From Dionysus to Darkness: Ivy Pochoda’s Ecstasy as a Modern Bacchae
In 5th-century Athens, Euripides scandalized audiences with The Bacchae, a play that blurred the boundaries between madness, ecstasy, and divinity. Now, in 2025, Ivy Pochoda revives that same unsettling tension in her gripping new novel Ecstasy, set on a luxury Greek island haunted by Dionysian chaos. Like its ancient predecessor, Pochoda’s novel asks: What happens when we lose control—and want to?
At its core, Ecstasy follows a wealthy, beautiful crowd on a private Greek island whose detachment is pierced by a mysterious woman named Melina. She arrives, like Dionysus, from outside civilization—offering pleasure, danger, and collapse. One reviewer calls her “a force of nature, untethered and mercurial.” Pochoda herself describes the novel as “a meditation on power, beauty, rage, and myth.”
"I wanted to write something that explores what women are taught to repress—and what it looks like when they stop." —Ivy Pochoda
The Ancient Scandal: Dionysus as a Disruptor
When The Bacchae was first performed around 405 BCE, the figure of Dionysus shocked Athenian audiences. Divine but androgynous. Powerful, yet laughing. A god of ritual, yes—but also of intoxication, frenzy, and breakdown. Dionysus wasn’t Apollo, the god of reason and order. He was chaos embodied. You might say Dionysus had an Elvis effect: like Presley’s infamous hip shake, Dionysus exposed desires that society had locked away.
As classicist Jon-David Hague, Founding Editor at WLG observes: “Dionysus was scandal personified. He wasn't about order like Apollo. He was about release. In that sense, he's a deeply modern figure.”
Euripides himself was a controversial playwright. Late in his career, he experimented with music and genre in ways that Athenians found jarring. He layered comedy into tragedy, not for laughs, but for bathos (Greek for depth). The result was unsettling: tragedy that descended into raw human truth, with strange tonal shifts and anti-heroes. In this sense, Euripides was already writing psychological horror 2,400 years before the term existed.
A Woman Named Melina
Like Dionysus, Melina in Ecstasy emerges from the periphery. She is neither fully known nor knowable. She enters the resort community and begins to disrupt its calm, its routines, and its illusions of control. But unlike a typical antagonist, she doesn’t cause chaos—she invites it. She doesn’t seduce in the traditional sense; she awakens a kind of ecstatic rebellion.
The women in the novel start to shed their practiced stillness. Their lives become less curated, less "Instagrammable." They begin to shout, to sing, to run. One begins to write feverishly; another paints; another disappears into the cliffs. Pochoda builds this unraveling with remarkable restraint, letting the madness simmer beneath the prose. Readers familiar with The Bacchae will feel the dread mounting. Euripides ended his play with dismemberment. Pochoda brings that same emotional fragmentation, but updated for a modern age of curated appearances and silent dissatisfaction.
Literary Horror, Myth, and Bathos
What makes Ecstasy so compelling is that it doesn’t sit easily within any genre. It begins like a dreamy vacation novel, morphs into a feminist awakening, and descends into literary horror. Critics have compared it to Midsommar, but there are also echoes of The Secret History, White Lotus, and even Frankenstein. Melina is a monster of beauty, not unlike Shelley’s creature—crafted in response to a cold world, judged as monstrous for refusing to obey.
"What starts as a dreamy vacation novel becomes a slow burn of dread." —Washington Post review of Ecstasy
Pochoda’s novel invites us to reconsider what horror can do when it's informed by ancient myth. Her horror isn't grotesque for the sake of shock. It's something deeper. It mirrors the bathos that Euripides aimed for: that moment when things aren't just scary—they're unbearably true.
The Feminine and the Forbidden
The Bacchae, for all its ancient context, is essentially about what happens when society represses what it calls "feminine": emotion, ritual, vulnerability, ecstasy. Euripides wrote women with more complexity than most of his contemporaries. Ivy Pochoda follows this thread into the 21st century, but with new tools. Her women are powerful not because they are orderly or restrained, but because they are feral, contradictory, feeling everything all at once.
This is where the book's mythic structure meets its psychological depth. Pochoda doesn’t romanticize liberation. She lets it look messy. Melina's followers aren’t saints. They’re flawed, jealous, impulsive. But they are alive. Just as the women in The Bacchae leave Thebes to join Dionysus in the forest, Pochoda's characters abandon their social roles and lean into something ancient and unnameable.
Resurfaced Meaning: A Westbrae Lens
At Westbrae Literary Group, we value writing that re-activates meaning, that doesn’t just tell a story but re-sees what stories are for. Ecstasy does exactly that. It reminds us that ancient plays weren’t dusty museum pieces—they were shock art. They were meant to provoke, to startle, to awaken. Euripides wasn’t playing it safe. Neither is Ivy Pochoda.
In pairing myth with the modern world, Ecstasy reveals how little we’ve changed. We still fear wildness. We still shame emotional excess. We still want to keep the Dionysian at the edge of the city—unseen, untamed. But as both Euripides and Pochoda make clear: you can’t keep Dionysus out forever. Eventually, he comes down from the hills, and when he does, nothing will be the same.
Recommended Pairings
- Read alongside: Euripides’ Bacchae (trans. Anne Carson, if possible)
- Watch: Midsommar (Ari Aster), or Call Me by Your Name (for its sun-drenched decadence)
- Listen: Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever (an album inspired by ecstatic ritual)
Further Reading
- Washington Post review of Ecstasy
- Euripides’ The Bacchae (summary & context)
- More Westbrae Literary Group essays on genre & myth
Let us know what you think: Can literature still shock us into seeing ourselves more clearly? Can horror still heal? Can Dionysus still dance?
