The Love That Kills: Phaedra’s Challenges to a Philosophy of Eros

Abstract

Focusing on the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus as developed in Euripides and Seneca and especially in Racine’s Phèdre and taking into account as well its further development in works by Camillo Boito, Luchino Visconti, and Yukio Mishima, I make the following arguments: (1) Contrary to many theologians and philosophers of love, a pathological form of love that issues in murder and suicide should not be regarded as unworthy of serious attention. Racine’s tragedy provides a catharsis for universal experiences of unrequited love and jealousy, a major human phenomenon. (2) Contrary to Paul Valéry, Phèdre’s love cannot be called merely animal, since the analytical insight she develops into her morbid passion carries tremendous moral force and lies at the origin of the European psychological novel, as launched by Madame de La Fayette a year later. (3) Contrary to François Mauriac, even if she is a heroine of desire or concupiscence rather than of “true love” (in contrast to the relatively innocent affections of Hippolyte and Aricie), the incredible beauty of her language resists such an easy categorization. (4) Study of concrete presentations of “love” in literature confirms that the meaning and use of this word is marked by an irreducible pluralism. Philosophical and theological analysis of love has to come to terms with this. (5) The role of a work of art, in crystallizing archetypical emotions and situations in a way that carries authority, is to provide the middle ground between the abstractions of philosophy on the one hand and the uncontrollable diversity of the empirical on the other. Even psychologies or sociologies of love, which claim to be close to the concrete data, need to be anchored in and corrected by the special concrete vision that only great literature can bring.

1. Introduction

Focusing on the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus as developed in Euripides and Seneca and especially in Racine’s Phèdre, I identify two challenges to a philosophy of love.

If one postulates that the passion of Phaedra is indeed a form of Love and refuses to dismiss it as simply immoral concupiscence or pathological obsession, this has unsettling consequences for efforts to define love in philosophical terms. To limit the use of the word “love” to what moral or psychological orthodoxy prescribes would clash with Racine’s vocabulary, which consistently names the heroine’s passion as “love” (amour), and also with the spectators’ experience of catharsis as they see their own experiences of frustrated love exhibited in the drama. In Phaedra and her avatars, the philosopher is invited to recognize the essence of erotic love even in decadent and violent contexts. In a paradoxical dialectic, which thwarts the desire for philosophical transparency, love itself is shown to become obsession, hatred, murderous, and suicidal, without ceasing to be love.

The second challenge is of a methodological or hermeneutical order. Plunging into the Phaedra tradition, the philosopher is invited to engage with a specifically literary mode of thinking, which cannot be integrated without remainder into philosophy. When a literary work succeeds in crystallizing archetypical emotions and situations in a way that carries authority, it provides coherent view that makes it a middle ground between the abstractions of philosophy (and the human sciences) on the one hand and the uncontrollable diversity of the empirical on the other. The literary illumination and interrogation of love (especially in such problematic forms as the Phaedra legend highlights) will resist the received judgements of philosophers and psychologists and may alter their sense of values.

2. The Violent Proclivities of Love

Philosophies of love tend to be rather bland, rarely adverting to the darker aspects of what is called love. The foremost philosopher of eros was less guarded: “those who are servants of Ares and followed in his train, when they have been seized by Love (hup’Erōtos halōsin) and think they have been wronged in any way by the beloved, become murderous and are ready to sacrifice (kathiereuein) themselves and the beloved (ta paidika)”.1 The Greeks knew that Eros was the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, and that much of its vocabulary is martial. Christian thinkers have been happy to agree that pagan erōs can behave violently, unlike the agapē celebrated by St. Paul and St. John, which provides the basis for a theology of love (something that seems to be in short supply at the moment),2 but which cannot be addressed adequately under the rubric of “philosophy”. Choosing instead to focus on what might seem a decadent or frivolous topic, I approach it through its most perfect literary treatment, Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677), a work whose classical lucidity takes us close to the realm of penetrating philosophical insight. Both philosophers and theologians, for different reasons, make their own the dictum humani nil a me alienum,3 and literature allows them to plunge into the thick of the human. But conversely, since the human is mixed up with so much that is problematic or evil, literary criticism needs to be supplemented with a searching philosophical and theological critique.

In Europe, an Italian man assured me, love is out of date. Once the staple of pop music—“love me tender, love me true”—it seems to have been replaced by morbid musings on death. Pope Francis has a canny comment in his recent encyclical Dilexit nos: “a relationship not shaped by the heart is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism. Two monads may approach one another, but they will never truly connect. A society dominated by narcissism and self-centredness will increasingly become ‘heartless.’ This will lead in turn to the ‘loss of desire’” [2] (#17). How would this comment apply to the story of Phaedra, the classical archetype of destructive one-sided love, and its many modern avatars? “Would you agree that Phèdre’s love for Hippolyte is ‘true love’?” asked a fellow student of French literature (in the throes, perhaps, of a crush). “How can it be, when it kills him, and her?” I replied, unreflectingly. In fact, I now think that my fellow student was right. What Racine sets before us is a universal experience of love. This love first appears (in Act 1) in the form of acute love-sickness, since its object is unattainable and forbidden (implying incest and adultery). It cowers in a climate of guilt and shame, yet it is a relief for the heroine when it is brought to the light. In Act 2 her one-sided love runs up against reality and is exposed to a painful shock of rejection. Officially, it turns to hate: “Je le vois comme un monstre effroyable à mes yeux” (l. 884),4 but it is substantially the same passion. In Act 4 a further trauma is added by the discovery that she has a rival, and her love is transmuted again, into the pain of jealousy, which again sparks murderous rage. The seamless movement through successive states of a single passion builds on elements the spectators will find in their own experience, inviting a sympathetic identification with the heroine even as she lunges into crime.

In fact there are countless other love stories that lead straight to murder or suicide. When the couple in a famous roman noir of 1934 resolve on the murder of the inconvenient husband: “I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church”. When the crime is committed, “Next thing I knew, I was down there with her, and we were staring in each other’s eyes, and locked in each other’s arms…. Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to have her”. In the messy aftermath, they remember this as a peak experience: “We were up so high, Frank. We had it all, out there, that night…. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have”5 [4] (Cain, pp. 17, 46, 85–86). The murderous couple in Nathanael Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun likewise wander through the nocturnal streets of Rome in ecstasy. Henry James was struck by this: “every one will remember the figure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime”. He praises “the pages describing the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam’s eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, afterwards, of the guilty couple, through the ‘blood-stained streets of Rome’” [5] (pp. 167, 169). Should such criminal destinies of love be dismissed as merely perverse or pathological? In literature, they certainly insist on our attention, and I shall argue that they merit it in philosophy and theology as well. The phenomenon of love, wherever it emerges, merits close phenomenological attention, and also demands of us that we respect its inherent dignity, though moralists and courts of law see only matter for condemnation.6

All love seeks an ontological connection, an ontological exchange with the beloved. The love of charity can flourish in marriage and parenthood or in the communion of the body of Christ in which we are “members one of another” (Romans 12:5). It continues to put forth loving energy even when unreciprocated: “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). Yet queer sorts of love, such as that uniting the murderous couples in the two novels quoted above, or such as the thrill of adoration that a fascist mob feels for its abusive leader, also create an ontological bond, not quite matching the Pope’s diagnosis that “Two monads may approach one another, but they will never truly connect”. These loves may be idolatrous, but they are not “heartless” for they are truly heart-stirring. The mob are deeply moved when the fascist leader salutes them from the heart.7 Racine’s obsessed heroine uses the word cœur many times: “Dans le fond de mon cœur vous ne pouviez pas lire” (l. 598).8 Not only agapē, which “lays down its life” (as in John 15:13), but all sorts of love find supreme expression in death. The majority of operas end with some variant of the formula: “love kills”. If this is worthy of philosophical reflection, one need only list the victims of tragic passion that litter the operatic stage to have a casebook for such reflection. Lovers practice self-immolation (Norma, Donizetti’s Edgar, Gilda, Werther), or become murderers (Lucia, Otello, Don José, Salome), or yearn to be united in death (Tristan and Isolde, Aida and Radames, Andrea Chenier and Maddalena). The spectacle of human beings powerfully drawn to one another, braving death or embracing it, is not alien to Scripture: “Love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave” (Song of Solomon 8:6). It is bound to thrill existential philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. What does it tell us about the nature of existence and of being? If eros makes such absolute claims, this suggests that the absolute or ultimate reality would have love as one of its characteristics or modes, as Schelling thought, and as Plato and Plotinus would agree.

3. A Seductive Legend

Love spurned or betrayed may instinctively reach for the dagger, as happened not far from my house in Tokyo last year. Such murderous love can reach monstrous proportions, as with Salome in Oscar Wilde’s play and Richard Strauss’s opera or in the ferocious Noh play Dōjōji in which Kiyohime’s unrequited passion turns her into a fire-breathing serpent. Kōri Torihiko produced a modernized version of this, as did Yukio Mishima, prompted by Kōri’s example.9 In more vulgar reaches of Japanese art, the figure of Oiwa, another murderous lover, created in the wildly successful Kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan in 1825, is a staple of Japanese grand guignol and supernatural horror movies.10 In Western films like Play Misty for Me (1971) or Fatal Attraction (1987), such obsessed women may be handled without sympathy, as dangerous stalkers, to be stamped out like cockroaches or thoroughly exorcized like vampires. Should the philosopher descend even to this level and find ontological dignity in the stalker’s passion? Ever since Euripides, the figure of Phaedra has seduced spectators into identification with her agonies of unrequited love for her athletic son-in-law, and even into a transgressive sympathy with her as she proceeds to destroy him by accusing him of attempted rape.11

The Phaedra story was a hieros logos for the worship of Hippolytus as a god in Troezen.12 It enters literary history with Euripides’ Hippolytus Veiled of which only fragments survive; this play shocked the Athenians, especially the scene where Phaedra confesses her passion for Hippolytus directly to him (perhaps causing him to veil himself out of shame). Sophocles, in another lost play, lent the heroine nobility in resisting her evil passion. In Euripides’ second, extant version, Hippolytus Crowned, Phaedra narrates how she tried to use her reason or common sense (γνώμη) to resist her passion. To save her own and her family’s honour against the love-sickness sent by vengeful Aphrodite, she undertakes a hunger strike and wins the esteem of Artemis for her γενναιότης (nobility), ll. 1300-01. In this version, it is her nurse who reveals Phaedra’s love to Hippolytus. Euripides had a rich philosophical culture and his influence on philosophers all the way down to Nietzsche offers a wide field for research.13

Seneca’s play Hippolytus (also titled Phaedra) portrays the unhappy queen as governed by reckless passion, which she aggressively confesses to its object (ll. 589-718). Seneca “probably had access to the first Hippolytus of Euripides, which privileged a passionate Phaedra without limits…, ignoring the innovations of Hippolytus Crowned, notably the initial avowal and the role of the nurse as tempter” [11] (p. 318). Seneca keeps the heroine on the stage until the end, no doubt to provide the audience with an unfailing supply of transgressive thrills. From his Stoic perspective, her behaviour is reprehensible, but also instructive; he makes the nurse quite a moralist, more serious than Racine’s Œnone: “To what end art thou hasting, wretched woman? Why heap fresh infamy upon thy house and outsin thy mother?” (ll. 142-3; trans. F. J. Miller). Yet Seneca’s Phaedra, like Racine’s heroine, wins the spectator’s sympathetic identification, even when she admits: “I know nurse, that what thou sayest is true; but passion forces me to take the worser path, furor cogit sequi peiora. With full knowledge my soul moves on to the abyss” (ll. 177-9).

From this cornucopia of toxic, illicit love, Racine selected the most excruciating highlights. He is the only author to have Phaedra confess her passion both to the nurse, Œnone (Act 1) and to its object, Hippolyte (Act 2); he added to the mix the agony of jealousy sparking murderous rage (Act 4). As he rightly boasts in his preface, he never loses his moral bearings: in this play “the least faults are severely punished; the mere thought of crime is regarded with as much horror as the crime itself”. Yet the text is free of heavy-handed moralizing. The love by which Phèdre is swept along is a more powerful current than any other and has the best lines. Her love is criminal, yet at no point does Racine cheapen it by facile branding. Philosophers wishing to reflect on pathologies of love may bow to the expertise of psychologists. But they might find more lucid focus and more depth of significance in the classical literary treatments of the Phaedra legend, particularly Racine’s, which is the densest synthesis of all its elements. His play would reward philosophical contemplation, which it has not received. Theologians, too, have taken little notice, ever since the Jansenist master Antoine Arnauld’s (1612–1694) imperceptive reaction. For both philosophy and theology, study of the play would get properly underway with the recognition that it is really a play about love, not just about uncontrolled passion or a form of insanity.

In Racine’s “theater of passions”, the majority of the leading characters are preoccupied by love, in close vicinity to blood and death [12] (pp. 111–150). Paul Bénichou stressed that “Racine broke the tradition by introducing into tragedy a violent and murderous love, opposed on every point to courtly habits” [13] (p. 101). His sedulous scrutiny of the classical sources, following the neoclassical urge to absorb, enhance, and critique previous tradition (chiefly Euripides and Seneca in Phèdre, but Virgil too, in the frequent references to the Underworld; and also the six previous French dramatizations of the story), never becomes merely pedantic nor is it allowed to deflect his steady aim at poetic intensity. The control and formality of neoclassical tragedy might seem bound to impart a deathly chill, but in Racine’s hands the stately structure becomes a purring machine fuelled by passion. The play is not a cold monument but a smouldering volcano. Racine’s withdrawal from the stage after composing it, at the age of thirty-eight, indicates that he had perfected his formula and had nothing essential to add. He had poured his all into it. It is written in blood: “Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit”.14 Youth ended here, and it was time for him to adopt the domestic, pious lifestyle of his later years.

William Blake, in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, wrote of Milton: “he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” [15] (p. 35). But Milton surely knew very well that the passions he ascribes to Satan were his own, which is why he gives Satan and the other devils the most eloquent lines ever penned in English. Racine, likewise, knows very well that he is of Phèdre’s party, at the level of emotional identification, and it is this that enables him to give her the most piercing lines of French verse. In both cases the passions are contained by the structure of the works, which imposes a moral order. Armchair psychologists might dismiss Phèdre as hysterical and Satan as obsessive, but the poets cannot be so complacent about the forces they have unleashed. In whipping up vaulting ambition and monstrous love to extremes of self-intoxication, they risk blowing their artistic construction sky-high. But both Milton and Racine are always thinking, always conscious of a host of classical and other literary references, and always capable of articulating the emotional and moral stakes in a diction that weds lucidity and beauty. The astonishing wealth of allusion to biblical, classical, French, and Italian literature in Milton is matched more discreetly by Racine, with both poets absorbing as much as possible of previous tradition to give their own verse uncanny potency. Comments like Blake’s may mislead, for these well-equipped and self-conscious artists enjoy their tasks, just as we, their readers enjoy the result, and they can manage the emotional elements as a painter manages colours.15

4. A Crystalline Analysis

The art of discreet allusion makes Racine’s text inexhaustible, for new associations can surface at any moment His diction is saturated with discreet keywords such as voir, vue (117 occurrences), mourir, mort, mortel (69), oeil, yeux (68), aimer, amour, amoureux, aimable (56), cœur (44), sang, sanglant (39), crime, criminel (34), jour (32), ciel (28), monstre (18), feu (17), flamme (12), which never become dull repetition, but produce a hypnotic effect as the words are uttered with unerring aptness each time. The thoroughness of his analysis and interrogation of the phenomenon he is exhibiting is closely connected with the perfection of the language and the thorough exploitation of these recurrent leitmotifs. Philosophers and theologians who wish to take up Racine’s vision of love must begin with the intensive reflection thus embedded in the text at the micro-level of its diction. We might call the kind of reflection pursued in Racine and his sources, and also in the long tradition of later treatments of the Phaedra theme, proto-philosophical. It awaits philosophical appropriation and explicit critical articulation in properly philosophical terms. Freud and Lacan, in their psychoanalytical readings, set a headline for philosophical and theological readers, not least in their sharp-sighted attention to the letter of the texts.

Racine’s characters may often seem bloodless and bodiless to readers or spectators today, but one of the features that make his Phèdre exceptional is her overwhelming physical presence. Every part of her body is named in vibrant, intimate terms: yeux, genoux, mains, cœur, veines, pleurs, larmes, front, flanc, esprits, sens, soupirs, oreille, sein; her physical reactions are conveyed in potent verbs: voir, rougir, respirer, pâlir, transir, brûler, saigner, languir, sentir, s’exhaler, expirer, être dévorée, embrassée; her physical states in telling nouns: force, feu, flamme, fureur, trouble, blessure, ardeur, chaleur, transports. Again, a philosophy of love in dialogue with Racine cannot airbrush this intense physicality. It must not be ashamed to think physically, as the ancient Greek philosophers of eros did.

Each leitmotif becomes a thread to explore the labyrinth of love, and Racine’s artistry holds them all firmly in hand. For instance, the motif of day (jour) never sounds without beauty and significance, from its first appearance at line 46, “Lasse enfin d’elle-même et du jour qui l’éclaire”16 to the devastating last words of the heroine, “Rend au jour qu’ils souillaient toute sa pureté…”.17 As in Wagner, the impact grows as we recognize the motival status of the word and the web of its connections. Phaedra, etymologically “the shining one”, is a descendant of the sun. But in Racine, Hippolyte moves in bright day, whereas Phèdre’s guilt-ridden passion, like that of her mother Pasiphaé, belongs to the dark entrails of the Labyrinth, into which she would bring Hippolyte; but in contrast to Euripides, it is not he, but she, who is the primary victim of Venus’s rage. She imagines that the sun blushes at her behaviour:

Noble et brillant auteur d’une triste famille,

Toi, dont ma mère osait se vanter d’être fille,

Qui peut-être rougis du trouble où tu me vois,

Soleil, je te viens voir pour la dernière fois.

(ll. 169-72)18

Phèdre is a mass of suffering. Her love has made the entire universe a source of pain; all things, including especially the light of day, conspire together to torture her: “Tout m’afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire” (l. 161).19 Note in that line how the syllabic music wins from the spectator a gasp of admiration even as it makes us feel her grief. Pathos and poetic prowess—in those hovering circumflexes and lingering mute “e”s20—similarly blend in “Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fütes laissée” (l. 254).21 Writhing in shame, Phèdre dreads the exposure of her dark agony to the light of day. The light is desired, but it is painful when seen: “Vous haïssez le jour que vous veniez chercher” (l. 168).22 Hippolyte can sum up his own character to perfection in twelve monosyllables: “Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon cœur” (l. 1112).23 The magic of this line resides in the music of the vocalic progression, jour, pur, fond, cœur, and is increased when we realize that these are four thematic keywords.

Racine finely differentiates the passion of the night:

Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée:

C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée.

J’ai conçu pour mon crime une juste terreur.

J’ai pris la vie en haine, et ma flamme en horreur.

Je voulais en mourant prendre soin de ma gloire,

Et dérober au jour une flamme si noire.

(ll. 305-10)24

from daylight love, so eloquent though untutored:

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit….

Songez que je vous parle une langue étrangère,

Et ne rejetez pas des vœux mal exprimés,

Qu’Hippolyte sans vous n’aurait jamais formés.

(ll. 543, 558-60)25

The contrast of these two love-musics is lost if the producer or reader of the play subscribes to Paul Valéry’s perception of Phèdre as consigning all the other characters to insignificance, so that we forget them immediately: “they have ceased to pretend to be, never having been except to serve the chief purpose.… They do not survive, but She survives. The work is reduced in memory to a monologue” [19] (p. 500). In contrast, Paul Claudel, successful playwright and inheritor of Racine’s fauteuil at the Académie Française, praises Jean-Louis Barrault for filling out the entire canvas. “Thanks to the importance that he has restored to the role of Œnone, the first act became for me one of the great revelations of my artistic life”, while Hippolyte emerges as a “martyr of purity”, whose nobility in death is a “liberating ray” amid “the darkness of ancient fatality” [18] (p. 464). Valéry might think that a monodrama, dispensing with all the complexities of the plot, would give the essence of Racine’s vision, but in fact the key moments in the play are those in which she exposes her inner darkness to the light in the interactions with Œnone, Hippolyte, and Thésée, each of whom has a well-defined character and outlook. If she confessed only to herself, there would be no drama at all.

5. The Role of the Gods

Another source of the play’s power is that it is saturated in a fevered religiosity. The initial prayer to Helios is striking, but in a sense, the heroine is praying all the time, not only in such moments as the invocation of “Implacable Vénus” (ll. 813-22), but in the frequent utterances of Dieux! or Ciel! (ll. 176, 205, 222, 247, 325, 743, 839, 1195, 1205), shared with Œnone (ll. 157, 239, 265, 711, 1327), Hippolyte (ll. 663, 719, 727, 991), and Thésée (ll. 956, 1035, 1127, 1165,1411, 1480, 1493, 1572, 1480). “L’aimable Trézène” (l. 2) is a god-haunted place, but the gods send confusing and contradictory messages. They intervene in the action constantly, sending Phèdre to Trézène (l. 36), causing Hippolyte to fall in love (ll. 61-4, 96, 114-15, 123-6), not to mention Phèdre (ll. 181, 257, 277-8, 306, 679-82), inspiring Hippolyte to favour Aricie (ll. 377, 512), delivering Thésée to death (ll. 469-70). Hippolyte asks the gods why they reward the wicked Phèdre (ll. 727-8). All the characters speak spontaneously to the gods, who are not remote, but very near. Œnone in the misplaced speech26 at the end of Act 4 reminds Phèdre that they sometimes transgress their own code (ll. 1304-6), leading her mistress to pray that “le juste ciel” will punish her (ll. 1319-24). Thésée’s fateful prayer to Neptune (ll. 1065-76) is the longest in the play; it hangs balefully over the comings and goings of the next 400 lines, until Theseus seeks to revoke it in another prayer (ll.1483-87). This is immediately followed by the news that the first prayer has been dreadfully answered. Thésée then exclaims against the “inexorables dieux” (l. 1572). What is remarkable is that despite the frequency of reference, the gods create no clutter; their presence and action remain somehow discreet and are in such perfect syntony with the emotions of the characters that we are tempted to say that “passions spin the plot”.27 If we choose to see the religious references as mere rhetoric, as they might well be in countries where a traditional piety holds sway, this is part of Racine’s strategy of discretion. The gods are everywhere, yet nowhere. Some talk of the absence of the gods, reduced to metaphors, in Racine’s Greek plays, but here we must distinguish the cool Andromaque (1677), where references to the gods are purely conventional, from Phèdre, where Racine never misses a chance to give such references maximum resonance.

At the most electrifying moment of the action, Phèdre analyses her own moral state with an acuity her creator learned from Romans 7,28 from Augustine’s Confessions, Book 8, and from his Jansenist education:

J’aime! Ne pense pas qu’au moment que je t’aime,

Innocente à mes yeux, je m’approuve moi-même;

Ni que du fol amour qui trouble ma raison

Ma lâche complaisance ait nourri le poison;

Objet infortuné des vengeances célestes,

Je m’abhorre encor plus que tu ne me détestes.

(ll. 673-8)29

There is a force stronger than morality in the play, namely a pervasive miasma of guilt and shame, and it adds to the mere play of emotions the spice of what Baudelaire called “—La conscience dans le Mal!”.30 Jacques Mercanton writes that “God is absent in Trézène because he has become necessary. To Phèdre, delivered to her reprobation, but also to the tragedy, which, without him, becomes a descent into Hell” [21] (p. 78). The constant references to the unhelpful gods create an atmosphere of desperation which indicates the absence of a saving god. The capricious tyranny of Greek deities is now laced with the sombre overtones of predestination:

Que dis-je? cet aveu que je te viens de faire,

Cet aveu si honteux, le crois-tu volontaire?

(ll. 693-4)31

The introspective lucidity of the self-condemning heroine is yoked with extreme murkiness about the agency of Venus, another name for her unmasterable passion.

Hippolyte, too, loves Aricie against his will, tamed by the power of Venus. In the Greek play, he is the companion not of a human lover but of Artemis, goddess of the hunt and of chastity. The name of “Diane” occurs only once in Racine’s play (l. 1404), though mentioned several times in the preface. Euripides’ jaunty huntsman, with a primitive horror of unchaste women, becomes in Racine a well-bred Frenchman, endowed with an exquisite passion, contrasting with Phaedra’s in its innocence and its lesser intensity. He and Aricie want to sanctify their union by marrying in a special temple (ll. 1379-1406). Yet his love is called a sickness unto death, “Vous périssez d’un mal que vous dissimulez” (l. 136),32 a line which anticipates Œnone’s graver report on her mistress, “Elle meurt dans mes bras d’un mal qu’elle me cache” (l. 146).33 Hippolyte may be in no real danger of perishing for love of Aricie, and Théramène does not mean his “périssez” literally; his tone is even one of witty banter: “Le ciel de nos raisons ne sait point s’informer” (l. 115).34 Philosophers are unlikely to dwell on this love except as it highlights by contrast the searing passion of the guilt-ridden heroine, which disrupts any conventional discourse of love.

6. A Fleshly but Self-Analyzing Passion, Archaic but Modern

Paul Valéry writes of Phèdre’s love: “Here the flesh alone rules. That sovereign voice calls imperiously for the possession of the loved body…. Nothing veils, softens, ennobles, adorns, nor edifies the access of the rage of sex” [19] (pp. 500–501). But this animalistic portrait fits ill with the lucidity with which she looks into her soul, analyzing her affections in a subtle way. Lines like:

Grâces au ciel, mes mains ne sont point criminelles

Plüt aux dieux que mon cœur füt innocent comme elles.35

Enunciate not only insight into her affections but a moral judgement on them. Before finding the distinction between hands and heart evangelical or Augustinian, André Blanc notes that it is already in Euripides: “My hands are pure, it is my heart which is tainted” (Hippolytos, l. 317) [22] (p. 252). This is the only one among the Greek, Latin, and French versions of Phaedra in which the heroine painfully and protractedly confesses her love twice, to her nurse and to her idol. The two scenes are the most electrifying of the play, making the later coups de théâtre seem anticlimactic. The combination of intense passion and inner conflict with the perfect order and clarity of the majestic Alexandrines produces an effect of increased tension and intensity while at the same time flooding the dark places of the soul with clarity. In Valéry’s analysis, “this love without metaphysics”, “desire in its raw state”, “secretes a poison of destruction imperceptible at first” which can “suddenly become more energetic than all the force of reason and every fear of men or of the gods” [19] (pp. 501, 502, 504). It is ascribed to the “second puberty” [19] (p. 505) of an ageing woman and is read in terms of the ancient Greek sources, when love was a primitive instinct.

But Valéry has trouble reconciling this one-sided view with the elegance of Racine’s diction, which he treats both as “this form that achieves the synthesis of art and the natural” and as “a drapery on the nakedness of the thought” [19] (p. 507). The perfection of the synthesis shows that the link of language and passion is not that of mere drapery. It is a modern woman who speaks in her highly sophisticated lines; or one may say that archaic insight is upgraded for modern consciousness. Valéry, in turn, updates Racine to the age of Freud: “Today we can discover in it more richness and depth than the author thought to put into it” [19] (pp. 505–506). But Racine himself offered a subtle update of the Greeks in light of the introspective abysses opened up by theology, and particularly by the genius of Jansenism. “An irritating, thorny, and controverted subject”, “today, Jansenism in itself can hardly interest more than a handful of erudite specialists” [12] (p. 168). Prickly and difficult as the subject is, it is just as relevant to Racine’s art, at least in this play, as his classical sources and the other French plays on the Phaedra story. A penetrating and comprehensive theological reading of the play would have to go beyond the impressionistic level of such remarks as Mauriac’s, “the God of Saint-Cyran weighs frightfully on Phèdre” [23] (p. 67),36 and would have to begin with situating Racine precisely on the Jansenist spectrum. “Racine is not Pascal” [12] (p. 171): his piety is gentler, more humanistic, not always teetering on the brink of tragedy. But when it comes to imaginative rendering of the love that kills, a darker Jansenist climate prevails: “the instinct of destruction that accompanies love in Racine’s characters” usually culminates in suicide. “The brutal and obsessive passion that Racine substituted for the ideal love of chivalry, even while it moves within the limits of nature is unable to find there its sustenance and its balance. It is here above all that Racine’s psychology is tied to the inhuman views of Port-Royal” [13] (pp. 184–155). Too sweeping, no doubt, yet inviting not dismissal but a subtler development. Not for nothing are Racine’s ashes enshrined across from Pascal’s in the Lady Chapel of St. Étienne du Mont, a sacred spot. Perhaps only “specialists” can explore the dramatist’s Jansenist culture, or for that matter his classical culture, but in letting this background slip into oblivion we may be anticipating a day when Racine and Pascal themselves will face the same fate.37

Phèdre’s language of love, despite its underpinnings in the classics and in a certain theological culture, also belongs firmly to its time, the later seventeenth century. This is particularly the case when she registers her consciousness of a new torment: jealousy:

Hippolyte est sensible, et ne sent rien pour moi!

Aricie a son cœur! Aricie a sa foi!38

Some will object that this emotion is too modern and obvious. For Hegel the introduction of Aricie “lowers the [tragic] pathos to mere amorous passion”. Friedrich Schlegel thought so as well and generally doubts if French tragedy deserves that name at all. He reprimands Racine for “having put in the background the seriousness of the immorality of the protagonist’s love for her stepson by minimizing the reference to incest in such a way as to shift the focus to the inner torment of a morally unworthy figure” (quoted in [24], pp. 160, 163). These German critics may be recognizing a force in the play which Racine shields from view in his Preface. Today, old languages of moral condemnation or of pathologization are challenged by those who celebrate Phaedra and Phaedra figures as martyrs of proscribed love. Modern adapters may decide that Phaedra’s moral struggle can no longer “be regarded as a relevant topic for serious aesthetic treatment” [25] (p. 135), quoted in [26] (p. 87). The play hardly speaks to contemporary experience of moral struggle or guilt, whereas its language of addictive eros, disengaged from the moral framework, continues to cast a spell.

Like Satan fuming at “these two imparadised in one another’s arms” (Paradise Lost IV, l. 505), Phèdre stokes her rage by projecting an idyllic image of the young lovers:

Dans le fond des forêts allaient-ils se cacher?

Hélas! ils se voyaient avec pleine licence:

Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait l’innocence;

Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchant amoureux;

Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux!

Et moi, triste rebut de la nature entière,

Je me cachais au jour, je fuyais la lumière.

(ll. 1236-42)39

Here the scene of jealousy broadens to a wide view of the two loves, making explicit for Phèdre herself the major contrast shaping the entire play. Something primitive and archaic emerges in her desire to have Aricie killed (ll. 1259-63). But this is followed by immediate guilt and self-condemnation, something not imposed by Racine’s moralistic Jesuit advisers Rapin and Bouhours [11] (pp. 292–295), nor inspired by the Jansenist God, but born directly from her civilized shock at where her frustrated love has led her: “Que fais-je? Où ma raison se va-t-elle égarer?” (l. 1264).40 Phèdre’s “Christian” remorse41 is already in Euripides, who was correcting his earlier treatment of the story, which had caused offence {11] (p. 302). In Euripides, it is not love that kills, but honour, which Phaedra compromised by revealing her secret to the Nurse [11] (p. 303). Alonge argues that Racine, knowing his public’s taste for the furious Phaedra of the Senecan tradition, does not follow through on what his Preface promises, namely a portrait of a woman torn between scruple or common sense on one hand and unchained passion on the other, but externalizes the former attitudes in Œnone, leaving Phèdre free to follow her passion to the end. But at the close of Act 4, in a reversal of roles, Phèdre roundly denounces Œnone for the lack of scruple she has revealed in her unexpectedly licentious speech (ll.1295-1306), immediately supervening on her mistress’s most intense bout of self-condemnation. Perhaps neither woman has a stable moral position, so that the ravages of love (and the murderous hate it can become) are only sporadically resisted. The play sometimes falls back on the shame culture of Euripides and on common sense morality, but it comes into its own only when the stresses of an introspective religious guilt culture are given full play. This subjective torment adds spice to the erotic passion, and only unconvincingly erects a moral order to be taken with full tragic seriousness. Racine’s report on how love can kill is not apologetic but invites to empathetic connivence. Philosophers who want to halt for reflection and assessment will be overborne by the propulsive movement of the drama, and their moral report will arrive too late and be shunted aside as irrelevant. Perhaps we stumble here on constitutive tensions between the literature and philosophy that can never be fully resolved.

7. Phaedra as Icon of Decadent Love

In modern decadent literature, Phaedra is brought down from her royal pedestal and becomes a vehicle for the expression of unorthodox passions. Swinburne in his poem “Phaedra” has her crave to be slain by the sword of godlike Hippolytus [27] (Swinburne 1866). D’Annunzio’s Fedra likewise (in a play of 1909) “challenges him to split her body with his battleaxe and reveal her heart” [28] (p. 242), Again, we face the question: Is her passion a form of genuine love, and if so, what does this tell us about the nature of love? We suspect decadent authors of promoting their own queer, warped, perverse lusts to tragic dignity, illicitly claiming for them the name of love. In the absence of healthy, normal, reciprocated love, they cultivate amorous obsessions as a drug. Today, when the word “queer” has been revalorized, are we sinking again into decadence, or does this constitute a welcome broadening of the horizon of what counts as love?

The oscillation, recurring over the millennia, in attitudes toward Phaedra and her avatars is shown in the contrast between Camillo Boito’s novella “Senso” (1883) and Visconti’s film adaptation, Senso (1954). Boito presents an unambiguously bad woman, but Visconti’s operatic treatment lures the spectator into identification with the heroine as she avenges herself on her lover by getting him executed by firing squad. Visconti brings her closer to Phaedra by inverting the age relationship of the novella’s characters. Livia, aged 22 in the novella, is played by Alida Valli (1921-2006), four years older than Farley Granger (1925-2011), and she acts older than her 33 years while he acts younger than his 29. Moreover, Valli had been a famous star for twenty years—an ageing star—while Granger would have been known in Italy only as the tennis-playing protagonist of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951).

Some accounts of the film speak of the heroine as insane, but this is a defensive distancing. It would not be surprising, in the present culture, if critical judgement on the Phaedra tradition were to take a condemnatory turn, exposing all the Phaedra figures as sexual abusers and predators, but especially questioning the sympathy that poets and scholars have been allowed to lavish on them. Such moral frenzy is a panicked refusal to see oneself in the mirror the transgressive figure holds up. Phaedra and Salome have served as safety-valves for women tormented by longing, or perhaps rather for their male creators. To cancel these cathartic emotional outlets by rigid moral insistence would be culturally and humanly damaging. Remembering the offence given in Athens by Euripides’ first version and the sense of moral riskiness that recurs over the centuries, the danger of such a Puritan clampdown is not to be dismissed. Homoerotic feeling has undoubtedly played a part in the creation and reception of the tradition, and one may even see its fictions as confessions of their authors. The universal appeal of the heroine is due to the universality of the experience we call “unrequited love” (pallidly translated as amour non partagé, amore non corrisposto), which can morph into “frustrated lust” or suddenly tip over into hate: “Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr” (Racine, Andromaque, l. 416).42

The flamboyant fantasies of Yukio Mishima (born on 14 January 1925) are enjoying a revival now, with renewed interest in his vast literary oeuvre. His writings, one critic claims, are “concerned with love—be it passionate or perverse, melancholy or obsessive, destructive or betrayed, forever driven to its extremities or beyond” [29] (Karetnyk 2025). In 1970, his grisly public suicide by seppuku, with his lover at hand to behead him, showed how dangerous his love for Japan was to its painfully won postwar democracy. Twenty years earlier, he had celebrated the love that kills in a more standard format. The five chapters of his novel Thirst for Love (Ai no kawaki, 1950) reflect the five-act structure of Phèdre, with strong influence from François Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) and Destins (1928). Mishima juggles elements of the legend: sexual frustration, murderous passion, incest; the Hippolytus figure is a guileless, primitive young gardener, Saburo, a devout follower of the Tenri sect, in which the sun plays a major role (a nod to Racine’s gods). When the desperate widow Etsuko pursues Saburo shamelessly, he takes her talk of “love”, a word with no place in his vocabulary, as an invitation to rape, and she strikes him dead with his own mattock, the novel’s equivalent of Hippolytus’ sword. Donald Keene, in his preface, talks of “Etsuko’s compulsion to love, her need to inflict pain in love, and her revulsion when suddenly she feels she is loved” [30] (p. 7). This seems naive or imperceptive, but perhaps Keene is discreetly hinting that Saburo is giving Etsuko the only kind of “love” he knows, and that perhaps this could be the basis of a warped relation that might have relieved her “thirst”. The magnificent Dionysian tumult of a Shinto festival at the novel’s centre [30] (99–118) matches the “monster” theme in Phèdre: the bull of Pasiphaé’s “égarements” (l. 250), the monsters slain by Thésée, including the Minotaur (ll. 79-82), the bull from the sea that kills Hippolyte (ll. 1515-24). Flanked by the daring gay novels, Confessions of a Mask (1949) and Forbidden Colours (1953), the story of Etsuko is a volcano of raging love never again matched in Mishima’s fiction but instead enacted poisonously in his later pseudo-military activities and his death. Etsuko’s love is animalistic and the novel’s conclusion is nihilistic: she sleeps peacefully after brutally dispatching the gardener. Yet the reading public takes her story as a bona fide addition to the literature of love. How should the philosopher proceed? If such stories are classed under a rubric such as “lust”, “vice”, or “perversion”, their potential contribution to a phenomenology of love is lost. If one implements summary ethical judgement, refusing to notice any tincture of actual love in the brew of vile obsession, a thought-provoking realm of paradox is closed off, which might have shed light on higher forms of love as well.

8. The Psychological Novel Between Philosophy and Life

Under an absolute monarchy (from 1651), French drama had taken a psychological focus, in contrast to the broad political vision of Pierre Corneille (1606–1684).43 A year after Phèdre, Madame de La Fayette (1634–1693), who had a close relationship with François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), author of the psychologically penetrating Maximes (1665; 5th ed., 1678), published La Princesse de Clèves, considered the first psychological novel, or at least “the first in which the psychological interest is more important than the plots and the adventures” [33] (p. 155). Like Phèdre, the novel turns on an avowal. Racine and La Rochefoucauld thus stand as patrons of the European psychological novel, centred on the analysis of love (and often allied with confessional literature); their heirs include Rousseau, Laclos, Stendhal, Balzac, George Sand, Benjamin Constantin, Fromentin, Flaubert, Proust; Richardson, Austen, Meredith, James; Goethe, Fontane, Thomas Mann; Turgenev and Dostoevsky. The latter breaks the frame, however, for characters such as Myshkin and Rogozhin in The Idiot behave in a way that suggests hidden forces, demanding the Freudian postulate of the Unconscious. The classical lucidity, transparency, and continuity of the tradition cedes to a stark opacity, in a world of crime, evil, and madness, which twentieth-century heirs of Dostoevsky will explore.

The study of the novel has a crucial function in the philosophical study of humanity and its passions, as testified in the works of novel-reading philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Robert C. Pippin, and a host of French thinkers. On one side we have the explorations of psychology, with behind them, the loftier theories of philosophical anthropology, and on the other side we have the raw empirical data of real life, or what Goethe called “the millionfold hydra of the empirical” [34] (p. 442). Every novelist faces the problem of how, and how far, to “integrate” the real into the artistic structure.44 Philosophers have faced a similar problem, for instance, in Hegel’s struggle to subject his encyclopedic material to luminous conceptual order or in Husserl’s constant refinement of the phenomenological method to ensure it does not fall back into mere empiricism. Racine marks one end of the spectrum: his art reduces passions to their essence (giving the italicized words something like the sense they have in Husserl). Hegel misses the power of this method of distillation when he says that French classical drama, in contrast to Shakespeare and Goethe, “has shown itself more content with formal and abstract representations of general types and passions than with truly living individuals” [36] (p. 500).

Sociology, too, crystallizes insight into the complexity, or apparent chaos, of passionate behaviour. Yet Niklas Luhmann, in his fascinating study of the codification of love, avoids the extreme situations we have been examining, perhaps seeing them as too marginal, if not monstrous, to be “codified”; he prefers to consult Marivaux rather than Racine [37] (Luhmann 1987). The psychological novel brings the deliveries of empirical life into crystalline focus and lends them perfection of form. The form is not an ornament but a heightening, producing something larger than life, and far more lucid. This is how Henry James fulfilled a dictum his brother derived from Rudolf Eucken’s phrase, “Die Erhöhung des vorgefundenen Daseins”: “Why may not thought’s mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence?” [38] (p. 870). The supreme vehicle of psychological lucidity was classical theatre, reaching perfection in Molière’s Le misanthrope (1666) as well as in Phèdre, but in 1687 the baton was passed to the novel, which has retained it ever since.

Philosophers may be loth to recognize that love can be a very murky business, and that it may surface in warped and sickly forms. Psychologists may thrust such knowledge upon them, but novelists do so more digestibly. To construct a symbolic figure of such love, or to repristinate an archetype like Phaedra, is to provide a priceless mirror in which humanity comes to know itself. Original fictions are not merely a mirror of life, but may invent new ways of living, and the crisis of traditional narrative in authors such as Kafka or Joyce marks a change in human existence itself; see [39] (de Gramont, 2024). Our present age of frankness and media exposure may lead us to think that we know all about love, in all its forms. The result is the dominance of stereotypes, and a cruel intolerance of what does not fit with them. Phaedra is but one of older tragic protagonists who would be more harshly treated today. The pleading of moralists and psychologists is liable to be seen as impotent bleating. Only major works of literary, dramatic, or cinematic art can “cleanse the gates of perception” as Blake urged and also guide a deeper and more pluralistic philosophical reflection on the eternally enigmatic topic of love.