Sacrificial Animal In Euripides The Bacchae

Violet Venable refuses to return to her husband who is suffering from a terminal illness. She stays with her Buddhist monk. Every summer she goes on a vacation with her son. This summer, unfortunately, she cannot follow him since she herself is ill due to a stroke. So she sends Cathy along with him. It is through Cathy that we hear the brutal killing of Sebastian, but in a slow manner. It is a death by Cannibalism at the hands of locals whose sexual favors he sought, as a homosexual. They tear his parts, limb to limb, and eat his raw flesh. It is a kin to the myth of Dionysus in which a sacrificial animal is torn apart and eaten raw as in Euripides' play, The Bacchae. It is a reworking of the Pentheus myth in which the young man is torn apart my Maenads (female worshippers of Dionysus) for not accepting the primacy of Dionysus’s ecstasy.

She is a wealthy widow who wants to destroy Cathy, buried the truth of the absent character's destiny, by ordering lobotomy to be performed on her. She finds Dr. Cukrowicz’s experimental work so that he yields and performs the operation. Memory suspension of Cathy is what she conspires. Memory can mean “a neuro – cognitive capacity, a store of information… a componential process of retrieving of that information or an individual’s phenomenal awareness of remembering” (Favourini,2008: 2). It is this bitter memory of Cathy that violet wants to destroy. This is a play of escaping from the truth. Thus, in the words of Rosen, “the secrets and memorabilia are demystified, purged of their power to hold the people together… the yearning to unearth the past, to belong to some place, to recognize the self behind the face…