Behind Her Twisted Eyes

This article opens a new vein of discussion regarding the closely interrelated themes of sight and gender in Euripides’s tragedy Bacchae. Using a framework of enacted cognition, this study illuminates mania to be a female-coded experience of seeing and knowing in which the playwright primes his spectators to share an emotional stake. In the play, the female (or feminized, in the case of the cross-dressed Pentheus) body is the site of Dionysiac possession and tragic suffering, chiefly symptomatized by “twisted eyes,” an embodied characteristic of madness, or mania. The playwright presents roving-eyed mania as an experience of knowing through perception akin to enacted cognition (a la Noë 2006), which frames knowing as a result of bodily action, or “self-movement.” The focus on characters’ self-reports of their own hallucinatory vision as a source of knowing allows the playwright to create a touchstone of phenomenological experience for spectators to undergo alongside the characters of Pentheos and his mother and murderer Agave. Spectators encounter this female-coded experience of mania through a process of what this study terms the experiential custody of Pentheus and subsequently Agave. I develop the term “experiential custody” to reference the playwright’s invitation for spectators to enter the cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and moral world of each character as it reveals, manifests, and transforms itself through their speech and actions onstage. In Bacchae, spectators visit similar elements in the experiential custody of Pentheos and Agave. In both cases, the characters self-report their capacities for enacted cognition in the altered experience of vision and (mis)recognition in states of hallucinatory mania. I will provide a close reading of these dynamics in the text of Bacchae, in dialogue with previous studies of vision and cognitive-emotional experience in this play and Greek tragedy generally (Thumiger 2013, Most 2013, Rabinowitz 2013, Meineck 2012, Gregory 1985). This article thus contributes to studies of ancient ideas of gendered cognition, and furthers an interest in the tragic playwright’s process of soliciting spectators’ cognitive, emotional, and embodied viewing experience.