Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

138 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Another solution is the rapture of irrationality. If Apollo 32 is phallogocentric and
onto-theological, Dionysus is the postmodernist hero. Postmodern feminists believe
Dionysus is going to smash patriarchy. However, Dionysus was also a Greek tyrant,
(Elder 367 B.C., Younger 345 B.C.) Some feminists have been sold a bill of goods/
gods. They become the bacchae. As Mary Daly argues, “Madness is the only
ecstasy offered to women by the Dionysian ‘Way’” (1978, p. 66). Do they celebrate
patriarchal chaos and the death of Apollo because they are more terrified of rational
than irrational man Do they not remember that Dionysus and Apollo shared the
same shrine 33 Postmodernism is patriarchal ideology. The particular cosmogony is
Dionysian and Apollonian: the disorder of the unconscious, the possession of all
women by phallic logos, the symbol and word of God in all things, the word from
nothing making all things. Unemotionality and irrationality are one, as their reason
and emotion are, in fact, One. Apollo/Dionysus is just another version of what Sheila
Ruth has described as a Janus-faced image of masculinity: “on the one hand, the
warrior hero, a compilation of classical ideas and warrior qualities; on the other
hand, the machismo syndrome, the undercurrent of mischief, composed of a
predilection for violence, intemperate and exploitative sex, and recklessness” (1980,
p. 49). Dionysian loss of self as liberation is another ruse of masculinist reason. 34
Faceless masks do not change a master narrative, they are the master’s normative,
when deceit is truth. Femininity as the textual imaginary 35 of male uncertainty is
used to seduce women. Dionysus the Possessor seeks to erase women’s boundaries
and territories. He is an “androgynous” man who pretends to mediate between the
feminine world and the world of the Father. The previous querelle des femmes which
lasted from 1300 to 1600 was a quarrel over the question of whether woman was
human. Now, humanism is passé and feminists are accused of both that and
logocentricism, but woman is still the anti-human. The male definition of woman
and human as without centre is posed as the way out of humanism, master narratives
and logocentricism. But women can’t keep up like men, can’t keep up with their
style.
In “The Menace of Dionysus: Sex Roles and Reversals in Euripedes’ Bacchae,”
Charles Segal mentions that Dionysus and Pentheus symbolize different masculine
approaches to the feminine and the chaotic. However, we can see that both are twice
born, and have difficult relationships with their mothers, the sisters Semele and
32. Mary Daly draws on research which shows that Apollo’s name is derived from The Destroyer.
As the King of woman-haters, he killed the dragoness “Delphyne” (from “womb”), usurped her
shrine and built a temple where the maxim was engraved, “Keep woman under the rule” (1978,
p. 62).
33. See also Mary Daly, (1978, pp. 64–69), “The Illusion of ‘Dionysian’ Freedom”. She points to
female annihilation, madness and confusion as the Dionysian Final Solution for women.
34. Mary O’Brien considers the laws negotiating family and polity historically, and notes that the
laws of Solon, for example: were “concurrent with religious developments in which the old chthonic
and fertility cults had been consciously replaced by the Olympic heavenly patriarchs, and lifeprocess
celebrations in which women participated were ‘rationalized’ in the all-male mathematical
mysteries of Orpheus and the intoxicated liturgies of Dionysus” (1981, p. 108).
35. In her study of sadistic novelists, Dardigna concludes: “Women become textual material for the
masculine imaginary: thus do we enter contemporary eroticism” (1981, p. 40).