Gender Roles In The Bacchae

In Euripides’s The Bacchae and in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, I found the gender roles in these particular plays to be very interesting because this was my first exposure to cross-dressing in works of literature. In The Bacchae, women play a huge role because women are often portrayed as feminine and inferior in many past works, however, in The Bacchae, the women of Thebes decide to rebel against the men and join the Greek God of grape harvesting, wine, fertility, and partying, in the woods. The women were manipulated by Dionysus and were turned into maenads because they joined Dionysus and rejected the norms for women, to stay in their place and they all went from the first world they were living in, Thebes, to the second world,

If men were supposed to be superior, then why would Zeus decide to listen to his wife Hera who is a woman? If the narrative is that men are more dominant and powerful than a woman then why is it that albeit a goddess showing dominance over the king of the Greek gods? There are two different concepts of music for Nietzsche, Apollonian and Dionysian, named after the Greek god, Apollo, the god of music, truth, and prophecy, healing, the sun and light, and much more. Apollonian music is characterized by ordered, logical, and reasoned (Naughton). Whereas Dionysian music is characterized as unrestrained (Naughton). Could it be that because Apollo is described as a young fit manly looking male and because he is characterized as being very manly that Nietzsche decided that the music is ordered, logical, and reasoned because he is also born from Zeus and Leto, the goddess of motherhood? What about the Dionysian type of music that is described as the opposite of the Apollonian music, unrestrained because Dionysus is known for having womanly features and although Apollo and Dionysus are half-brothers, Dionysus has a mortal mother. Perhaps the manly features of Apollo and