Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (45 page)

This play disturbed Molière’s contemporaries, for they sensed that he was muddying the genres, that an old lecher who actually hurt was at once laughable and not entirely laughable. We know enough about Molière’s own marital and erotic problems—not only did he marry a very young actress, but he himself invariably acted the role of the cuckold onstage—to feel that this drama had a personal tinge and a special bite. He cuts, I think, an interesting and appealing figure: in play after play, year after year, he mocks the foibles of the old and unloved, the elders who try to resist nature’s plan, the stubborn ones who don’t have the smarts to let go—finally—of the money or the girl. But one wonders if this theme eventually got under his skin. We are aware that he died shortly after performing the role of Argan, his great hypochondriac in
Le malade imaginaire
, but I can’t help feeling that illness and sexual disfavor merged in his mind as the cardinal indignity of staying alive too long.

But I want to close on the comic, not the tragic, side of things. What is fascinating in these comedies is the deep knowledge they display of mania and obsession and the still-deeper conviction that nature’s sweet laws must in the end be obeyed. Descartes had proclaimed that
le bon sens
is egalitarian, to be found everywhere among thinking humans; Molière, the connoisseur of libido and creator of utterly delusional characters, reorients this confidence in sanity by ascribing it to the ways of the universe and the turns of his plot. The old will be brought into line. Their feverish longings will not be honored forever. They will be coerced into decorum. And we laugh, even if the older among us have trouble forgetting the amount of pain and heartbreak that may go into “natural selection.”

As we saw in the discussion of
King Lear
, there is at times an outright horror of female sexuality, of generation itself, in Shakespeare, most notably seen in Lear’s crazed vision of the prudish old lady who, below the waist, is given over to the centaurs and the fiends, possessing a vagina characterized by burning, scalding, stench, and consumption. Such a phobic vision seems present to me in
Hamlet
as well, as we see in the young prince’s savage indictment of his mother’s unseemly behavior. Gertrude scarcely qualifies as old in our eyes, but her son does not see it that way, and he wastes no words in spelling out to her how obscene it is for a lady of her years to indulge her sexual appetites. “You cannot call it love, for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble,” he suavely explains to Mom. In case she doesn’t get the point—but she does, she begs him to cease, she is looking inward at the “black and grainèd spots” on her soul—he turns up the heat and proffers this account of her activities with Claudius: “Nay but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty.” He will speak daggers to her, he told us; and he has. We are not far from torture.

Not only is this sadistic, but it seems more than a little voyeuristic as well, as if Mother’s sexual behavior were mesmerizing, had a steaminess and carnal rankness that could be neither brooked nor gotten past by her son. His words have a breathy heat that gets our attention as well as hers. But is it fair? We are made to see Gertrude’s “betrayal,” and so much else, from Hamlet’s own perspective of nausea and disgust, but one would like to know more about the queen’s fuller predicament, fuller response. It has been pointed out that both she and Claudius have their deeply human side, have deep feelings for each other, even if Hamlet himself is venomous and unforgiving on their score. So the young man perseveres, shames her into submission. To what end? To be sure, she is repentant and promises to change, but change what? To give up Claudius? Or to give up sex altogether? Perhaps she too should get herself to a nunnery? Lady, your time is up.

A contrast with Molière may be illuminating. Arnolphe must be removed so that Agnès can marry someone “proper,” someone her age. One might claim that Hamlet’s rage also has to do with nature being contravened, since presumably the sex between Gertrude and Claudius will not yield an heir, but I feel that her real offense is different: what is unacceptable (to her son!) is a mother’s libido, an older woman’s libido. The familiar argument that Hamlet has an Oedipal complex makes no sense to me, since he is filled with sexual revulsion for both women, Gertrude and Ophelia, as if female sexuality itself were the serpent in the kingdom.

Arguably the most famous figure of older female lust in classical literature is Phaedra. It is instructive to contrast Euripides’ version of the woman who desired her stepson with that of Racine, who dealt with these same matters more than twenty-one centuries later. In the Greek play
Hippolytus
Phaedra herself is a virtuous woman who is utterly altered by Aphrodite in her ongoing warfare with Artemis; the goddesses are duking it out, hence the goddess of love smites a decent woman (in order to punish someone else altogether) and transforms her into someone aflame for Theseus’s son Hippolytus, her own stepson. One sees absolutely no volition or collusion here on Phaedra’s part, no psychic or libidinal truth, as it were: it is the dirty trick of the gods. But Racine significantly keeps the gods and goddesses offstage, and even though his Phèdre wails to the gods and indicts Venus for her burning desire—
“C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée”
she shrieks in a famous line that evokes the goddess of love as predator battening onto prey—one cannot avoid the realization that this play is taking place at ground zero, at the base level of human flesh, and that the gods are essentially just the names we give to the elemental feelings that course through us and sometimes destroy us. Phèdre too is not old, but Racine has taken the step of adding a nubile
young
girl—Aricie—to his cast of characters, as if to underscore the impropriety—indeed, the obscenity—of this older woman wanting this younger man. One of the strongest things in the play is how both Phèdre and Hippolyte feel dirtied by the lady’s desire. Let the young mate with the young.

But what we remember this play for is its magnificent depiction of a mature woman’s physical desire for a beautiful young man who is also her stepson. There is in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
an almost throwaway line about Paul D’s innate grasp of female sentiment, including late lust: “Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and made them sad; that secretly they longed to die—and to be quit of it.” Racine wrote in the 1670s what that enormous, greedy, savage feeling was like, and the woman who feels it speaks it openly to her confidante Oenone and covertly to Hippolyte himself. This is what it felt like when she saw the proud, virile young male (so much more desirable than his famous, famously womanizing, but much older father, Theseus):
“Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue; / Un trouble s’éleva dans mon âme éperdue; / Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler; / Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler.”
This language hisses. The economy of French classical verse, with its Alexandrine metrics and rhyme scheme, is in the service of a physiological, almost clinical vision. I saw him, I reddened, I turned pale, darkness rose in my lost soul, my eyes could not see, I could not speak, I felt my body freeze and burn. Note how this reverses the venerable truism that men gaze at women’s bodies; here the desiring woman is almost transmogrified with lust by looking at the young male.

To the boy himself she is, in her remarks, initially, understandably under cover. When they meet, he sees she is moved, aroused, but she claims her longings are for Theseus. Yet it is not any Theseus we know but rather someone
“fier,” “même un peu farouche,” “charmant,” “jeune”
(!): proud, even ferocious, charming, young. Thus begins one of the most sinuous and haunting love evocations in Western literature. (Euripides avoids this scene altogether by having the confidante tell Hippolytus of his stepmother’s feelings.) Phèdre reinvents the myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth, and the result is a shimmering spectacle of substitutions and displacements. At first she invokes Hippolyte as the replacement for his famous father: Hippolyte is now imagined to be the monster slayer, the man who made his way into the maze, armed only with Ariadne’s thread. But this feverish desire is followed by its still more feverish counterpart, the crucial second substitution that now puts Phèdre herself into the Labyrinth, paired with her young lover, teaching him how to explore its sinuous reaches and depths:
“C’est moi, prince, c’est moi, dont l’utile secours / Vous eût du Labyrinthe enseigné les detours.”
(Twice the first person bursts forth—me! me!—“I would have taught you about the twists and turns of the maze to be penetrated.”) And even this vaginal discourse does not say it all, for the final desire is for darkness itself, for an ecstatic lostness together: the older woman and the young man, descended into the pit, forever united, never to return:
“Et Phèdre au Labyrinthe avec vous descendue / Se serait avec vous retrouvée, ou perdue.”
This bold yet exquisite mythic venture into the dark realm rewrites a woman’s longing as a dream of coupling, of going further and further into the bowels of the universe, penetrating—being penetrated?—ever more deeply.
Jouissance
and orgasmic pleasure are not only the goal, they may be said to be scripting the entire delirious speech itself as the older woman lets fly.

Even the obtuse Hippolyte senses that this is not kosher. One need not be an expert on Greek mythology to see in Phèdre’s crazed yearnings not only a reformulation of the myth via substitutions but a transformation of the burning woman into the monster itself, the Minotaur who famously lodges in the heart of the maze. Racine’s play does full justice to this motif, and Phèdre is insistently imaged as a monster to be slain. (After her declaration, she points to her breast—bares her breast in some stagings—and orders Hippolyte to strike, to slay that monster; she even takes his sword, a gesture that Freudians have not failed to comment on.) At play’s end, Hippolyte himself will both kill and be destroyed by the actual sea monster, who materializes as if to show that sexual desire is the beast that cannot be conquered or kept in the dark. And Phèdre herself finally commits suicide, reclaiming a kind of lost purity as the poison enters her veins, indicting sexual hunger as the flaw in the Creation, the pollution that must be found and purged, so that her death might cleanse the heavens,
“rendre au ciel toute sa pureté.”

It has been argued by critics that Racine is the supreme analyst of female love, the man who found language for a kind of brutal, affective realism that is new to literature, certainly new to French classical tragedy. Yet there is something horribly punitive about this play. As the author himself wrote in his preface, desire itself—as opposed to acting on desire—is coded as evil and rebuked by everything Racine can throw at it. After all, Phèdre herself wants only to die at the play’s beginning, anything other than to reveal her feelings. We can ascribe some of this severity to the playwright’s leanings toward Jansenism—a virulent Catholic religious sect (in which he was brought up) that damned the flesh and its desires—but we cannot avoid seeing here an indictment of woman, of an older woman in the throes of passion. The soma is shockingly present in this play, despite the elegance of the verse and the decorum of the dramaturgy. The body speaks its imperious needs: through blushing, panting, burning. Of course language matters too. Once spoken, passion acquires an unstoppable, unorientable life of its own, catalyzing feelings, engendering actions that none could have premeditated or even considered possible when the curtain first lifts. Once spoken, words can never be recalled. Theseus will learn this hard lesson. The animal will out, labryinth or not. And in its romp there will be much destruction.

Yet readers of
Phèdre
will not easily forget the sheer moral scope and dimensionality of its heroine, whom love chose. In contrast to her ever-growing lucidity, the other figures of the play seem both blind and puppetlike, going through their motions but unattuned to the world they inhabit or that inhabits them. Yes, the virtuous Hippolyte is initiated into the pangs of love, but he never has a clue to the conflagration that is his stepmother. The great Theseus seems to yearn, even at the play’s bloody close, for more darkness, for some escape from truth and light. Lear understood, at story’s end, the savage and lethal histrionics of power, causing him to discover and inhabit a subject position he could never have imagined: bare, forked animal. Phèdre’s pilgrimage seems no less momentous, even if her knowledge is of a different kind.

Phèdre has not only drained the cup, she has gone the route, has moved through the very landscape of desire via her reenactment of the myth, right to the calamitous moment of its brutal undoing, its collision course with reality. And even that is not all. Urged by her confidante to slander Hippolyte before he slanders her, she initially moves in that direction. She had thought this disciple of Artemis impervious to women altogether, but now she learns that he loves Aricie, and this is intolerable.
“Hippolyte est sensible, et ne sent rien pour moi!”
He has feelings, but feels nothing for me! With this discovery, her voyage continues, and masochism takes over entirely: not only does the fierce young man have sexual urgings, but he’s probably an easy catch, probably loves many other women, probably loves all women
except
Phèdre. Here is the generative algebra of sexual paranoia, the kind of thing that led Othello to muse that Desdemona’s “sweet body” might perhaps be known to the entire army. Rage ensues: for
this
crime he must die. She must dirty him before he does it to her. It is not pretty.