‘Neither Completely Guilty nor Completely Innocent’: Representing Injustice in Jean Racine’s Phèdre

Abstract

The eponymous protagonist of Phèdre emerges as a true tragic heroine by exercising her own free will to commit wrong instead of being a mere victim of fate. Criticism focusing on injustice has tended to shine light on Thésée, denying Phèdre royal sovereignty just as French Salic law did to queens. By shifting the spotlight from Thésée to Phèdre, and from the idea of judgment as a means of redressing injustice to injustice resulting from the challenges of governance and self–governance in royal leaders, we will see that Phèdre's gender has tended to obscure the important connection between injustice and the exercise of monarchical power. The gender of the eponymous heroine of the play operates as a cover: by associating wrongdoing with a female monarch, a literal impossibility in France, Racine is able to delve into particularly controversial aspects of unjust governance as experienced in his day and age.

KEYWORDS:

• Injustice
• female monarchs
• French Salic law
• tragedy
• Nicomachean Ethics
• royal sovereignty
• gender

Biographical note

Marc Bizer is Professor of French at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published three books: La Poésie au miroir: imitation et conscience de soi dans la poésie latine de la Pléiade (1994), Lettres de Rome: Les Regrets et la tradition épistolaire (2001), and Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (2011). He is currently working on a study of the relationship between early modern French tragedy and the history of emotions.

Notes

1 See for example Danielle Allen, ‘Greek Tragedy and Law,’ The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Law and Drama in Ancient Greece, ed. by Edward Monroe Harris, Delfim Ferreira Leão, and P. J. Rhodes (London: Duckworth, 2010).

2 Jean de Coras, Arrest Memorable, du Parlement de Tolose (Lyon: Antoine Vincent, 1565), annotation CIIII. This text served as the basis for Natalie Z. Davis’s account in The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

3 Foucault observes that

Government as a general problem seems to me to explode in the sixteenth century […] How to govern oneself, how to be governed how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor – all these problems, in their multiplicity and intensity, seem to me to be characteristic of the sixteenth century.

Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87–105. This is not, however, ‘governmentality’, by which Foucault meant ‘The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population … ’, a phenomenon that he dates from the eighteenth century. It is telling that Foucault himself uses the word ‘tragic’ in conjunction with the state, concluding his lecture with the observation that fascination with the state has a ‘lyricism of the monstre froid’, whose form is ‘immediate, affective and tragic.’ ‘Governmentality,’ p. 103.

4 Sylvaine Guyot, Racine et le corps tragique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014). Guyot notes how ‘Le corps tragique propose ainsi le dévoilement (prudent, partiel, problématisé) du mécanisme et des limites (même surmontées) d’un pouvoir fondé sur l’exposition du souverain’ (p. 146) and also ‘en proposant des visions alternatives du pouvoir monarchique, le dialogisme propre au théâtre fracture le discours de la sublimation, qui entretient le mythe d’un souverain naturellement et absolument éblouissant’ (p. 143). Perhaps most aptly (but again without referring directly to Phèdre), she asserts ‘Chez Racine, les corps n’éblouissent donc que pour mieux signaler que la consécration ne transcende jamais tout à fait les pulsions primitives de l’humain’ (p. 151). See also her article Sylvaine Guyot, ‘“Un silence d’étonnement et d’admiration.” Racine, ou la discrète réticence du théâtre encomiastique,’ European Drama and Performance Studies, 1.2 (2014), pp. 241–60.

5 Hélène Bilis, Passing Judgment: The Politics and Poetics of Sovereignty in French Tragedy from Hardy to Racine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

6 For the theme of law and tragedy in seventeenth-century French tragedy, see also Christian Biet, Œdipe en monarchie: tragédie et théorie juridique à l’âge classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), and Christian Biet, Droit et littérature sous l’ancien régime: le jeu de la valeur et de la loi (Paris: Champion, 2002), the latter of which focuses on comedy and the novel.

7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. by W. D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 1138a.

8 All the while acknowledging that its plot diverges from its source: ‘Quoique j’aie suivi une route un peu différente de celle de cet auteur pour la conduite de l’action, je n’ai pas laissé d’enrichir ma pièce de tout ce qui m’a paru le plus éclatant dans la sienne’ (p. 817). References in parentheses in the text are from Georges Forestier’s Pléiade edition of Jean Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Théâtre–Poésie) (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).

9 ‘quo, misera, pergis? quid domum infamem aggravas | superasque matrem? maius est monstro nefas: | nam monstra fato, moribus scelera imputes.’ Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Tragedies, Volume I: Hercules. Trojan Women. Phoenician Women. Medea. Phaedra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), ll. 142–44.

10 Aristotle also makes this clear in the Poetics:

There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some fault, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity […].

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Jonathan Barnes, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1453a.

11 ‘The story that love is a god was invented by base lust, in the interests of its own depravity; to have greater scope, it gave its mad passion the pretext of a false divinity’ [‘Deum esse amorem turpis et vitio favens | finxit libido, quoque liberior foret / titulum furori numinis false addidit’] (Phaedra, ll. 195–97). A bit later the nurse points out that self-restraint seems more easily practiced by common folk than by the ruling class: ‘Why is it that chaste love dwells beneath lowly roofs, that average folks have sane affections and modest status is self-controlled, while the rich and those bolstered by royal status seek more than what is right?’ [‘cur in penates rarius tenues subit | haec delicatas eligens pestis domos? | cur sancta parvis habitat in tectis Venus | mediumque santos vulgus affectus tenet | et se coercent modica, contra divites | regnoque fulti plura quam fas est petunt?'] (Phaedra, ll. 209–14).

12 ‘haud est facile mandatum scelus | audere, verum iusta qui reges timet | deponat, omne pellat ex animo decus: | malus est minister regii imperii pudor’ (Phaedra, ll. 427–30).

13

[‘J’ai même pris soin de la rendre un peu moins odieuse qu’elle n’est dans les tragédies des Anciens, où elle se résout d’elle-même à accuser Hippolyte. Cette bassesse m’a paru plus convenable à une nourrice, qui pouvait avoir des inclinations plus serviles, et qui néanmoins n’entreprend cette fausse accusation que pour sauver la vie et l’honneur de sa maîtresse.’ (Phèdre, pp. 817–18)

In Euripides, Phaedra leaves a tablet accusing Hippolytus after her death, and in Seneca she accuses him directly to Theseus.

14

‘There is a difference between the act of injustice and what is unjust, and between the act of justice and what is just: for a thing is unjust by nature or by enactment; and this very thing, when it has been done, is an act of injustice, but before it is done is not yet that but is unjust. So, too, with an act of justice (though the general term is rather ‘just action’, and ‘act of justice’ is applied to the correction of the act of injustice).’ (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1135a)

15 ‘Phèdre: Grâces au ciel, mes mains ne sont point criminelles. | Plût aux dieux que mon cœur fût innocent comme elles!’ (I. 3. 221–22).

16 ‘Nurse: There is no stain of blood upon your hands? | Phaedra: My hands are clean: the stain is in my heart’ (Euripides, Hippolytus, ll. 317–18).

17 Which she does in Seneca in a very different way, asking reproachfully

Why is it that chaste love dwells beneath lowly roofs, that average folk have sane affections and modest status is self-controlled, while the rich and those bolstered by royal status seek more than what is right? Excessive power wants power beyond its power. (Phaedra, ll. 212–16)

18 At the outset, Phèdre says, ‘Pourquoi détournais-tu mon funeste dessein?’ (III. 1. 747), then later ‘Par tes conseils flatteurs tu m’as su ranimer; | Tu m’as fait entrevoir que je pouvais l’aimer’ (III. 1. 771–72).

19 For an analysis of Phèdre’s answer ‘Fais ce que tu voudras’ in light of the famous motto of François Rabelais’s Thélème Abbey, see my forthcoming article, ‘Reflections on Free Will and (Self-)Governance in Racine and Contemporary Politics,’ in Teaching Approaches to Seventeenth-Century French Tragedy, ed. by Hélène Bilis and Ellen McClure (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2021).

20 As Derval Conroy notes, ‘female rule in France was always dependent on the king’s absence (temporary or definitive) […].’ Conroy, Ruling Women, Volume 1: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 3. For more on the Salic law, see Sarah Hanley, ‘The Salic Law’, trans. by Richard Dubois, Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women, ed. by Christine Fauré (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 3–12.

21 Or, at the very least, the category of ‘prince’ now includes both men and women.

22 Conroy, Ruling Women, vol. 1, pp. 2–4.

23

… it is precisely the qualities perceived as ‘female’ that are invaluable in government, namely clemency, mercy, humanity – all frequently connoted collectively in the notion of douceur. What emerges in either case […] is a notion of government, the quintessential public role, as the ultimate site of androgyny. (Conroy, Ruling Women, vol. 1, p. 4)

24 Conroy notes,

The significance of androgyny as a way of highlighting the shared elements of human experience, the common humanity of men and women, has long been recognized, and was particularly prevalent in the sixteenth century. The best-known examples of European female rulers who exploited it expertly in their self-representation and rhetoric are no doubt Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century Christina of Sweden. More generally, the appropriation of the Amazon figure is possibly the most obvious instance of its deployment. (Ruling Women, vol. 1, p. 4)

25

The last to emerge, the deliberative heroine is not just a combination of her heroine counterparts but a bold response to them. She thinks. She feels. She acts. She is the centrepiece of her respective play; this had never happened before in French theatre.

Theresa Varney Kennedy, Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750) (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 6. Kennedy calls Racinian plays featuring heroines like Phèdre ‘propagandistic in every way because they demonstrate the dangers of passion or unfettered ambition’ (p. 10).

26 ‘Tout semble s’élever contre mon injustice’ (V. 6. 1609).

27

When he acts with knowledge but not after deliberation, it is an act of injustice – e.g. the acts due to anger or to other passions necessary or natural to man; for when men do such harmful and mistaken acts they act unjustly, and the acts are acts of injustice, but this does not imply that the doers are unjust or wicked; for the injury is not due to vice. But when a man acts from choice, he is an unjust man and a vicious man. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1135b)

28 Guyot, Racine et le corps tragique, p. 146n3.

29 Bilis, Passing Judgment, p. 197.

30 Racine, Œuvres complètes, p. 1622.

31 See, for example, Laurent Thirouin’s L’Aveuglement salutaire: le réquisitoire contre le théâtre dans la France classique (Paris: H. Champion, 1997).

32 Racine, Œuvres complètes, p. 880.

33

Ce qui peut encore excuser la Phèdre d’Euripide et de Sénèque, et ce qui doit condamner celle de MM. Racine et Pardon, c’est que chez ces Anciens elle est entraînée malgré elle dans le précipice, selon le principe de leur Religion, elle se trouve forcée par le Ciel à commettre ce crime. (Racine, Œuvres complètes, p. 880)