Phèdre

“There is no doubt:

You love, you burn; you perish from an illness

Which you conceal.”

Hippolytus, like the other lovelorn characters of Racine’s play, has a companion and confidante (Theramenes) who easily reads his feelings, just as Aricia has the sisterly Ismene and Phaedra has the devious Oenone. In all three corners of the play’s love triangle—Hippolytus, Aricia, and Phaedra—the symptoms of love are described in similar symbolic terms: as a burning, an illness, or captivity (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“PHAEDRA. Since Venus so ordains,

Last and most wretched of my tragic race,

I too shall perish.

OENONE. Are you then in love?

PHAEDRA. All of love’s frenzies I endure.

OENONE. For whom?

PHAEDRA. You’re going to hear the last extreme of horror.

I love… I shudder at the fatal name…

I love…

OENONE. Whom do you love?

PHAEDRA. You know the son

Of the Amazon—the prince I’ve harshly used.

OENONE. Hippolytus! Great Gods!

PHAEDRA. ’Tis you have named him,

Not I.

OENONE. O righteous heaven! The blood in my veins

Is turned to ice. O crime! O hapless race!

Disastrous voyage! O unlucky coast!

Why did we travel to your perilous shores?”

Phaedra’s exchange here with her nurse Oenone imitates the stichomythia of Greek drama, in which two characters alternate lines of dialogue, an example of the way Racine reworks his ancient models. These key lines, in which Phaedra confesses her love for Hippolytus, highlight the link between Forbidden Love and Desire and The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate, with Phaedra and Oenone both attributing Phaedra’s feelings to the curse placed on Phaedra’s family by the love goddess Venus (Aphrodite).

“My lips implored the goddess, but I worshipped

Only Hippolytus.”

Phaedra characterizes her love for Hippolytus as a kind of “worship,” surpassing even her worship of the gods. Her hyperbolic way of speaking reflects the depths of her Forbidden Love and Desire, suggesting that she has long struggled to control herself. Later in the play, Phaedra’s jealousy over Hippolytus will lead her to stand quietly by as Theseus condemns him, suggesting that there is a difference between the unrequited “worship” felt by Phaedra and the deeper, reciprocated love that blossoms between Hippolytus and Aricia.

“To your advice

I let myself be drawn. Well, let me live,

If I can be restored to life; and if

My love for a son can in this grievous moment

Reanimate the rest of my weak spirits.”

Phaedra is torn throughout the play between her irresistible love for Hippolytus and The Importance of Honor and Duty, defined in no small part by her devotion to the rights and honor of her young son. In her impossible situation, Phaedra is prone to indecision and, on more than one occasion, this leads her to follow passively the dubious advice of Oenone, as she does here: “To your advice / I let myself be drawn.”

“The name of lover would offend his heart,

But yet he has a lover’s tender eyes,

If not his words.”

Ismene’s portrait of Hippolytus highlights his inner turmoil: Hippolytus is torn between his commitment to his chastity and his Forbidden Love and Desire for Aricia, which he cannot control any more than Phaedra can control her love/lust for Hippolytus. Hippolytus, like Phaedra, is betrayed by the physical symptoms of his love.

“Is it believable to you who know me

That the sad plaything of a pitiless fate,

Whose heart is fed on bitterness and tears,

Should be acquainted with the trivial griefs

Of love?”

Aricia, not unlike Phaedra, here casts herself as a “victim” of The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate, attributing her present suffering to the misfortune or misdeeds of her ancestors (in this case, her treasonous brothers). That fortune is fickle and can change rapidly was a commonplace of ancient drama and is an idea that Racine incorporates into his retelling of the Hippolytus myth—but though Aricia’s fortune does initially change for the better when she discovers that Hippolytus does love her, it ultimately changes again for the worse when Hippolytus is killed.

“O Gods! What do I hear?

Do you forget that Theseus is my father,

And you his wife?”

Hippolytus’s response to Phaedra’s revelation of her feelings for him is far from encouraging, and reflects his staunch belief in The Importance of Honor and Duty: He tries to remind Phaedra that Theseus is his “father / And [Phaedra] his wife,” recalling the familial ties that bind them in duty to one another. Significantly, however, this is the last time Hippolytus and Phaedra speak. After confessing her feelings, Phaedra does not give Hippolytus a chance to explain his side and his own feelings, contributing to the misunderstandings that culminate in the play’s sad outcome.

“Know Phaedra, then, and all her madness. Yes,

I love; but do not think that I condone it,

Or think it innocent; nor that I ever

With base complaisance added to the poison

Of my mad passion. Hapless victim of

Celestial vengeance, I abhor myself

More than you can. The gods are witnesses—

Those gods who kindled in my breast the flame

Fatal to all my blood, whose cruel boast

Was to seduce a weak and mortal heart.”

Phaedra, committed to the portrait of herself as a “victim,” does not make a serious attempt to win over Hippolytus, but takes it for granted that she is to be rejected and dishonored—this, after all, reflects her belief in The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate. She does not even present an alliance or marriage between herself and Hippolytus as advantageous to both of them, as Oenone had urged her to do. Phaedra’s passive acceptance of her fate—and of Hippolytus’s reaction—has catastrophic results, leading Phaedra to believe that her reputation will be destroyed by her confession, even though hearing Hippolytus out would have made it clear to her that he had no intention of betraying her confidence.

“But what have profited my useless pains?

You loathed me more: I did not love you less’

And your misfortunes lent you further charms.”

Phaedra’s words show that she misunderstands both Hippolytus’s attitude towards her and her feelings for Hippolytus. On the one hand, Hippolytus’s “loathing” for her is clearly exaggerated, as throughout the play Hippolytus’s attitude toward Phaedra is closer to one of respect, understanding, and even compassion than one of loathing. On the other hand, Phaedra’s own mistreatment of Hippolytus suggests that her feelings toward him are characterized more by desire and lust than by true love.

“Is it a great mischance to cease to live?

Death has no terror for the unfortunate.

I only fear the name I leave behind me.”

For Phaedra, losing one’s reputation is far worse than death—a position that she has reiterated throughout the play when considering The Importance of Honor and Duty. It is to preserve her good name that Phaedra will ultimately choose to die, though her great tragedy is ultimately that she dies too late: Had she ended her life before confessing her love, she would have really preserved her reputation, whereas by ending her life when she does, she dies abhorred by Theseus for what she has done.

“I see him

Even as a monster hideous to my eyes.”

Racine’s play is full of monsters: The monsters slain by Theseus, Phaedra’s husband and Hippolytus’s father; the monster that emerges from the sea to kill Hippolytus; and the monsters that people make of each other and of themselves. Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus has degenerated into hatred with so much speed that he now appears as a manifestation of the monster that is her lust.

“And to save your threatened honor

All must be sacrificed, including virtue.”

The paradox that Phaedra must sacrifice her “virtue” to preserve her “threatened honor” is the first indication that Oenone’s plan is flawed. Really all Oenone’s false accusation manages to do is preserve the semblance of Phaedra’s honor at the expense of her virtue—a compromise that Phaedra is ultimately unwilling to live with.

“I see Hippolytus. In his haughty eyes

I see my ruin written. Do what you will,

I resign myself to you. In my disorder,

I can do nothing for myself.”

Phaedra here falls once again into her characteristic helplessness, leaving her fate in the hands of Oenone (“I resign myself to you”). By evading her moral responsibility, Phaedra becomes no less guilty than the scheming Oenone, and it is thus no coincidence that the two of them finally meet exactly the same fate (namely, death by suicide).

“Ah! here he is. Great Gods! What eye, as mine,

Would not have been deceived? Why should the brow

Of a profane adulterer shine with virtue?

And should one not by certain signs perceive

The heart of villainous men?”

Theseus believes that there is a discrepancy between Hippolytus’s honorable self-presentation and his dishonorable actions, failing to realize that this discrepancy is illusory and that the appearance—in this case, at least—matches the reality. Hippolytus really is as virtuous as he seems, though it is telling that Theseus, the notorious philanderer, should see a bit of his own weakness in his son.

“With this black falsehood righteously incensed,

I would not speak the truth; but I suppress

A secret that would touch you too.”

Hippolytus demonstrates his commitment to The Importance of Honor and Duty precisely by his failure to defend himself, keeping Phaedra’s love for him a secret even when it might benefit him to betray her. In Euripides’s Hippolytus, Hippolytus keeps quiet because he has been bound to do so by oath; in Racine’s version, there is no oath, making Hippolytus’s resolve to keep the secret of a woman who has betrayed him all the more noteworthy.

“I loved you,

And feel that notwithstanding your offense

My heart is yearning for you in advance.

But it was you who forced me to condemn you.

Was ever father more outraged than I?

Just gods, you see the grief that overwhelms me.

How could I father such a guilty child?”

Theseus’s self-pitying speech, though full of tragic pathos, shows his misunderstanding of The Importance of Honor and Duty: If Theseus has been deceived, it is because of his own folly and his inability to listen and to understand his son and his son’s deepest values. That Theseus is “yearning” for his son “in advance” of his own sentence being carried out, moreover, highlights that Theseus reacted too quickly and without thinking.

“Repel, madam,

An unreal terror! Behold with other eyes

A venial fault. You love. One’s destiny

Cannot be overcome, and you were drawn

By a fatal spell. Is it a prodigy

Unknown before amongst us? And has love

Conquered no other hearts than yours alone?

You are a mortal—bow to mortals’ lot

The yoke that you bewail is nothing new:

The gods themselves—the dwellers on Olympus—

Who scare us from such crimes, have before now

Been scorched with lawless fires.”

Oenone’s last attempt to help Phaedra involves recasting her affliction in a new light, as a natural feeling that even gods cannot escape (this idea is prominent also in Seneca’s Phaedra). She depicts Forbidden Love and Desire as something one is passively subject to, calling it a “destiny / [That] Cannot be overcome” and urging Phaedra to “bow to mortals’ lot,” as even the gods themselves have “Been scorched with lawless fires” from time to time.

“My heart

Can be unbosomed only to the gods

And you. I could not hide from you—by this

Judge if I love you—all I would conceal

Even from myself.”

Hippolytus hides nothing only from Aricia, citing his openness with her as evidence of his love. The openness between Hippolytus and Aricia contrasts with the distance and secrecy between Hippolytus and Phaedra, suggesting that their Forbidden Love and Desire is, at heart, purer and more unjustly thwarted than that felt by Phaedra.

“Do you discriminate so ill, my lord,

’Twixt crime and innocence? Must a hateful cloud

Conceal his virtue from your eyes alone,

Which brightly shines for others?”

Aricia defends Hippolytus to Theseus, making him think about how he alone can fail to recognize his son’s honorable nature when it is so obvious to everybody else. In the end, though, Hippolytus’s innocence will do nothing to save him, and Theseus, Phaedra, and even the gods will be complicit in his death.

“Perhaps

I have believed unfaithful witnesses

And raised too soon towards thee my cruel hands.

By what despair now will my prayers be followed.”

By the time Theseus begins to consider that he may have judged Hippolytus too hastily, it is already too late. Theseus has been misled by his own impulsiveness to bring about the death of an innocent man, an outcome that could have easily been prevented had he investigated properly and allowed Hippolytus to defend himself.

“‘The heavens,’ said he, ‘now snatch my guiltless life.

Look after Aricia when I am dead.

Dear friend, if my father one day learns the truth,

And weeps the tragic ending of a son

Falsely accused, in order to appease

My blood and plaintive ghost, tell him to treat

His captive kindly’”

Even as he is dying, Hippolytus’s last thought is of Aricia and of upholding The Importance of Honor and Duty towards her, highlighting his honorable nature to the last. Theseus, repentant when he learns the truth, does do as Hippolytus asks and commits to treating Aricia kindly after Hippolytus’s death.

“My son! dear hope

Now taken from me! Inexorable gods,

Too well indeed you have fulfilled your word!

To what remorse my life is now reserved!”

Theseus mourns Hippolytus’s death as soon as he hears about it—even before Phaedra confirms that the story about his assault of her was false. Just as Theseus was quick to judge Hippolytus, he is also quick to mourn him, an indication of the same impulsivity that caused his tragedy in the first place.

“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.”

Even Theseus’s grief is a testimony to his self-importance, with Theseus reflecting that his punishment will be worse precisely because of his “very fame” and because of the gods’ prominent role in his life. By placing some of the blame for Hippolytus’s death on the gods, moreover, Theseus at least partially exonerates himself, blaming the gods for the “honors” and “murderous favors” they have given him, echoing The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate in the play by depicting himself as doomed by external forces.