I am Drawn that Way: Sex, Euripides, and Jessica Rabbit

Using an ancient Greek play and a Disney movie, I'm going to try to discuss how we use art as a way of dealing with the powerful human sexual drive. (This is my attempt to fulfill the assignment about Euripides I've given to my students, though this is longer than what they need write.)

Things don't work out for Pentheus
a peeping Tom among the Bakkhai

In the Bakkhai by Euripides, the character Pentheus wants to have order in his city but gets frustrated by the Bakkhai, women who go outside the boundaries of the city (and of morality) to celebrate the rites of the God Dionysus (or Bacchus). Those rites tend to include a lot of wine and little clothing. Despite himself, Pentheus is drawn to spy upon the celebrants. This proves his undoing.

The mask of Dionysus
suggests his animalistic power

In a sense Euripides provides a very common morality lesson: if you indulge sexual passion, it will cost you dearly. But the way he structures his play gives us interesting ways of understanding and dealing with sexuality. For one thing, the god Dionysus blatantly expects to be worshiped. Essentially, he says "If you don't participate in the licentious activities that I endorse, you're going to get it." We can dismiss this as the ravings of a fictional pagan god, or a cheap excuse to get drunk. Or, we can consider that Euripides uses Dionysus to personify primal human drives. In that case, it makes me wonder whether I respect Dionysus. (I'm not going to worship him. I believe in the Christian god, but maybe Dionysus is more metaphor than being.) But on to my Disney example.

In the Disney film noir parody, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the animated and voluptuous Jessica Rabbit interacts with the non-animated Eddie Valiant. Her features are exaggerated, as this picture shows, playing up her sexual attraction. Here is a famous exchange between the two characters:

Eddie Valiant: You don't know how hard it is being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.
Jessica Rabbit: I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.

There is a pun on the word "drawn." Obviously "drawn" means artistically created: she is an animated character. But "drawn that way" can also mean she feels a natural tendency to sex, or perhaps more specifically, to playing up her sexual nature. "Drawn that way" is a powerful pun, since the two meanings differ greatly with respect to the issue of agency. If someone has drawn (created) her that way, she is not responsible for this part of her character. However, if she is drawn (personally attracted) to this sexuality, she is admitting a tendency that can be controlled. Is her statement an excuse, or a confession of inclination?

If we are hard wired with a deep-seeded identity as sexual creatures, we can hardly be blamed for acting from our own nature. Yet we are blamed, by ourselves and others, because we know that even if we are "drawn that way" (it is our nature to have strong sexual inclinations) we know there is plenty of room to play up or play down the way we are "drawn" to act on that nature.

Drawing at the Dentist
While awaiting my son during a long dental visit, I spent time reading a book about the irrationality of the Greeks. This inspired me to make the drawing that you see here, imitated from a Greek vase. The figure is a maenad or bacchante, a celebrant of the rites of Dionysus or Bacchus.

Unlike what Pentheus saw when spying on the Bakkhai, we are looking here at a work of art, which is at some remove from actually witnessing an orgiastic celebration, thankfully. By calling this art, I make no judgment about its visual quality. By art I mean it is the product of a process. This is a crafted representation, created according to a method and for a variety of legitimate purposes (learning the craft of figure drawing, using media to enhance teaching, and using it as an illustration in this blog post). In other words, the art is not the thing that it illustrates or explores. Being something made and framed according to rules and standards puts it into another category.

The fine arts are rhetorical arts, for they persuade us to provide frameworks by which we can give things meaning and rationally discuss them. One may take issue with my picture, or the vase form which I copied it, but that only proves my point. We have stepped outside of the dangerous world of primal sexuality and into an objective realm of rational discussion. And while it is always possible for someone to misuse art, treating it as a pretext for less noble purposes, we have names for that ("exploitation" for one), and by naming and discussing these things according to whatever standards of art or morality, we once again escape the forces of the irrational.

Euripides' play puts a frame upon sexuality that redeems it from the errors of the characters that it depicts. This is one of the great gifts given to us by the Greeks, the arts of drama or discourse that create rational frames for irrational us.