The Delights of 'Dribbling Gore'

Subject: *Note: Dionysus has not driven me to dementia. I am just weird.
I am not ashamed to say that Anne of Green Gables and Gene Kelley musicals dominated my early years. I love frivolity and innocuous entertainment, but lately I find myself lusting after violence. It is a terribly strange feeling and I can find no real cause for it. In my religion class, I was delighted to learn of Jael, a fearsome maiden who drives a tent peg through the head of the mighty general Sisera. More recently, I watched the film V for Vendetta and was utterly fascinated by the masked vigilante and his lustrous knives (his knack for alliteration was quite taking as well). Naturally, The Bacchae of Euripides satisfied this gory new palate of mine. The following selection in which the Maenads literally rip the impious Pentheus apart is possibly my favorite scene.
She [Agave] took him by the arm, the left arm, under the elbow, then she planted a foot against his ribs and tore his arm off…one had one of his feet, still warm in its sandal. His ribs were stripped of flesh, and all the women, all those bloody hands, were throwing pieces of him back and forth between them as though it were a game. (49)
Deliciously nauseating, isn’t it? I can see it so clearly. The details of the situation immediately penetrate the mind. Perhaps, such intense imagery is what attracts audiences to atrocity. The words alone work to efficiently produce vivid pictures of unpleasantries. One is often repulsed, yet the lucidity of the scene is very enticing. The same goes for tragedy as well. Human nature will not allow us to turn away from misery. We are nosy creatures who must see the outcome.
The Bacchae of Euripides was also appealing in that it placed women in unconventional roles. Agave and the other Bacchants are deemed detestable by Pentheus because they ostracize themselves from the home and family. Their absence is seen as a nuisance to the men of Thebes. He exclaims that it “is beyond endurance. To have to suffer from women!” (32) When they disassembled him it was like sweet vengeance for me. It is always a nice to see women holding “a dominating hand above the bent head of the enemy [men]” (37) for a change, even if these gals were a little bit crazed.