How the French Invented Love (12 page)

The very first production of Racine’s
Phèdre
took place in 1677, four years after the death of Molière and one year before the publication of
La Princesse de Clèves
. But unlike Molière and Madame de La Fayette, whose subject matter was French in every respect, Jean Racine looked to Greek and Roman literature for his subjects, following the example of Louis XIV, who used mythological figures to enhance his own grandeur. Racine took from Euripides’ play
Hippolytus
the trio of Theseus, Phaedra, and Hippolytus. By the time of Euripides in the fifth century
BCE
, Theseus was already familiar to every Greek as the legendary king of Athens who had slain the Minotaur—a half-human, half-bull creature—in a maze on the island of Crete. Through this daring act, Theseus had freed his Athenian subjects from paying an annual tribute to Crete in the form of human sacrifices.

Phaedra was Theseus’s second wife, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, the rulers of Crete. Hippolytus was the son of Theseus by his first wife, Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. In Euripides’ play, Hippolytus is the central character, a notoriously celibate young man devoted to Artemis, the virgin goddess of chastity. In Racine’s play, the spotlight is moved to Phèdre, who finds herself in the familiar French triangle of husband, wife, and lover.

But what happens when the prospective lover rejects the advances of another man’s wife, especially when that other man is his father? What happens when love that is already illicit by virtue of its adulterous nature becomes doubly illicit through connotations of incest? Then all hell breaks loose.

W
hen Phèdre first appears onstage, she is wasting away from an unknown malady and has resigned herself to an untimely death. Her confidante, Oenone, forces her to reveal her shameful secret: that she, Phèdre, wife of the heroic king Theseus, is madly in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. Previously, Phèdre had been able to conceal her passion by treating Hippolytus rudely, by sending him away from the Athenian capital, and by concentrating on the well-being of her own younger son. Publicly, she has played the role of the good mother and the hateful stepmother. As far as her actions are concerned, she has nothing for which to reproach herself. But ever since her husband Theseus took off six months earlier on one of his long uncertain voyages, she has been obliged to reside in the coastal city of Troezen under the protection of Hippolytus, and carnal desire has returned with a vengeance. She describes herself, in one of the most famous lines of the play, as the victim of “Venus attached to her prey.”

Venus, the Latin name for Aphrodite, is an implacable goddess. If she seizes you, you are doomed to love, no matter how tragic the consequences. In the world of Greek and Roman mythology invoked by Racine, to be caught in the claws of Venus has the same effect as a medieval love potion. Passion of this order is irreversible.

Phèdre has certainly struggled mightily against her incestuous desires, for she is not the remorseless pagan of ancient legend, nor the proud adulteress of medieval romance, but a Christianized version of woman subject to a guilty conscience. And how Phèdre’s guilty conscience eats away at her! By the time she appears onstage, she is already in a state of extreme frailty and mental disarray, which makes it easy for Oenone to pry out a confession. Once Phèdre has described her torments, there is no going back. Speaking out is in itself an irreversible act. In Racine’s world, one talks one’s way into a state of exultation and into the sequence of tragic events that follow.

The situation is further compounded by the fact that Hippolytus is secretly in love with Aricia, the only surviving offspring of an enemy dynasty with pretensions to the throne of Athens. Theseus has spared her under the condition that she remain in captivity and never marry. In both cases—Phèdre’s and Hippolytus’s—the love object is forbidden fruit, and in both cases, the smitten parties reveal the secret to a trusted confidant before confessing directly to the persons they love. Hippolytus unburdens himself to his friend Théramène, who encourages him to try his luck with Aricia. By the time Hippolytus declares himself to Aricia, and by the time Phèdre admits her longings to Hippolytus, the spectator is tense with anticipation.

We experience the emotions of the characters onstage as if they were our own. First, we witness Hippolytus’s embarrassed tenderness toward Aricia and her dignified, yet subtly flirtatious response. At that moment, we are all young lovers susceptible to the charm of budding romance. For a moment we forget the dark clouds gathering in the background, the fate of kingdoms and empires and smaller nations doomed to destruction. We forget the catastrophic harm inflicted by evildoers and even the well-intentioned. We open our hearts to the possibility that love will conquer all when Hippolytus declares to Aricia:

    
My love speaks crudely, but do not reject it.

    
Without you, I never could have known it.
⁴

After that bright interlude, the meeting between Phèdre and Hippolytus evokes an entirely different set of emotions. Believing her husband Theseus to be dead, Phèdre allows herself to be persuaded by Oenone that her love for Hippolytus is no longer unspeakable. We cringe with the knowledge, unknown to Phèdre, that Hippolytus loves Aricia. We are embarrassed as Phèdre works her way up to a declaration by invoking the physical similarities between Theseus and his son. Having unsealed her lips, she permits the words so long repressed to spill forth in an ardent tirade where love and guilt are inextricably interwoven.

    
I am in love.

    
But do not suppose for a second

    
I think myself guiltless

    
For loving you as I love you.

    
 . . .

    
You know too well how I have treated you.

    
I not only shunned you.

    
I acted like a tyrant, I had you banished.

    
I wanted you to hate me. . . .

    
Yes, you hated me more. And more and more—

    
But my love never lessened.

Phèdre’s interior struggle between her passion for Hippolytus and her sense of guilt are now acted out onstage. Condemning herself as “utterly corrupt,” she begs Hippolytus to punish her, to kill her, or lend her his sword so that she can kill herself. Instead, he flees to join his friend, Théramène, and depart for Athens, where turmoil has broken out at the news of his father’s death.

At the beginning of act 3, Phèdre is at the nadir of despair. She has uncovered her love to an incredulous, horrified Hippolytus and realized, too late, that she should have kept her feelings to herself. Oenone advises her to try to find peace in the obligations now imposed on her by the power vacuum in Athens, to which Phèdre responds:

    
Me, rule? Me take control

    
Of a state flying to pieces

    
When I cannot control myself?

Such protestations soon become moot because—to everyone’s surprise—Theseus turns out to be alive and about to return. Now Phèdre is tormented by a new fear: what if Hippolytus reveals to Theseus her lovesickness? Once again Phèdre expresses her preference for death to disgrace, and once again Oenone comes up with a solution: “Accuse him first—of the same crime.”

When Theseus arrives home, Oenone follows through on her own suggestion and accuses Hippolytus of attempting to seduce Phèdre. In response, Theseus curses Hippolytus and calls down the wrath of the gods. By the last scene of the play, both Phèdre and Oenone have joined Hippolytus in death, but not before Phèdre confesses all to Theseus. And in this last scene she regains some of her lost dignity and honor. With poison in her veins and only a few moments to live, she admits her unrequited love for Hippolytus and affirms his innocence.

    
Listen to me carefully, Theseus.

    
Every moment now is precious to me.

    
Hippolytus was chaste. And loyal to you.

    
I was the monster in this riddle.

    
I was insane with an incestuous passion.

As Phèdre expires at his feet, Theseus goes off to honor the remains of his son and to take Aricia as his surrogate daughter.

H
ow did Racine, a seventeenth-century Frenchman, refashion the subject of love for his time and place? If we compare his
Phèdre
to the Greek model on which it was based, the first obvious change is that he transferred the leading role from a male to a female. Ten years earlier, Racine’s first major theatrical success,
Andromaque
(1667), had born the title of its female protagonist, played by the seductive actress Thérèse du Parc, whom Racine secretly married. After her death, he took up with the greatest actress of his day, La Champmeslé, who would play the lead in
Phèdre
. Even Racine’s last plays,
Esther
and
Athalie
, written in 1689 and 1691 when he had become a sage married man and prolific father, would feature a woman as the central character. With Racine’s
Phèdre
in 1677, and Madame de La Fayette’s
La Princesse de Clèves
in 1678, the French were getting used to seeing women with top billing.

A second significant change in
Phèdre
was the addition of the character Aricia, who did not exist in the Euripides play. She brings another feminine dimension into the drama and one that incarnates normative ideas about love. She is young, beautiful, noble, and a captive. Little wonder that Hippolytus finds her irresistible! Under her sway, the hero, supposedly immune to love’s flame, becomes humanized—one might even say feminized.

This French feminization of love, with its roots reaching back to troubadour poetry and medieval romance, contrasts markedly with the ancient Greek masculinist ideal. It is true that Euripides and the other great Greek tragedians—Aeschylus and Sophocles—have given us several imposing female characters, such as Antigone and Medea. And it is true that Racine learned from Euripides how to make even monsters like Medea—a woman who murdered her own children!—sympathetic to an audience. Yet Racine goes one step further. He makes Phèdre’s torment understandable and her person not to be despised. A woman who falls in love with her stepson, who resists revealing this love until she is practically dying, who feels guilty for a crime she has not committed, who allows herself to be manipulated by her most loyal confidant, who is rejected and humiliated by the young man she lusts after, and who ultimately atones for her sins through confession and suicide—this woman is not a monster. She is human, all too human, and could exist in any age.

If we set aside the royal setting with its crowns and swords, it is not impossible to imagine a similar scenario in certain American families today. Stepmothers and stepfathers living in close proximity to the offspring born from their partners’ earlier unions sometimes find themselves sexually attracted to these children. We know that fathers and stepfathers sometimes lust after their daughters and stepdaughters and may even force them into sexual relations, usually with devastating effects on the child. Mother-son incest is considerably less common.

Incestuous desire always defies societal proscriptions. It would certainly have horrified those brought up in the morally strict Jansenist branch of Catholicism, like Racine. And it is this stern version of Christianity, however disguised under the names of Greek gods, that Racine implants in Phèdre’s conscience and which contributes to her overwhelming sense of guilt. Even if her sin remains hidden in her heart, even if it is not acted upon, it is seen by the eye of God and causes her unbearable anguish. Phèdre’s struggle between the claims of passion and the relentless attacks of her conscience resonate with the moral dilemmas of many historical eras, including our own.

This is the paradox of Racinian love, and of French love. On the one hand, no people in the Western world understand the claims of passion better than the French. No one extols love more—with the possible exception of the English in their poetry and the Italians in opera. No one better conveys the obsessive nature of romantic love and its tendency to take precedence over all other human relations.

And yet the French cannot avoid their Catholic heritage, which has had a notably troubled relationship with carnal desire. While the French have difficulty conceptualizing love without a sexual component and are generally much less moralistic about sex than Americans, they are nonetheless imbued with Judeo-Christian beliefs that impose numerous restraints on sexual behavior. The tension between these collective beliefs and an individual’s erotic longings is palpable in many French novels, plays, and films centered on love.

Which brings us to a second facet of Racine’s
Phèdre
that is peculiar to the French. The French love to talk about love. For all of Phèdre’s initial silence, once she begins to speak, she is inexhaustible. She evokes every aspect of her seething desire, burning body, and tortured mind, without, of course, ever using a vulgar word. Hippolytus, too, for all his previous career as an enemy of love, suddenly knows how to turn a phrase when he declares himself to Aricia. Like all classical French writers, Racine followed the dictates of linguistic good taste that had become operative in salon and court culture. And he elevated this constrained style to the level of tragedy through his sublime poetry.

With or without the craft of poetry, a French man or woman who doesn’t know how to talk the language of love is considered a boor. In the French mind, conversation is almost as essential to love as physical attraction. Of course, Molière made fun of those gentlemen who felt obliged to carry ready-made love poems with them at all times, and he ridiculed those ladies who used so many euphemisms in conversation that you couldn’t understand what they were saying. Still, the tradition of gallant love talk has never disappeared from France. Think of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, who lent his flowery speech to the word-challenged Christian, so that Christian could become an acceptable lover for Roxane, the woman both men adored. Think of the characters in Eric Rohmer’s films, who spend most of their time talking lucidly about the love obsessions that devour them.