In Phèdre, as my students didn’t fail to notice, the fatality seems even more internalized. The heroine tightens the trap into which she has fallen with every word she utters and with every act she commits. From the moment she confesses her forbidden love to her confidant, Oenone, Phèdre sets herself on an irreversible course of self-destruction. When she approaches her stepson, Hippolyte, it is not her intention to declare her passion for him.
The declaration pours out against her conscious will. By the time she becomes aware of the fact that she is stripping herself bare before her horrified stepson, it is too late to stop. To save her sullied honour, she allows Oenone to slander Hippolyte. Then, overcome with guilt over this ghastly decision, she is on the verge of denouncing herself to her husband, Thésée. However, just when Phèdre is about to regain control of herself, recover her dignity, and confess her wrongdoing, she learns from the very man she was ready to cuckold that his son is in love with another woman.
Devoured now by jealousy, her noble intention is nullified. Blaming the gods and her loyal servant, Oenone, for the terrible crisis into which she has sunk, she allows herself to be submerged by the idea of her cruel fate instead of rushing forward to save Hippolyte from his father’s fury. All that is left for her to do, then, is to poison herself in a final act of self-loathing and admit to her husband in her dying breath that his son was innocent.
The pessimism expressed in this play appears utterly despairing and implacable. Nevertheless, as I emphasized to my class, the subtext, if one deciphers it attentively, reveals something very different and quite exalting. Phèdre often deplores her helplessness in coping with her guilty passion. She accuses the gods of having programmed her to commit the irreparable. Yet simultaneously she judges herself mercilessly and condemns her transgressions, thereby implying that she does indeed possess the free will necessary to combat her apparent predestination. If she were really the slave of her erotic lusts and powerless to resist them, the notion of freedom to choose one’s course of action would be meaningless.
The tragedy, then, places us at a crucial crossroads. On the one hand, man seems condemned by a cruel fate to commit actions of which he is ashamed. On the other hand, he possesses the necessary energy and lucidity to fight it if only he is willing to make use of these resources. How many modern pop artists or rappers, I asked my students, could present the contradictions of our human condition in such a stunning light? After several months of classes with me, they were ready to agree.
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