Blindness

There is a tendency for humans to be trapped by their own preconceptions and to resist anything that goes against those pre-established beliefs with denial, contempt, or outright (and often) violent rejection. In Margaret Atwood’s poem “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and Euripides’ The Bacchae, central characters refuse to accept and believe in the truth and instead decide to side with their individual delusions and beliefs. In particular, Pentheus (in The Bacchae) and the Narrator (in Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer) fail to accept and see Nature. Ultimately, both characters are blind to the power of nature and cannot see what is in front of them. There are several similar stages either character face in each work: an encounter, denial, resistance, underestimation, and finally, acknowledgement of nature.

Though I will primarily be discussing the similarity of blindness and resistance to nature (and in acknowledging nature’s power) in either work, there are a few key differences that are unique to either story. Firstly, in Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer, the Narrator’s encounter with nature is an invisible, omnipresent force he encounters in the forest. Pentheus’s encounter with nature is with a personification, Dionysus, who acts and behaves like a person but is just as omnipresent and all-powerful as what the Narrator faces in Atwood’s poem but more about internal nature and conflict. On the contrary, however, although both succumb to nature in the end, Pentheus only acknowledges nature partially (and still remains half-blind and ignorant) as a result of Dionysus’s possessing him and is murdered in the end as punishment. The Narrator, however, acknowledges nature as a superior and his initial preconceptions of ...

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... I see a bull.” (Line 917) Pentheus, after disregarding the existence of the god of nature, Dionysus, in the entire duration of the play, finally sees the god’s true form: a bull. As a consequence of possession, his blindness is partially cured. His own old preconceptions about the world, about his own superiority, and denying the existence of nature is now split into two worlds: one side that does believe, and one side that still does not—resulting in his skewed vision of the city. Even after being partially enlightened (especially seeing Dionysus’s true form for the first time), Pentheus still underestimates the god’s powers and foolishly heads to the hills to be mauled by his own family and the other women under Dionysus’s spell of frenzy. It is almost ironic that Pentheus perishes at the hand of his own mother as a result of her blindness—she sees him as a lion.