Phèdre

The fifth and final Act of the play is marked by a pervasive parallelism and juxtaposition: The burgeoning but doomed relationship between Hippolytus and Aricia parallels and juxtaposes the marriage—no less doomed—of Theseus and Phaedra; the suicide of Oenone parallels and prefigures the suicide of Phaedra; the guilt of Phaedra parallels the remorse of Theseus. These parallels bring a sense of symmetry and balance to the play as it arrives at its disastrous denouement and concludes its meditation on the themes of Forbidden Love and Desire, The Importance of Honor and Duty, and The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate.

A positive portrayal of Forbidden Love and Desire is that which blossoms in the play between Hippolytus and Aricia. Their tender and mutual bond has everything that the marriage of Theseus and Phaedra lacks. Nowhere is the juxtaposition between these two romantic relationships clearer than in the final Act, which begins in Scene 1 with a scene full of pathos and youthful innocence between Hippolytus and Aricia, and ends in Scene 6 with an ugly scene between Theseus and the dying Phaedra.

Hippolytus and Aricia reciprocate one another’s feelings and clearly respect each other. Hippolytus, unlike Theseus, has not had any previous lovers, and even his desires for Aricia are essentially chaste: When he asks her to run away with him, he wants first to marry her, for he has “too much care for [her] renown” (217) to even consider doing otherwise. Theseus, on the other hand, is notoriously unfaithful as a husband, and at no point shows any sign of genuine affection for Phaedra. Likewise, Phaedra herself loves and desires not Theseus, but his son Hippolytus. When Hippolytus dies, Aricia weeps and grieves terribly; when Phaedra dies, Theseus hopes coldly that “the memory of her black deed / Could perish with her” (225). Different as these two examples of love are, they both end the same way: in loss. Venus, as Phaedra has said throughout the play, is a cruel goddess.

Death by suicide is another prominent fixture in the final Act, with both Phaedra and Oenone taking their own lives. In both cases, death by suicide arises from a sense of The Importance of Honor and Duty. Oenone seemingly throws herself into the sea because she has given everything to serving Phaedra and cannot find meaning away from her presence, while Phaedra ends her life because she sees this as the only way to restore some semblance of her damaged honor. Her death, she tells Theseus as she dies, will restore the “purity” (225) that she has tainted. However, neither Oenone nor Phaedra can undo anything by dying: The innocent Hippolytus has already been killed, leaving Aricia and Theseus desolate. When Oenone and Phaedra could have taken action to change things, they did nothing. Their suicides reflect a sense of honor through a display of remorse, but their remorse is unsuccessful in recouping the honor they have lost. Neither woman will be mourned the way Hippolytus is, as Aricia and Theseus recognize his honorable conduct and his innocence. Oenone and Phaedra, by contrast, remain shunned even in death.

The fateful, guilty ending of Racine’s play results from a tragedy borne of family relationships, echoing the play’s concerns with The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate. Phaedra’s lie and Theseus’s hasty judgment both contribute to Hippolytus’s death, and both Phaedra and Theseus—who each loved Hippolytus in their own way—are equally guilty. Nevertheless, they suffer different fates: Phaedra, “Baring [her] remorse” (224), takes her own life, while Theseus must go on living:

Everything seems to rise

Against my injustice. Even my very fame

Augments my punishment. Less known of men,

I could the better hide. I hate the honors

The gods bestow upon me; and I’m going

To mourn their murderous favors, and no more

Tire them with useless prayers. Whate’er they granted,

Would never compensate me for the loss

Of what they’ve taken away (224).

Theseus assigns some of the blame to the gods, and in some sense the gods are complicit in the tragedy: Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus can perhaps be attributed to the goddess Venus, and it is Neptune who sends the monster that kills Hippolytus. However, Neptune kills Theseus only at Theseus’s own behest: Theseus cannot clear his name so easily. Likewise, even if Phaedra could not control how she felt, she could have controlled her actions—and this she decidedly failed to do. Whatever role the gods or fate have in the play, the results of the characters’ own acts of agency thus suggest that they still share a portion of moral responsibility for the tragedy that has occurred.