The essay I didn't submit

This is the essay I didn't submit for "Greek and Roman Mythology": a structuralist reading of The Bacchae.

Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae is fundamentally predicated on the structuralist binary human/not human: the play's tension comes from anxiety over the borders between the two states. The anxiety comes from two main sources: how to distinguish between the human and not-human when they appear to be the same, and how to preserve one's own status as human.

Illustrating the Eumenides

Some of these might be NSFW, if your work is uptight about paintings involving waist-up female nudity (all in the service of Art, of course!)

Someone in my course forum said they imagined the Eumenides as "monstrously bodied women with Clint Eastwood's `Dirty Harry` face". When I thought about it, I realised I had been picturing them as Japanese onryo, with white faces, black dishevelled hair and dirty white shifts, while the Delphic priestess in the play itself says she has seen paintings of them where they look like Harpies. Some of the articles I've read say that they have blood dripping from their eyes, which is a nice touch (and quite onryo-esque), but I can't track down the source for that.

I took a look at how other people have envisioned them, and there are some really spectacular renderings.