As is stated in Interdisciplinarity, English as a subject is hard to pin down or define and in some people’s opinion it is not qualified to stand on its own as a discipline. I can understand this confusion, since by nature English as a topic deals with a wide variety of “subjects” (such as death, love, sex, friendship, religion, etc.) and those subjects can be conveyed, explained, or explored in many different mediums, whether by poetry, fictional novels, non- fiction prose, and a combination of others. This uncertainty connects in my mind to the The Bacchae in the sense that Dionysus himself is hard to quickly sum up or fully explain with evidence of facts. His own origin and claim of being a god is questioned, by his mother Semele’s own family. Many people, such as Pentheus consider worship of Dionysus to be degrading. This ambiguity can also be applied to his worshippers, or maenads. How exactly are these women affected by Dionysus is hard to say. To what extend are they under his influence? It could be said that they are fully and completely under Dionysus’ control, unaware of their actions and unable to control themselves as is they were zombies (for lack of a better word). This opinion could be backed up by examining the scene where Agaue, Pentheus’ mother realizes that she has torn apart her own son, and not an animal as she previously thought. She seemingly snaps out of a kind of trance and acknowledges that Dionysus had a wicked control over her. This could be disputed because Dionysus does command the maenads to attack “the man who makes a mockery of me and you…” but it is also said that the women did not fully hear this first command. Could it be that these women are aware of their actions but are just caught up in the frenzy, potentially freeing to them because it is so drastically different from their oppressive role in society? It could be possible that Agaue was aware of the murder but as a little more time passed the hysteria wore off and the full weight of her actions realized, her blaming of Dionysus still makes plausible sense. As we discussed in class it is difficult, if not impossible to determine without a doubt who in this story is insane and who is sound minded. Worshippers of Dionysus, even through the chaos and madness they bring, seem to emulate a calmness. Rituals preformed for Dionysus are seen by worshippers as sacred or holy, while to outsiders it is viewed as debasement or profanity. Ambiguity is something that appears often throughout the English discipline, whether it be in sentence structure or the meaning of a line of poetry. This can be seen as a weakness when compared to other disciplines such as the sciences, which are based for the most part on clear, hard facts (which of course can be disputed as facts in their own right). These other disciplines function with even less ambiguity than English because often once they are mastered there is a clear line of business or work that a person could then function in, whereas sometimes that isn’t the case with English, as is spoken about in Interdisciplinarity. Ambiguity, as for example with Dionysus and his followers, can be embraced and looked at through many different lenses or opinions based off of other disciplines or strictly “English” concepts only, which I view as more of a strength than a weakness.