40 pages • 1 hour read
Jean RacinePhèdre
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1677A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Act Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
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Important Quotes
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BetaThemes
Forbidden Love and Desire
Forbidden love and desire—and their destructive consequences—are at the heart of Racine’s Phèdre. Phaedra exemplifies the consuming nature of forbidden love and desire in her vain pursuit of Hippolytus, but Hippolytus also succumbs to the power of forbidden love when he falls for Aricia, a political enemy of his father’s. Though Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus and Hippolytus’s love for Aricia are very different kinds of love—for one, Hippolytus’s love is reciprocated while Phaedra’s is not—they are both doomed, and both have fatal consequences for the royal family in the play.
From early on in the play, Phaedra’s passionate feelings for Hippolytus and the symptoms of these feelings are depicted very vividly. To everybody else, Phaedra appears ill. Before Phaedra first enters the stage, Oenone describes her still-mysterious illness as a “continual disorder” and “restless affliction” (183) that causes her to be weak and faint. Phaedra herself speaks of her condition as a kind of madness, referring to “[her] lost reason” (187) and asking Oenone to “serve [her] passion / And not [her] reason” (201). Oenone tells her on a few occasions that her love is inappropriate, not only because it is adulterous but because its object is her stepson (“you feed a flame / That ought to be put out” [200]) and Hippolytus himself, of course, rejects Phaedra on precisely these grounds. Phaedra also knows that her love is inappropriate, that it “foully wrongs” her husband Theseus (202), but she is simply unable to control herself, seeing herself as the “victim” of fate and of the gods of love.
The most notable testament to the power of love in Racine’s play is its hold over Hippolytus. Ancient authorities always made Hippolytus a virgin devoted to the Greek nature goddess Artemis (Diana in Roman religion). In Racine’s Phèdre, Hippolytus is still sexually abstinent, but for the first time he is in love—not with Phaedra, but with Aricia, a daughter of the traitor Pallas and a political enemy of his father Theseus. If this love is forbidden, it is not because it is taboo in the same way as Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus—it is simply a matter of politics. More than anything, it reflects Theseus’s harshness: Despite the guilt of her father and brothers, Aricia has not done anything to undermine Theseus’s authority. Similarly, though Hippolytus, like Phaedra, cannot control his feelings, he can and does control his actions. Thus, Ismene can read love for Aricia in Hippolytus’s face:
The name of lover would offend his heart,
But yet he has a lover’s tender eyes,
If not his words (190).
Hippolytus does not succumb to the physical weakness or frantic symptoms that characterize Phaedra’s love for him, and he does not speak of his love until it is appropriate to do so: After his father is (allegedly) dead, or when he is about to go into exile. Aricia returns Hippolytus’s feelings, and the two of them even make plans to marry. This suggests another difference between their love on the one hand and Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus on the other: Hippolytus and Aricia seem to truly love each other, while Phaedra, who brings about Hippolytus’s death when he rejects her, seems to feel desire and lust more than love. Both loves, however, are ultimately doomed by their forbidden nature at the play’s end.
The Relationship Between Heredity and Fate
Fate or destiny is an important force in Racine’s Phèdre, as it is in many classical tragedies. In Racine’s play, fate is closely tied to the idea of heredity: the idea that a family’s fortunes—whether good or bad—pass down from one generation to the next. Most of the characters of the play are haunted in some way by a hereditary fate.
Phaedra, a descendant of the sun god, is an especially good example of this. There was an ancient tradition that the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite (or Venus in Roman sources) hated the sun god Helios (Roman Sol) and placed a curse on his descendants, who would always fall prey to inappropriate passions. The most famous of these inappropriate passions was the one that afflicted Pasiphae, Phaedra’s mother, when she fell in love with her husband Minos’ prize bull, consummated her love, and bore the monstrous Minotaur. Phaedra, afflicted in the play with an inappropriate love of her own, views herself as another “victim” of her family’s fate, speaking of the sun as the “Author of my sad race, thou of whom my mother / Boasted herself the daughter” (183) and of the “hate of Venus and her fatal wrath” (186) while referring to herself as the “Hapless victim of / Celestial vengeance” (198). Nor is Phaedra the only one who interprets her love this way: Hippolytus himself, in his abortive defense in Act IV, reminds his father that Phaedra’s “race” is “more filled / With horrors than mine is” (211).
Phaedra is not the only character burdened by the weight of heredity. Aricia, in a different way, suffers in the play for the guilt of her relatives when Theseus forbids her to marry because her brothers once tried to take power from him. Aricia, as Hippolytus points out, comes from a “fatal race that has conspired / Against us” (180), and this alone is enough to define her destiny, her own innocence notwithstanding.
Hippolytus also suffers from the burden of heredity and lineage. Since his mother was an Amazon and not the wife of his father, he is not generally regarded as Theseus’s legitimate heir, despite being his eldest son. More urgent, however, is Hippolytus’s anxiety to prove himself to his famous father, to fight monsters and evildoers and to show to the world that he is a “Son worthy of a noble father” (198). He echoes similar sentiments later in the play, as when he professes his desire to “Prove to all the world / I was [Theseus’s] son” (205), and to be “a worthy son / Of a heroic father” (222). Hippolytus never gets the opportunity to achieve this. Despite his bravery in fighting against the monster from the sea, he is killed before he can perform heroic deeds to match those of Theseus—even though in moral stature Hippolytus’s virtue far exceeds that of his impulsive and cruel father.
The Importance of Honor and Duty
Honor and duty are indispensable in the world of Racine’s Phèdre, though each character has somewhat different definitions of these values. In particular, Hippolytus and Phaedra exhibit contrasting approaches to honor and duty, fueling the central conflict of the tragedy.
For Racine’s Hippolytus, not unlike his ancient antecedents, honor and duty are innate qualities, driving his actions throughout the play. At the play’s opening, Hippolytus says that he must go to seek his father because, in doing so, “I do my duty” (179, emphasis added). He goes to see Phaedra, who has often tormented him, because “my duty thus ordains” (182, emphasis added). When Theseus is reported dead, Hippolytus’s first thought is not to augment his own power but to look out for the best interests of the kingdom, telling Theramenes, “Whatever the cost / Let’s put the scepter into worthy hands” (199, emphasis added). For Hippolytus, acting according to the dictates of duty and honor are of primary importance, even when he suffers for it or it goes against his own advantages.
Hippolytus thus wishes to be truly virtuous instead of merely seeming so, and if he is ever proud, it is because he is confident that he has attained his ideal. As Hippolytus tells Theseus when he is accused of rape:
I do not wish to give
Too favorable a picture of myself;
But if some virtue’s fallen to my share,
My lord, I think that I have clearly shown
My hatred of the crimes imputed to me.
By this Hippolytus is known in Greece.
I’ve pushed my virtue to the edge of harshness.
My moral inflexibility is known.
The day’s not purer than my inmost heart (210).
Hippolytus keeps Phaedra’s secret even when faced with banishment and death because he believes that to betray her confidences would be dishonorable and inflict even more pain upon his father—something that his sense of filial duty will simply not allow. He instead trusts his reputation, repeating what is commonly “known” about him throughout the kingdom (“By this Hippolytus is known in Greece . . . My moral inflexibility is known”). Hippolytus’s tragedy is that he pushes his sense of duty even at the expense of self-preservation and the revelation of the truth: that Phaedra has framed him out of thwarted love.
Phaedra’s sense of honor and duty, on the other hand, is largely external: Throughout the play, she is more preoccupied with her reputation than with her actual conduct. It is primarily to keep her good name that Phaedra keeps her love for Hippolytus secret. Since Phaedra wants ultimately to appear good—to others as well as to herself—she is able to lie about Hippolytus’s actions, viewing this as the only way to maintain her honor, even if to maintain the appearance of honor Phaedra must behave dishonorably. At the same time, Phaedra is not without a strong sense of duty: She initially tries to suppress her feelings for Hippolytus precisely because she is a dutiful wife. At the end of the play, she dismisses Oenone for causing her to “forget [her] duty” (215). Above all, Phaedra is motivated by her duty to her son. This is why she propositions Hippolytus the way she does, by suggesting an alliance to control the kingdom: “My love for a son can in this grievous moment / Reanimate the rest of my weak spirits” (189). Phaedra ultimately places her honor and her maternal responsibilities above her feelings for Hippolytus, and even above her own life, with the same results: Both end up dying by the play’s end.
