Emily Waller Singeisen, University of Pennsylvania
“Costume is Flesh”:
Trans*ing Pentheus in Anne Carson’s Bakkhai
“Queering the Hero,” Society of Classical Studies 2024 Annual Meeting
“Look at Pentheus / twirling around in a dress, / so pleased with his little girl-guise / he’s almost in tears. / Are we to believe / this desire is new? / Why was he keeping / that dress in the back / of his closet anyhow? / Costume is flesh.”
These lines in the translator’s note to Bakkhai, Anne Carson’s 2015 version of Euripides’ tragic play, lyrically intimate the thinly-veiled queerness of the play’s central figure. While crossdressing, same-sex desire, and gender-bending (along with its tragic consequences) are intrinsic to the text itself, Carson’s translation and its introductory poem highlight the essential role of transness, becoming, and threshold identities in the play. While scholars have examined the failed Oedipality at the core of Pentheus’ identity, as well as his consequent gender ambiguity and fetishization of Dionysus’ femininity, they often fail to fully capture the ways in which Pentheus’ external covering represents a fundamental reordering of the flesh, nor have they explicitly approached the play through the lens of trans theory (Segal 1978; Wohl 2005; Mimidou 2013).
This paper reads Carson’s Bakkhai in light of her introductory assertion that “costume is flesh,” as well as her summary of the play as “the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman.” While many scholars regard Pentheus’ crossdressing as an act of imitation, I instead approach it as an act of transformation, evinced by Pentheus’ own concern that dressing as a woman might fundamentally alter his identity (Eur. Ba. 822: τί δὴ τόδ᾽; ἐς γυναῖκας ἐξ ἀνδρὸς τελῶ;). Taking the works of theorists such as Jay Prosser and Gayle Salamon as a framework, this paper casts Pentheus as a subject-in-transition, a threshold body unintelligible to the maenads and killed as a result of that very unintelligibility. Trans theory, I argue, offers a productive lens for viewing Pentheus’ transgressive desires to at once possess the women through voyeuristic fantasy and to become a woman. Pentheus’ threshold identity is read in the context of a larger web of bodies in transition, as the play blurs the lines between human and animal, man and woman, mortal and divine, birth and death—all of which demonstrate the mutability, unreadability, and instability of the body. Finally, I argue that reading Carson’s translation in this way casts the sparagmos at the play’s close as an act of transphobia, following Prosser’s definition of transphobia as “literally, the fear of the subject in transition” (Prosser 1998).