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Racine’s Phaedra: Here There Be Monsters
Ginger Macfarlan
A popular myth claims that in the early days of mapmaking, when the world was
still incompletely charted by European civilization, cartographers disguised their
ignorance by giving Earth’s unknown regions a frightening label: “Here there be
monsters.” The phrase is historically inaccurate, it is notorious and, as a result,
somewhat chilling. Though a cultural Gothic obsession with monsters didn’t fully
reach fruition until the Romantic period, monsters still lurked in the shadows of
Neoclassical literature. Jean Racine’s Phaedra, a monument of the Neoclassical
epoch, is no exception. Despite the appearance of conflict between characters,
Phaedra’s real tragedy stems from conflict between humanity and monstrosity—
whether the monstrosity is literal or metaphorical. When, in the end, it is the
monsters that triumph, the reader is left with a dark warning: Here, there be
monsters.
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The theme of monsters is introduced at the beginning of Phaedra via the ideal of
monster-slaying: an ideal to which Hippolyte, Phaedra, and Theseus all aspire. Providing a
setting to the story is Theseus’s heroic past—not greatly described in the text, but idolized by
Hippolyte. As Hippolyte recalls:
Men’s longing for another Hercules—
Those monsters slain, those brigands all undone.
(Racine 1.1.78-79).
Unfortunately, Theseus’ many conquests are not limited to the heroic realm, but include
the romantic; Hippolyte also speaks of Theseus’a infidelity. King Theseus is described both as
monster-killer and faithless lover; as Erica Harth notes, Hippolyte “indicates a wish to emulate
his father in the former role” (21), proving himself a hero to become worthy of Aricia’s love.
Racine, as a writer of the Enlightenment, viewed the ancient story of Theseus through the
lens of his age. The Enlightenment period, also called the Age of Reason, was preoccupied with
mankind’s quest to triumph over what society considered barbarian—the superstitious and
illogical: metaphorical monsters. Racine’s Theseus is a hero not only for slaying literal monsters,
but metaphorical ones: the “brigands” and barbarians threatening Greek civilization. Armed with
steely determination to keep his throne, Theseus killed all fifty of Aricia’s brothers when they
threatened to overthrow his line. The monsters menacing the characters of Phaedra are the same
that Neoclassical society feared: chaos and irrationality.
Phaedra, in addition to Hippolyte, expresses the desire to kill the monster. Possessed by a
perverse lust for her stepson, she fantasizes about Hippolyte, not Theseus, slaying the Minotaur
in the Labyrinth of King Minos:
You would have slain the Cretan monster then,
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Despite the endless windings of his den.
(Racine 2.5.69-70).
Phaedra also imagines herself as taking the place of her sister, Ariadne, who helped save
Theseus by giving him a skein of golden thread that led him out of the Labyrinth. Theseus
pledged love to Ariadne but later proved his unfaithfulness by abandoning her; Phaedra displays
her lack of rationality by casting herself and Hippolyte in the players of a failed romance.
Though she is fatally impassioned, Phaedra mourns the divine curse that has infected her and can
barely confess her lust to Oenone. Neither is she deluded about the horrific beast rising inside
her—the beast she is becoming. Upon passionately confessing her love to Hippolyte and
subsequently facing his horror, she begs him again to play the role of Theseus by killing the
monster. This time, however, the monster is Phaedra herself:
Come, rid the world, like your heroic sire,
Of one more monster; do as he’d have done.
Shall Theseus’ widow dare to love his son?
No, such a monster is too vile to spare.
(Racine 2.6.120-123).
In the play, passion can become a kind of monster, if it is irrational. In succumbing to lust
for a forbidden man, Phaedra is tormented by the beast rising up within her. Sara Melzer argues
that Phaedra’s passion for Hippolyte is comparable to Hippolyte’s love for Aricia: “Both Phédre
and Hippolyte desire the person whom the law forbids to them” (438). However, Phaedra’s
obsession goes against the laws of nature itself, while Hippolyte’s love for Aricia merely violates
the laws of Theseus. Any reader is willing to approve of love forbidden by overbearing parents,
as Shakespeare knew when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. Racine demonstrates the difference
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between the two passions by showing their effects. As Thomas J. Braga notes, “The
crystallization of Phédre’s love for Hippolyte…has not transformed her into a more
understanding, caring, and tender person as it has Hippolyte and Aricia. Rather, love has made
Phédre see monsters” (293). Phaedra is a tragic character because this monster—jealous,
impossible lust—represents the loss of her humanity to the bestial.
Monster-slaying is also an ambition held by Theseus. As a hero who has in the past
triumphed over beasts and barbarians, he is determined to pluck out any irrational thing that
threatens his kingdom. When Oenone lies to Theseus, claiming that Hippolyte is the one lusting
after Phaedra, the king brands his son a literal monster, calling upon the gods to slay him:
Monster, at whom Jove’s thunder should be hurled!
Foul brigand, like those of whom I cleaned the world!
(Racine 4.2.11-12).
Hippolyte desires to slay the monster in order to prove himself; Phaedra wants the monster she is
becoming to be slain; and Theseus is determined to slay the monster of irrationality.
Another monster looms in the play’s backdrop: the Minotaur. The dark story of King
Minos’ Labyrinth, though only alluded to in the text, provides important setting to the characters
of Phaedra. The Minotaur killed by Theseus was a monster begat by a monstrous desire:
Pasiphae’s lust for and copulation with a bull. King Minos built the walls of his Labyrinth to hide
his wife’s bestial passion, and Elissa Marder identifies Phaedra’s attempts to conceal her love
from Oenone as a kind of labyrinth-building, as well: “Phédre’s response…seems at first like one
more circumlocution. Instead of beginning to speak about her own illicit desire, she speaks about
her mother and her mother’s desire” (60). As Pasiphae’s daughter, and therefore the Minotaur’s
half-sister, Phaedra is haunted by an inescapable legacy.
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Phaedra bears this maternal legacy by inverting it. Her mother became a monster when
inflamed by literal bestiality--eventually giving birth to a literal monster: the Minotaur. Pasiphae,
in giving birth to Phaedra, also birthed a metaphorical monster. Phaedra, in turn, begets a
metaphorical monster: her lust for Hippolyte. Her illicit desire is an inversion of her mother’s sin
against Phaedra; she violates her appropriate mother-role by becoming inflamed with desire for
her stepson. Will the monster be manifested in Hippolyte--Phaedra’s son by law, if not in blood?
As if subconsciously attempting to break his symbolic blood-bond to Phaedra, Hippolyte, still
ignorant of Phaedra’s desire, assures Aricia of his pure motivations:
Hate you, Princess? No, not I.
I’m counted rough and proud, but don’t assume
That I’m the issue of some monster’s womb.
(Racine 2.2.57-59).
Though Hippolyte cannot yet know that Phaedra is in love with him, his words are
prophetic in that they clearly distinguish him from the offspring of the monster within Phaedra.
Phaedra herself seems especially desperate to separate Hippolyte from her biological children,
confessing him as the object of her affections by naming him, “A Scythian woman’s son”
(Racine 1.3.110). It is impossible to say whether her attempt is to justify her passion or to
(hopefully) protect Hippolyte from his monstrous maternal inheritance. Theseus certainly sees
Hippolyte as Pasiphae’s heir. In accusing Hippolyte of becoming a monster, Theseus implies that
the echoes of the Minotaur, Pasiphae’s sin, still ring through the family. The lines between
humanity and bestiality cannot be blurred. Killing the Minotaur was not enough; Hippolyte must
also be killed. The monster must be exorcised.
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But Theseus, Phaedra, and Hippolyte are all foiled in their fierce resolve to kill the
monster. The crushing tragedy in Phaedra arrives when, just after his innocence is realized,
Hippolyte is slain by the sea-monster. Theseus’s conception of Hippolyte as a beast was grossly
inaccurate, and in his death, the bestial has truly triumphed over humanity. As Harth observes,
regardless of what the monster-metaphor symbolizes, Hippolyte’s gruesome death by seamonster demonstrates that an “irrational force has won out” (21). The Herculean Theseus has
lost the battle. Hippolyte, too, has failed to kill the monster—failing to prove himself as a hero.
His defeat is humiliating and absolute. In a final cruel twist, Hippolyte’s mangled corpse is
“lacking form or hue” (Racine 5.7.92), so that even Aricia cannot recognize him: in a way, the
beast has stripped Hippolyte of his humanity. Phaedra, too, has failed to kill the monster she saw
in herself. Determined to win victory in some small way, she drinks poison, but irrationality has
still triumphed. In the moment that the sea-monster rises from the waves to slay Hippolyte, the
metaphorical monsters of the play have become literal. Phaedra is a tale of monsters, but the
literal ones are only representative of the metaphorical ones. Krystian Czerniecki traces the
etymology of “monster” to suggest that Racine intended a moral lesson: “Monstre derives from
the Latin monstrum…to instruct or teach…[In] Phédre…Racine demonstrates the imbrication of
the monster and the moral monitor” (1014). Ultimately, the triumph of the sea-monster
represents the triumph of the irrational beast over reason, making Phaedra a compelling tragedy
for Racine’s audience and audiences today.
On the surface, the conflict in Phaedra may appear to occur between Theseus and
Hippolyte, or Phaedra and Hippolyte, or perhaps Theseus and Phaedra. However, the tragedy
stems not from these interactions or any others, but from the battle between monsters and
humanity. And what were these monsters? Superstition. Chaos. Irrationality. Perhaps what truly
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terrified the characters in Phaedra were not these monsters alone, but the monsters they found
within themselves. The real conflict was not merely human versus beast, but rational humanity
versus irrational humanity. Racine named his play after Phaedra—is there any other character in
the work so clearly waging an inner battle of the soul? The symbolic victory of irrationality was
terrifying to a Neoclassical audience, but audiences today still will find little that is more
frightening than the monsters in our own souls.
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Works Cited
Braga, Thomas J. “Double Vision in Racine’s Phédre.” The French Review 64.2 (1990): 289298. JSTOR. Web. 30 March 2010.
Czerniecki, Krystian. “Deracination: Phédre’s Monstrous Pedagogy.” MLN 103.5 (1988): 10121030. JSTOR. Web. 30 March 2010.
Harth, Erica. “Exorcising the Beast: Attempts at Rationality in French Classicism.” PMLA 88.1
(1973): 19-24. JSTOR. Web. 16 March 2010.
Marder, Elissa. “The Mother Tongue in Phédre and Frankenstein.” Yale French Studies 76
(1989): 59-77. JSTOR. Web. 30 March 2010.
Melzer, Sara. “Incest and the Minotaur in Phédre: The Monsters of France Assimilationist
Politics.” Classical Unities: Place, Time, Action 32 (2000): 431-445. Google Scholar.
Web. 30 March 2010.
Racine, Jean. "Phaedra." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Ed. Sarah Lawall. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. 365-402. Print.
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