Book Review: A Feminist Theory of Refusal,by Bonnie Honig

Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal offers a new and deeply compelling interpretation of Euripides’s Bacchae. How is this possible? The scholarship on this ancient Greek tragedy is enormous. Honig’s approach, delivered as the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, is distinguished by its two related methodological premises. First, unlike most classical scholarship on tragedy, her reading of the Bacchae is not presented as a window into ancient Athenian society and culture. Her approach is horizontal rather than vertical. As the title of the book makes clear, Euripides’s tragedy is a touchstone for contemporary feminist thought, broadly understood as putting up a resistance to patriarchy. Second, her approach is guided by recent theoretical discussions of refusal as a political concept.

As in her earlier work, this book is also interested in the political and ethical promises of the sororal relation. In the Bacchae, this relation is literalized by the four daughters of Cadmus: Agave, Autonoe, Ino, and Semele. The plot of the tragedy is initiated by the refusal of the first three to believe that Zeus is the father of Semele’s son Dionysus. It is about the prerogatives of fathers and the precarity of mothers in a patriarchal system; the pregnant Semele dies as a consequence of her sisters’ doubts and Hera’s hubris. But Dionysus did not die. “Borne” as an immortal from Zeus’s thigh—or so the “stranger” in the play reports—he has come to Thebes to get revenge for the Thebans’ refusal to believe in his divinity. The premise of the play, in other words, is based on the sisters’ refusal as a conventional rather than a liberatory act.

Given these elements of the plot, Honig’s argument is brilliantly counterintuitive. Isn’t this a play about women—the maenads or bacchantes—under the thrall of a demanding and self-aggrandizing god? A play in which, as a result, a mother murders her own son? How can such a play be the basis for a theory of feminist refusal?

What, moreover, is meant by “refusal” in Honig’s reading? Is refusal always politically defensible? What about the refusal to resist, as in the refusal to resist fascism? Or the refusal to comply, as in the refusal to be vaccinated against Covid-19? And at its core isn’t the Bacchae about the horrific consequences of refusing to believe that Dionysus is a god? But this refusal is met with another when the women of Thebes, under the spell of the god and outside the confines of the city, refuse to play their gender-specific roles. Honig makes it clear throughout that she is talking about feminist refusal, defined as a “project of enacting sex-gender equality”(3). The crux of her argument is the refusal to accept as natural the dominant history of acquiescence to oppressive power structures.

In justifying her choice of Euripides’s Bacchae, Honig refers to the play’s “exemplary arc of refusal” (xiii). This exemplarity is predicated on reimagining the city of Thebes as the place to which the bacchantes return and, in that return, the possibility of transforming the city into an inclusive and equitable community. This reimagining also seems counterintuitive—even utopian. After Agave and her sisters return to Thebes, Dionysus enters ex machina to prophecy that they and their parents will all be sent into exile. As Cadmus reports, they are all miserable (τλήμονες). But Honig rejects cause and effect as the play’s defining structure and the source of its meaning. Rather, she values refusal as the necessary precondition for a more productive attachment to the city, to others, and to a “more just world” (3). After leaving the city and refusing to abide by its gendered protocols, the women’s return—in Honig’s reading—can initiate a generative aporia as opposed to the conclusiveness of etiological myth.

The book’s three main chapters are indebted to three theoretical concepts: Giorgio Agamben’s “inoperativity” (chapter 1), Adriana Cavarero’s “inclination” (chapter 2), and Saidya Hartman’s “fabulation” (chapter 3). Each, according to Honig, is a “refusal concept” (xiii) and each provides the impetus for rereading the Bacchae. Why these three? Honig poses this question directly in the book’s conclusion. She knows that the reader has been asking it all along. Some readers might think these authors are made of straw. But Honig’s comparative method, together with her commitment to methodological transparency, argue otherwise. She calls her readings acts of recovery where, freed from positivist or archival regimes, recovery retains both its historical and its therapeutic connotations. She rereads the Bacchae to celebrate the women’s freedom and joy.

In doing so, the book explores the limits of these three concepts. Inoperativity becomes not simply a suspension of use but its intensification. Inclination becomes a gesture that calls for a rethinking of maternal violence. And fabulation becomes a means of validating sororal care. Each of these reconceptualizations is itself a gentle form of refusal. Honig’s principal text is the first of the two messenger speeches in Euripides’s tragedy—that is, the description of the women’s activities on Mt. Cithaeron, led by the three living sisters. Her discussion is also framed by a variety of works diverse in genre and period—from Leonardo’s painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (c. 1503) to Melville’s novel Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) to Anna Rose Holmer’s film The Fits (2015) to the biography of Mohammad Ali (among others)—as analogues or counterpoints to the Bacchae’s exemplary arc of refusal. And although it does suggest parallelisms between the ancient play and these later works, this is not a book of classical reception studies. The through-line is conceptual and antiteleological. In this respect, it is in dialogue with Mario Telò’s recent (2020) study of the Bacchae’s “anti-cathartic aesthetics.” ¹

In chapter 1, Honig argues that the Theban women’s refusal to carry out the demands of domestic labor in favor of communal leisure exemplifies inoperativity as intensification. A key element is the women’s refusal to be watched by male spectators. This refusal is intensified in their brutal murder of the voyeur Pentheus. But the implied audience of the play is also involved in this refusal; they hear the messenger’s speech but do not see what he describes. The murders that comprise the genre’s most consequential events are often presented after the fact in the display of corpses on the eccyclema or wheeled cart. It is unclear whether the eccyclema was used in the Bacchae; the mutilated body of Pentheus is said to be brought on stage by attendants (lines 1216–17). But Agave clearly carries some parts of her son’s body in her own arms. Two related points pertain to Honig’s argument. First that the messenger, a standard figure in Greek tragedy, implicates the genre itself in Honig’s arc of refusal. And second, that the end of the play, which is reconstituted from the Christus Patiens (eleventh or twelfth century), links the women’s return to the city with an intensification of form. Similarly, in Honig’s reading of The Fits, sororal care and a refusal to yield to the dominant narrative of female madness require an intensification of the filmic form.

In chapter 2, Honig turns to Cavarero’s “inclination” as another example of a refusal concept with limits. The focus here is shifted away from Cavarero’s pacifist maternity to what Honig calls “sororal agonism” (47) where the seeming oxymoron signals the potential for ethical and political progress in the triangulation of love, care, and violence. As noted above, the textual analogue to the Bacchae is Cavarero’s reading of the gestural vocabulary of Leonardo’s 1503 painting, with side glances at Euripides’s Medea, Freud’s account of Leonardo’s painting, and the myth of the sisters Procne and Philomela (in Ovid’s telling). The painting is the starting point for contrasting the inclinational gesture of maternal care with the rectitude assigned to “verticalists” (53). Honig concludes that Greek tragedy is founded in the clash between vertical and inclinational thinking, a clash epitomized in the riddle of the Sphinx. The fact that uprightness is only a part of human life is, of course, what both Oedipus and Pentheus refuse to accept. But Honig’s sights are on Agave and her sisters. Against the standard reading of Agave as the remorseful mother, Honig shifts the reader’s attention to the sisters’ refusal to submit to sovereign power. Noting that “filicide and regicide will always coincide in patriarchy” (59), we are also reminded that regicide and patricide follow suit. And that when Oedipus kills his father, his mother is also a victim. Honig shows in this chapter how the political and ethical allegiances that pit caring against killing can be used to justify misogyny. As a comparandum, the myth of Procne—the sober and calculating filicide—suggests to Honig that Agave might have known what she was doing when she killed Pentheus. In this radical rereading, the play’s insistence on Agave’s madness disavows (both acknowledges and resists) its feminist arc of refusal.

In chapter 3, Honig turns to Hartman’s book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019), as a retelling of history that illuminates her own method; both are acts of recovery. A singular point of comparison is Honig’s speculation about what Agave may have been thinking when she murdered her son; this sort of speculation is a defining feature of Hartman’s work. Honig compares Hartman’s characters with the Greek chorus of bacchantes, defined by their collective relation to the city. How are the stories of women as political actors to be told? By giving voice to those who say “I refuse.” The targets again are the verticalists who, as the keepers of archives, have silenced that voice. Hartman restores it to free Black women in early twentieth-century urban America. Euripides’s Greek tragedy, a staple of the Western canon, may seem an uneasy interlocutor. But in Honig’s reading both are tales of deviance or “wayward living” (77), one (Hartman’s) erased by patriarchy and the other (Euripides’s) marshaled to justify it. Honig focuses here on the agon between Cadmus and Agave over Pentheus’s scattered corpse during which Cadmus leads Agave back to her prescribed roles as daughter, wife, and mother; this is what it means for a woman to return to her senses. We can note here too that Cadmus is a sane and calculating follower of Dionysus; he likes the idea of having a god in the family. Against this patrilineal prerogative, Honig acutely observes that in the agon, “Sister is nowhere to be heard” (80). She urges readers to attend to the play’s fabulations, its unsettled identities, its heroine as both filicide and regicide, its sororal possibilities. This unsettled condition is extended to the city, defined by those who leave it and then return. Thus, Honig reads Agave’s reentry into the city not as a scene of coming to her senses, but as a moment for imagining “a radical repartitioning of the city’s arrangements of gender, sexuality and power” (79). Anticipating her readers’ refusal to accept this radical rereading, Honig ends chapter 3 with a brief apologia, a defense of refusal. Embedded in this defense is the fact that the book is not a reading of the Bacchae as a whole. This, too, is a methodological choice. In spite of scholars’ intents, a holistic reading of the play is impossible precisely because it vows to control contingency.

The book ends with a brief summary conclusion, followed by an appendix of “final thoughts” (111) on Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), Erin Courtney’s play A Map of Virtue (2012), Astra Taylor’s film What is Democracy? (2018), and the biography of Muhammad Ali as a Dionysian figure. In Honig’s readings, each deploys refusal as the source of an interpretive promise including the promise of an as-yet-unknown but better political future. Not surprisingly, Honig’s interlocutor and theoretical touchstone throughout is Hannah Arendt. Agave and her wayward sisters test the limits of Arendt’s archival “heroes” (107), uniquely exemplified in Honig’s analysis by Arendt’s exclusion of Ali from her discussions of civil disobedience in the 1970s. The example suggests the ways in which exclusion can clarify the value of refusal.

Honig’s notes are extensive and need to be read. I would have liked a bibliography. The book’s intended audiences include political theorists, feminist scholars, and classicists, although the latter may put up some resistance. But this potential resistance simultaneously illustrates the ways in which, as Honig says, “refusal is generative” (107).