flight is painfully and meticulously detailed in the sixth volume, Albertine disparue [Albertine Disappeared]. Although it is only in the early volume of the novel, where she is barely distinguished from the rest of the band of unruly young girls, that she is explicitly described as a bacchante, the story of these mythical “frenzied women” is, I would argue, present throughout the Recherche as an echo chamber for the narrator’s interaction with Albertine.²

The early explicit association is inspired by the young girls’ apparent wildness, their seeming freedom from social constraints, their insolence in the face of authority, their disdain for those outside their band of friends, and ultimately their apparent resistance to capture and knowledge. They embody, for the young narrator, the heady combination of an object of desire that is at once tantalizing and terrifying. His certainty as to their lack of virtue leads him to associate them initially with a heterosexual promiscuity. In other words, the young narrator has recourse to a familiar reference point, or even fantasy, that he can understand, articulate, and deploy, in order to catalog them:

une fille aux yeux brillants, rieurs, aux grosses joues mates, sous un « polo » noir, enfoncé sur sa tête, qui poussait une bicyclette avec un dandinement de hanches si dégingandé, en employant des termes d’argot si voyous et criés si fort, quand je passai auprès d’elle (parmi lesquels je distinguai cependant la phrase fâcheuse de « vivre sa vie ») qu’abandonnant l’hypothèse que la pèlerine de sa camarade m’avait fait échafauder, je conclus plutôt que toutes ces filles appartenaient à la population qui fréquente les vélodromes, et devaient être les très jeunes maîtresses de coureurs cyclistes. En tout cas, dans aucune de mes suppositions, ne figurait celle qu’elles eussent pu être vertueuses. (Proust, II 151, my italics)

[a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks, a black polo-cap crammed on her head, who was pushing a bicycle with such an uninhibited swing of the hips, and using slang terms so typical of the gutter and shouted so loud when I passed her (although among her expressions I caught the tiresome phrase “living one’s own life”) that, abandoning this hypothesis which her friend’s hooded cape had prompted me to formulate, I concluded instead that all these girls belonged to the population which frequents the racing-tracks, and must be the very juvenile mistresses of professional cyclists. In any event, none of my suppositions embraced the possibility of their being virtuous. (my italics; Proust, Moncrieff and Kilmartin, II 854)]

Only as he begins to focus on the interaction between the girls – and specifically on witnessing their confident autonomy and self-containment as a group – does greater uncertainty as to what they are and what they represent begin to emerge; this combines with anxiety as to the potential (im)possibility of their containment or possession.

In a striking dismantling of the heteronormative primacy of the male gaze, the narrator fears not that they will judge him severely should they see him, but that he will not be seen by them at all; in particular, he fears that he will not even be noticed by the girl who will turn out to be Albertine. Should this fear be unfounded and should the, as yet unnamed, girl direct her gaze toward him, the focus of the concern would be the impenetrability of the perspective from which she would view him. He intuits that her perspective on the world is one of fundamental existential difference from his own, which would, as such, place him in a position of unknowing in terms of how his own identity is perceived. Reflecting the decentering of the male gaze that flows from the work of seminal psychoanalytical texts such as Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), he is forced to recognize his own identity as unstable; and in this short space, the desiring (male) self is transported unwillingly but unrelentingly into a position of, at best, otherness and, at worst, irrelevance. In a stark foreshadowing of his frustrated attempts at surveillance of Albertine through incarceration later in the novel, this observer in the Foucauldian panopticon becomes the observed who is aware of the gaze and internalizes the uncertainty as to the precise form of the judgment it implies.³

Un instant, tandis que je passais à côté de la brune aux grosses joues qui poussait une bicyclette, je croisai ses regards obliques et rieurs, dirigés du fond de ce monde inhumain qui enfermait la vie de cette petite tribu, inaccessible inconnu où l’idée de ce que j’étais ne pouvait certainement ni parvenir ni trouver place. Tout occupée à ce que disaient ses camarades, cette jeune fille coiffée d’un polo qui descendait très bas sur son front, m’avait-elle vu au moment où le rayon noir émané de ses yeux m’avait rencontré? Si elle m’avait vu, qu’avais-je pu lui représenter? Du sein de quel univers me distinguait-elle? Il m’eût été aussi difficile de le dire que lorsque certaines particularités nous apparaissent grâce au téléscope, dans un astre voisin, il est malaisé de conclure d’elles que des humains y habitent, qu’ils nous voient, et quelles idées cette vue a pu éveiller en eux. (II 151–2)

[For an instant, as I passed the dark one with the plump cheeks who was wheeling a bicycle, I caught her smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world wherein the idea of what I was could certainly never penetrate or find a place. Wholly occupied with what her companions were saying, had she seen me – this young girl in the polo-cap pulled down very low over her forehead – at the moment in which the dark ray emanating from her eyes had fallen on me? If she had seen me, what could I have represented to her? From the depths of what universe did she discern me? It would have been as difficult for me to say as, when certain distinguishing features in a neighbouring planet are made visible thanks to the telescope, it is to conclude therefrom that human beings inhabit it, and that they can see us, and to guess what ideas the sight of us can have aroused in their minds. (II 851)]

These fears grow exponentially, in line with theories of Proustian desire elaborated by René Girard and others,⁴ as does suspicion as to the potential lesbian underpinnings of the bond among the band of young girls, a fear which persists throughout the novel as the narrator attempts in vain to contain Albertine within a heterosexual relationship, even as his suspicions that she is having sexual encounters with women, notably Andrée and subsequently Gilberte, assume shape and solidity:

Je savais que je ne posséderais pas cette jeune cycliste si je ne possédais aussi ce qu’il y avait dans ses yeux. Et c’était par conséquent toute sa vie qui m’inspirait du désir; désir douloureux, parce que je le sentais irréalisable, mais enivrant, parce que ce qui avait été jusque-là ma vie ayant brusquement cessé d’être ma vie totale, n’étant plus qu’une petite partie de l’espace étendu devant moi que je brûlais de couvrir, et qui était fait de la vie de ces jeunes filles, m’offrait ce prolongement, cette multiplication possible de soi-même, qui est le bonheur. (II 152)

[I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes. And it was consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a sorrowful desire because I felt that it was not to be fulfilled, but exhilarating because, what had hitherto been my life having ceased of a sudden to be my whole life, being no more now than a small part of the space stretching out before me which I was burning to cover and which was composed of the lives of these girls, offered me that prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself which is happiness. (I 852)]

He cannot, however, possess her because, as an outsider to the “lesbian gaze” theorized by scholars such as Evans and Gamman (1995), he cannot possess what is in her eyes, not least because, as Evans and Gamman propose, the “lesbian gaze” is multiple, complex, and not monolithic, nor is it simply an inversion of the male, heteronormative gaze with whose objects of desire its own may overlap (33–7). These various threads intertwine in Albertine’s metaphorical embodiment as a “bacchante à bicyclette” (I 873).

The present discussion traces the image of the bacchantes through a number of literary contexts to consider how a myth that might on the surface be viewed as an exemplar of a male-controlled expression of female unruliness and ultimately a reinstatement of heteronormative relationships could instead be understood as an assertion of lesbian desire by stealth, which resonates through to the twenty-first century in rewritings that subvert heteronormative myths and rules. In addition, although beyond the scope of the present discussion, I would argue that a close reading of the original source of this particular myth, Euripides’s The Bacchae, suggests that their potency as an inspiration for Albertine’s resistance to capture has arguably been overlooked and, in fact, extends far beyond the single reference to the bacchante on a bicycle. In the few instances where this image has been considered by Proust scholars, it is analyzed in isolation and primarily in relation to Albertine’s association, not with the bacchante, but with the bicycle, a new technology which itself became a source of anxiety: “machine moderne et immodeste, monture dotée d’une beauté dangereuse et rapide” [a modern and immodest machine, a mount endowed with a swift and dangerous beauty] (Solomon 135). A closer reading of the Recherche through Euripides’s play could intimate how Albertine’s future submission to “respectability” (as a sophisticated young woman accepted by Parisian society) and her ultimate death in a horse-riding accident, symbolize a restoration of order that links back to Euripides’s play, as discussed further below. The ultra-mobile, high-speed bacchante is reduced to stasis. My focus here, however, is on how the figure of the bacchante, more generally, persists, evolves, and is ultimately subverted in relation to its sociocultural and political context. A recent, playful text, Céline Minard’s 2019 novella, Les Bacchantes, is considered here as a model not only for reconfiguring the social constraints on lesbian desire but for – literally – exploding them through a humorous, yet unsettling, rewriting of the myth of the bacchantes.

In search of a lesbian mythology

Male homosexuality has commonly looked to ancient Greece for its noble antecedents, discovering in the classical world a valorization of homosexual relationships. The male youth’s civic and intellectual apprenticeship to an older man and mentor, a “socially validated” practice known as paidrastia, includes sexual communion (Downing 173–4). Within ancient Greek (and Roman) mythology too, homosexual love is widespread and celebrated. Apollo, the god of the sun and music, is considered the patron of same-sex love: mythical narratives tell of his many male lovers, and his name was also invoked to bless homosexual unions. Equally, the list of male figures in classical mythology who enjoy same-sex encounters is extensive, including such heroic characters as Achilles, Dionysus, Heracles, Orestes, Orpheus, and Zeus, while what our contemporary society now understands as transgender identities, along with images of androgyny and hermaphroditism, are in no sense presented as marginal. Hermaphroditus himself, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, was depicted as a winged youth endowed with both male and female attributes (e.g. with female breasts and hairstyle, but with male genitals); while other figures such as Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were often depicted respectively as feminine and masculine in their behaviors, although Artemis is mocked for what are considered by ancient Greek standards to be her rough, “masculine” ways whereas Apollo is celebrated for his delicate beauty. Same-sex desire between women, in contrast, is relatively absent from Greek mythology, and it is primarily via Sappho’s poetry, and her association with the island of Lesbos, that the link between classical mythology and lesbianism has been created at all, as has a popular tourist industry. Figures from Greek mythology are part of this fabric of association (e.g. the poet identifies Aphrodite as the patron of lesbians); however, myths featuring lesbian desire are notably rare. Using the bacchantes as my focus, I seek to tease out further instances of what I have referred to above as lesbian desire by stealth, and from there to trace these through to a modern-day reinvention that offers an extraordinary challenge to conventional constructions of masculine power.

The original and most celebrated account of these figures in Greek mythology is Euripides’s The Bacchae, many recent interpretations of which have focused on the complex interplay of gender dynamics in the play, or gender-b(l)ending, to use Theodoridou’s term. For example, on an extradiegetical level, contemporaneous performances were reliant on cross-dressing, as all of the parts were played by male actors, but within the diegesis of the play too, elements such as Pentheus’s transvestism, assuming the guise of a bacchante in order to spy on their actions at close quarters, has prompted queer readings which reinforce Judith Butler’s conception of gender in Gender Trouble (2006 [1990]) as imitative and open to dismantling by acts such as cross-dressing. The god Dionysus is, of course, also associated with subversion of the social order and a destabilizing of binaries, not least masculinity and femininity. It is his effeminacy that is mocked by Pentheus, but this is the characteristic that Pentheus himself will ultimately assume, eschewing his previously hegemonic male identity as a powerful, controlling king. As is noted by Theodoridou (2008) quoting Bremmer, “Dionysos … appears as a true knight of queer: he negates the normal order of things and renders the weak tragically strong. He appears to be soft but uses the typically ‘weak’ womanliness to destroy the authoritative, masculine king and he transforms the women of Thebes into wild huntresses – and ‘hunting was a typically male activity’” (78).

Yet the absence of a focus on lesbian sexuality is striking, especially given that a web of inferences is woven into the text to point to the subtle presence of lesbian desire and/as threat. Dionysus undermines the stable heterosexual normativity of the city of Thebes, giving free rein to an unbridled female desire. His revenge for not being recognized as a god by the ruler of the city, his cousin Pentheus, is for him to drive the embodiment of family and home, the women, from their expected contexts, inducing in them a state of intoxicated frenzy in which they reject the order of the city for the wildness of nature. As Dionysus explains,

So, I’ve driven those women from their homes/in a frenzy—they now live in the mountains,/out of their minds. I’ve made them put on costumes,/outfits appropriate for my mysteries./All Theban offspring—or, at least, all women—/I’ve driven in a crazed fit from their homes./Now they sit out there among the rocks,/underneath green pine trees, no roof overhead,/Cadmus’ daughters in their company as well. (Euripides 7)

And yet, for all the frenzied rejection of home and role, the reader is struck by the empathic identification of the women with one another and with nature. The women may have been driven from their homes “in a frenzy,” but subsequent descriptions suggest only harmony in this all-female community that now exists beyond the normal societal constraints. Moreover, while satyrs may be part of the orgiastic rituals they perform in honor of Dionysus, the wild ecstatic dancing appears to be undertaken by the women alone. While the stimulus for the ritual is Dionysus, whose own gender identity is presented ambiguously (as discussed further below), the ecstasy is the product of the women’s collective activity.

As Christine Downing notes, “[m]aenadic enthusiasm was not an individual experience but a communal one; the maenads become a temporary community, the thiasos. The god is present in their midst but no man is.” (178)

In their wild ecstatic dancing,/they mixed this drum beat/with the sweet seductive tones/of flutes from Phrygia,/then gave it to mother Rhea/to beat time for the Bacchae,/when they sang in ecstasy./Nearby, orgiastic satyrs,/in ritual worship of the mother goddess,/took that drum, then brought it/into their biennial dance,/bringing joy to Dionysus. (Euripides 13)

Their existence outside social norms is the cause of the anxiety they evoke in other characters in the play, and concerns as to their promiscuity quickly emerge. While an early messenger talks of how they creep off to have heterosexual encounters, just as the young narrator of Proust’s novel will later suggest in his first impressions of the “jeunes filles,” that is nonetheless followed by an assertion that potentially aligns their desire, when read through the lens of Sappho’s poetry, with the patron of lesbian love, Aphrodite. Pentheus describes how:

it so happens I’ve been away from Thebes,/but I hear about disgusting things going on,/here in the city – women leaving home/to go to silly Bacchic rituals,/cavorting there in mountain shadows,/with dances honouring some upstart god,/this Dionysus, whoever he may be. Mixing bowls/in the middle of their meetings are filled with wine./They creep off one by one to lonely spots/to have sex with men, claiming they’re Maenads/busy worshipping. But they rank Aphrodite,/goddess of sexual desire, ahead of Bacchus. (Euripides 21, my italics)

As Downing further notes, “We know little in detail about the ecstatic rites of the maenads, though they were clearly recognized as having a sexual dimension” (178). The staff (or thyrsus) that they are depicted as carrying is a fennel stalk topped with a pinecone, and visual representations such as vase paintings depict them aiming the thyrsus at male genitals, an act which Keuls and others have interpreted as an “aggression against the paradigmatic emblem of male power” (Downing, paraphrasing Keuls, 178). Downing further speculates on the role of the “basket-hidden phalli” that are present in Dionysian processionals as follows: “Perhaps … the presence of the dismembered god served as an invitation to explore those pleasures for which not even a substitute phallos is needed. We know almost nothing of these mysteries except that they seem to have represented an initiation of women by women into women’s own sexuality, into arousal for its own sake” (178). Certainly, Euripides’s text shows the thyrsus being used to bring forth milk, honey, wine, and water from the land in response to the Bacchae’s desires. This communion with the earth which is enabled by the loosening of the physical and social constraints of home – and is embodied in the play as Rhea, the mother goddess and daughter of the earth goddess, Gaia – presents a female desire that is productive in itself, for itself, and independently even of the god Dionysus⁵; it also presents this image of a harmonious female collective in highly sensuous language. Attempts by Theban soldiers to hold the Bacchae prisoner are thwarted, for while they are initially captured, the chains that hold them are magically robbed of their power (Euripides 25–6), just as the narrator of Proust’s novel will be unable to hold Albertine prisoner, despite his attempts at physical containment.

A potentially troubling element of the play is the violent destruction wreaked by the Bacchae, first on animals and subsequently on Pentheus himself. The women are presented as bloodthirsty, tearing apart with their bare hands both animals and man, the affective “sting” of such an image acutely felt in performances of the play which present blood-spattered, near-naked bodies and, of course, challenge preconceptions of female passivity, tenderness, and care

We ran off, and so escaped being torn apart./But then those Bacchic women, all unarmed,/went at the heifers browsing on the turf,/using their bare hands. You should have seen one/ripping a fat, young, lowing calf apart—/others tearing cows in pieces with their hands./You could have seen ribs and cloven hooves/tossed everywhere—some hung up in branches/dripping blood and gore. And bulls, proud beasts till then, with angry horns, collapsed there on the ground,/dragged down by the hands of a thousand girls./Hides covering their bodies were stripped off/faster than you could wink your royal eye. (Euripides 61)

How are we to interpret these potentially unsettling images? Are anxieties about female independence and power assuaged by their transformation into unnatural acts, i.e., actions that are not those of normal women? Or are they representations of the unfettered power of women when they themselves are unfettered by behavioral norms? Or is the former the outworking of the latter? Whether the passage quoted above is a myth created by the messenger to make sense of witnessing unbridled female passion, or the report of an actual act of violence, is arguably immaterial, because both point to the construction of a performative identity to which the bacchantes do not conform, and therein lies their symbolic power. Therein also lies the potential that they represent for a reconfiguration of heteronormative categories and constraints.

As the play moves toward its culmination, the character of Pentheus comes to the fore as the key focus of Dionysus’s desire for revenge, as he is the ruler of Thebes and cousin of Dionysus who refuses to acknowledge the god’s divinity. Dionysus encourages Pentheus to disguise himself as a bacchante in order to witness their actions at close quarters. A playful coquettishness emerges as Dionysus preens over the details of Pentheus’s disguise, ensuring that each hair is in place and that he has mastered the necessary feminine gait:

[Enter Pentheus dressed in women’s clothing. He moves in a deliberately overstated female way, enjoying the role.]/ … PENTHEUS: How do I look? Am I holding myself just/like Ino or my mother, Agave?/DIONYSUS: When I look at you, I think I see them./But here, this strand of hair is out of place./It’s not under the headband where I fixed it./PENTHEUS [demonstrating his dancing steps]: I must have worked it loose inside the house,/shaking my head when I moved here and there,/practising my Bacchanalian dance./DIONYSUS: I’ll rearrange it for you. It’s only right/that I should serve you. Straighten up your head./[Dionysus begins adjusting Pentheus’s hair and clothing.] /PENTHEUS: All right then. You can be my dresser,/now that I’ve transformed myself for you./DIONYSUS: Your girdle’s loose. And these pleats in your dress/are crooked, too, down at your ankle here./PENTHEUS [examining the back of his legs]: Yes, that seems to be true for my right leg,/but on this side the dress hangs perfectly,/down the full length of my limb. (Euripides 78–9)

As their own interaction shades toward the homoerotic, so too do Pentheus’s anxieties about the bacchantes shift toward fears as to their lesbianism. In the only explicit reference to lesbian desire in the play, the dialogue continues: “PENTHEUS: That’s good. I can picture them right now,/in the woods, going at it like rutting birds,/clutching each other as they make sweet love./DIONYSUS: Perhaps. That’s why you’re going – as a guard/to stop all that. Maybe you’ll capture them,/unless you’re captured first.” (Euripides 81–2)

Simultaneously, in the play, Dionysus’s own identity is feminized. In the following extract from Pentheus’s observations on encountering him, the suggestion that his body is not unsuitable for women’s pleasure becomes curiously ambiguous, at least in translation, for it is now his womanly beauty, rather than his masculinity, that is likely to be the trigger for a woman’s pleasure. What we detect, therefore, is an implied lesbian desire, as further intimated by the reference to Aphrodite:

Well, stranger, I see this body of yours/is not unsuitable for women’s pleasure—/that’s why you’ve come to Thebes. As for your hair,/it’s long, which suggests that you’re no wrestler./It flows across your cheeks. That’s most seductive./You’ve a white skin, too. You’ve looked after it,/avoiding the sun’s rays by staying in the shade,/while with your beauty you chase Aphrodite. (Euripides 37)

Strikingly, too, this moment is reminiscent of Proust’s “en être” [being one of them] reflection in the fourth volume of the novel, Sodome et Gomorrhe [Sodom and Gomorrah] where, in a prefiguring of current debates as to the fluidity of gender identities, a male character, Morel, who is practiced in sexual encounters with both men and women, is described as acting/identifying as a woman to satisfy a lesbian’s desire.

What ultimately follows Pentheus’s attempt to spy on the bacchantes is his violent death at their hands,⁶ following which his mother (part of the band) carries his head back to Cadmus in Thebes, proudly presenting it as a lion they have slaughtered but gradually emerging into clarity and recognizing, with horror, her role in the death of her own son, and repenting for her actions. As such, order is restored at the end of The Bacchae with a deus ex machina permitting a bacchanalian ritual in which women step temporarily out of their responsibilities as wives and mothers, but which ultimately returns them to their existing roles. The established, patriarchal order is not disturbed, but only because of vigilance as to the threat that women represent. Order is maintained provided women are controlled, and one weapon in the armory to achieve that is to allow them to indulge temporarily in this primeval wildness. The same may be said of Proust’s bacchantes who ultimately embrace at least an outward show of convention, albeit with suggestions of temporary escape into all-female communion and desire.

Exploding lesbian mythology

What therefore are the possibilities for a permanent embracing of freedom beyond patriarchal and heteronormative restraint? Céline Minard’s short 2019 text may provide one possible figurative vision. The premise of the novella is a fanciful one into which we as readers are thrust without preparation: a typhoon is heading toward Hong Kong; a series of bunkers originally built by the British, but now used as a secure storage facility, given the perfect conditions inside, for the most valuable wines in the world, has been taken over by three women, the bacchantes of the title. The bunker is owned by former South African diplomat, Ethan Coetzer, who was due to host the great and the good of Hong Kong society there during the storm. The novella begins in the midst of the action with the opening line telling us only that “Personne ne bouge devant le bunker alpha” (Minard 9) [No-one is moving outside Alpha Bunker]. We read on to discover that the police chief, Jackie Thran (whose name must surely be a humorous nod toward Jackie Chan) and her team are stationed outside, weighing up the options for bringing the situation to a conclusion before the storm arrives. As they wait, the door to the bunker opens; one large foot (a size forty-two, we subsequently learn) shod in “un escarpin noir” (10) [a black pump], which is later identified as a Jimmy Choo, appears from behind the door, and a wine bottle that once contained very expensive wine but now contains urine is set down outside by a gloved hand and then kicked away in “un vif mouvement rotatif” (10) [a brisk rotary movement]. In a further dismantling of the externalized and internalized panopticon referenced above, what is happening inside is only shared via a video link with the police outside to the extent that the three women choose to; and their main activity appears to be no more than the gradual consumption of some of the best wines in the bunker while playing a game of bowling with the empty bottles. The first words that the police outside hear from inside are the sudden shouts of appreciation for a skilled play: “‘CINQ SUR SIX, BIEN JOUÉ BEAUTÉ!’” [FIVE OUT OF SIX, WELL PLAYED, YOU BEAUTY!].

Insights into the three women inside are relatively slight, nor are their motivations ever clear. We learn only at the start of the novella that a tweet has emerged announcing that the bunker has been taken over, but it is impossible to tell how this occupation was effected: “Personne ne connaît la source du tweet et personne ne sait non plus ce que veulent le ou les intrus. Le message tient en quelques mots: ‘Vous ne pouvez plus entrer. Nous avons tout ouvert. Nous avons tout relié. ECWC 21 h 18’” [No-one knows the source of the tweet and no-one know what the intruder or intruders want either. The message contains just a few words: “You can’t come in. We’ve opened everything. We have everything wired. ECWC 21 h 18”].⁷ Via the video link to the police, they introduce themselves as Bizzie La Clown (who is indeed dressed as a clown and whose mental stability is certainly in doubt), La Brune (who is dressed in stilettos and a tight-fitting sheath dress beneath a stole, and with hair in a gleaming chignon), and La Bombe, the leader of the group who is equally precisely described as having a closed, emaciated face and white hair of no more than a centimeter in length, as wearing combat trousers and polished black ranger boots, as apparently being over sixty-five and accompanied by a pet rat named Iliad (27–8). We later discover – along with the police – that her name is Jelena Drogan, that she is of Croatian origin but an American by nationality, and that she has had a long career in the military as an anti-mining expert and a specialist in improvising explosive devices who led sensitive military missions in Colombia, Angola, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and thus whose partnership with La Clown and La Brune seems all the more inexplicable (42).

The demands of the women inside are equally fanciful: in the first instance, we become aware that they have demanded luxury beauty products and very specific items of makeup: “‘la Prairie, crème cellulaire platine rare, base lumière universelle le Blanc, poudre lumière glacée, rouge Allure No 1, eye-liner long lasting, Chanel, mascara Diorshow Black Out, faux cils Terryfic 3D by Terry + colle’” (38) [“La Prairie Platinum Rare skin cream, Base lumière universelle make-up primer, illuminating face powder, Rouge Allure No.1 lipstick, long lasting eye-liner, all Chanel, Dior Black Out mascara, Terryfic 3D fake eyelashes by Terry + glue”]. Subsequently, we discover that La Bombe has also made the seemingly eccentric and certainly eclectic demand for thirty million dollars, a helicopter (despite the imminent typhoon), a limousine with six doors, an invitation to the Staatsoper (the Vienna State Opera), and a GAZ-66 (a Soviet 4 × 4 military truck) (41), all of which leads Thran to wonder whether they are trying to stall for time or whether they are “trois cinglées qui se sont lancées dans un truc qui les dépasse complètement ou si ce sont trois cinglées qui savent très bien ce que’elles font” (41–2) [three lunatics that have thrown themselves into this thing that’s now overtaken them completely or … three lunatics who know exactly what they’re doing]. Coetzer is the figure who offers to carry the beauty products to them and proceeds to surrender himself to those inside in a bid to get intelligence on what is happening; he strips naked, presumably to show that he is not wired with any listening devices, but the red lipstick that is one of the women’s demands hides a microphone which gives Chief Thran access to what is going on.

Popular reviews of the novella have not been particularly positive, with readers expressing their uncertainty as to the author’s intentions in terms of characterization, plot, or broader messaging; but for those very reasons, I would argue, we are encouraged to reflect on the reworking of the classical reference which, from its position of prominence as the title, subsequently appears to fade, with the evocation of the bacchantes followed through ostensibly only in the wine-drinking motif of the storyline (the bacchantes being the followers of Dionysus/Bacchus, the god of wine). These bacchantes are deliberate in their actions rather than frenzied: they are highly considered in their choice of wines, for example, to the extent that Coetzer feels a sneaking admiration for their taste [“‘Ils ont du goût. Ce sont des connaisseurs, d’une façon ou d’une autre. Peut-être des esthètes’” (22) [“They have taste. They’re connaisseurs, one way or another. Maybe even esthetes”]; they are not driven by the worship of any male locus of power (which might chime with the role of Dionysus in the original myth); and their bacchanalian pleasures are taken, not within a place of physical freedom, but in a place of containment. Indeed, the physical environment in which the narrative occurs could not be further from the escape from the city into nature of the original Bacchae, who move from convention and containment into wildness and freedom. In a further striking subversion of the original myths, these bacchantes have willingly locked themselves inside a secure bunker, the rationale for this course of action never explained in the text, to the frustration of some of Minard’s readers. We glean only fragments of information about each of the three women, as noted previously, and this information is focused mostly on La Bombe. Bizzie la Clown’s name is never known, and all we discover about La Brune is that her name is Livia Scilla and that she had been a student of Geology. Suggestions of a lesbian underpinning to their relationship are relatively slight: the physical description of La Bombe points to a certain lesbian stereotype, for example; while there are hints at gender fluidity in the early comments on the generous size of the foot that is seen kicking a bottle at the door of the bunker (“– 32% des femmes chaussent du 43. – Et 90% des drags, des queers et des trans MtF sont capables de cambrer le pied comme Beyoncé” (13) [- 32% of women wear a size 43. – And 90% of drag queens, queers, and trans women are able to arch their feet like Beyonce]). However, much later in the novel, Jackie learns from the geologist and volcanologist, Michaela Guidoboni (who once taught La Brune and is therefore able to provide an identification of these bacchantes based on a caving expedition that she led which included all three), that Livia, Jelena, and La Clown were alone around a campfire together one night at the end of the expedition, with drinks consumed, and that Michaela decided to withdraw and leave them alone together. She explains her rationale to Jackie Thran, saying, “‘– Je ne sais pas pour vous dans la police, mais dans l’enseignement quand on n’est plus de service, vive la vie, n’est-ce pas!’” (82) [“I don’t know how it is for you in the police, but in teaching, when you no longer serve any purpose, live and let live, right?”].

Various elements do nonetheless resonate with the image of female community present in earlier writings and rewritings of the story of the bacchantes: the autonomy and self-sufficiency of this same-sex group; their pleasure in the luxury beauty products and makeup being for themselves alone, rather than for any male gaze; and their treatment of Coetzer who is stripped of his clothes and all outward manifestations of position or power and encouraged to take sensuous pleasure in the wine with them: “Coetzer déglutit et laisse une rétro-olfaction envahir sa cloison nasale, son palais et sa gorge. – C’est une très belle cuvée. Il est possible que ce soit mon dernier verre, mais je le trouve magnifique. On devrait toujours boire comme ça. – Comment? Demande la Bombe. – Je ne sais pas. Conscient. Nu. Dévalisé” (67) [Coetzer swallows and allows a retro-olfaction to invade his nasal cavity, his palate, and his throat – It’s a very good cuvée. It could be my last glass, but it really is magnificent. One should always drink like that. How? asks La Bombe. – I don’t know. Aware. Naked. Robbed].

Notwithstanding these commonalities, however, the most significant departure from the original source and its rewritings is the most tantalizing one from the perspective of the present discussion, for the novella ends – in a style which leaves questions unanswered – with La Bombe laying dynamite within the bunker, and the three attempting to make their escape while blowing up the entire structure. Theirs is not therefore a temporary escape from constraint to indulge in bacchanalian rituals; rather, they willingly occupy this striking physical embodiment of constraint and enclosure, a WWII bunker that is designed to withstand any assault from the outside world, and blow it up from the inside. Unlike the bacchantes of Euripides and Proust, therefore, these bacchantes do not temporarily escape the walls; they bring them down permanently from within.

The final page describes only how the blast overtakes the bunker just as the three emerge from it and attempt to drive away, their pickup truck loaded with a selection of fine wines. Their destination, we know, is 18 Deep Water Bay Drive, a detail they have shared with Coetzer (and thus with the police team listening in from outside). A SWAT team is therefore waiting at this address, which a Google search reveals to be a private members club and wine cellar, to capture them. The novella, however, offers no sense of a conclusion as to their escape or capture. What follows the account of their attempted departure in the truck and the explosion are simply the following lines which close the novella in a curious echo of those that open it: “La pluie prend sa revanche, tire partout son rideau sur la terre émergée. Plus personne ne bouge dans la baie de Hong Kong” (106) [The rain takes its revenge, pulls its curtain all across the earth that has been uncovered. No-one else moves in the bay of Hong Kong].

Conclusion: Rewriting desire for the twenty-first century or unwriting it?

The present article proposes, at the outset, the somewhat ambitious possibility of rewriting the rules of female desire for the twenty-first century, a possibility that is premised on the changing ways in which classical myths have been reinvented over time. I have suggested that it is not only the myths themselves that change and evolve in these rewritings, but also our affective response when confronted with these mythical rewritings, for whereas the reader of a century ago would have been deciphering those rewritings from a position of knowing as to the original source, the present-day reader is more likely to be starting from a position of unknowing. It is no longer the change to a familiar story that interrupts the reader’s attention; it is the very presence of that unfamiliar story that requires a form of double detective work, for the urge to make sense for the average twenty-first-century reader is now both within the text and within the readerly experience of the text. In the case of Minard’s work, I would suggest that this may be interpreted as a conscious construction of unknowing, for myth is placed front and center on the title page, only then to become less obviously present apart from the recurrent motif of wine-drinking. Moreover, the scenario of wine consumption could arguably have operated without any reference to the bacchantes; thus, the reader – and most likely a reader less familiar with classical mythology than, for example, Proust’s contemporaries – is brought up short in a moment of questioning and a compulsive desire to make sense. The detective work this demands leads from Minard’s reference to the Bacchae back to earlier rewritings such as Proust’s and ultimately to the original source in Euripides. In deciphering these clues, we detect echoes of lesbian desire which may be nowhere explicit in Minard’s text, but are implicitly woven in via this mythological context.

Interestingly, in both Euripides and Proust, attempts are made by these male subjectivities to explain, understand, and catalog the bacchantes’ implied identities and desires, yet this is not replicated in the one female-authored text discussed here: in fact, no attempt at explanation of the three female protagonists’ motivations is offered at all. As noted above, this is why readers have expressed their disappointment and frustration with the text – its point is unclear. However, might this not also be its potency? Gretchen Schultz, in her article “Daughters of Bilitis: Literary Genealogy and Lesbian Authenticity,” concludes her discussion of Pierre Louys’s Les Filles de Bilitis by suggesting that male-authored representations of lesbian desire, from Louys to Balzac, “remind us that we are all, to a certain extent, daughters of Bilitis, that our culture grows in part from man-made images of our sexuality that we cannot completely escape. They remind us as well that we are not entirely beholden to these images; indeed, lesbian authenticity is less a myth than a confrontation with and a remaking of myths” (386).

Scholarly interpretations of Minard’s text have yet to emerge, while as noted previously, popular reviews have expressed frustration. Against that backdrop and the novella’s undeniable ungraspability, is one interpretative lens to see Minard as resisting such manmade scopic regimes by first creating what Foerster describes in relation to Decadent literature as a “heterotopia, a space dedicated to resistance to a regime of heterosexual normalization” and then exploding it by ultimately offering desire as it is, with no explanation, justification, or rationale? Adding a further layer to the position of unknowing, the three bacchantes cannot be made sense of; they simply are. “Pour la brigade d’intervention, le plus important est ‘comment’. Pour Jackie et le négociateur, c’est ‘qui’. Pour Ethan Coetzer, c’est ‘pourquoi’ … . Chacun pense à part soi qu’une seule réponse suffirait à résoudre la situation, mais aucun d’entre eux n’a le début d’une piste” (17) [For the armed police squad, the most important question is “how”. For Jackie and the negotiator, it’s “who”. For Ethan Coetzer, it’s “why”. Each one thinks that a single answer will be enough to resolve the situation, but none of them has a single lead]. Within this logic, we are arguably confronted not with a rewriting of the rules of lesbian desire for the twenty-first century, but an unwriting of them. Unlike French writers, such as Balzac, engaging with lesbian desire as titillation or threat, Minard’s novella provides neither plot nor eroticism nor objectification nor exoticism, a daring position for a novelist to adopt. Yet in this unwriting, I would argue, the real possibility of a reconfiguration of lesbian desire by stealth – and beyond the “rules” of heteronormative desire – emerges. This is a desire that is self-sufficient and in need of no external understanding or validation. Moreover, and in contrast to the representation of Euripides’s and Proust’s bacchantes whose self-sufficient female desire also resists understanding, but whose freedom is only temporary and ultimately quashed by the systems that constrain it and maintain the social order, Minard’s Bacchae literally explode the constraints from within. We do not know what ultimately happens to them, but perhaps even more, for that reason, they come to signify the power of self-invention in self-sufficiency, a power that emerges from the position of unknowing in which Minard places us as readers when we are denied the explanation we expect of the novelist. That their desire refuses to explain itself, and exists for itself alone, embodies the true potential of “not knowing” which is where, as American author Anthony Doerr suggests, “hope and art and possibility and invention come from” (13).

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.