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The Duality of Culpability in Phaedra

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            Greek mythology has become multifariously instructive to all those who’ve succeeded it, serving not just to illuminate the literary tradition of its people, but also to serve as recorded documentation of their history.  The lives of the Greeks are elucidated in mythology through portrayals that, while centered on royalty and gods, nevertheless are precipitated by conflicts that are above all else human.  Beneath the posturing and statesmanlike gravitas which is part and parcel to the projection of nobility, even the progeny of the purest bloodline is vulnerable to the complexities of that central theme; the human condition.  The Greeks foundational writings in the mode of tragedy laid the groundwork for future expressions of the cruel twists of fate that are omnipresent in civilized human interaction, offering proof that even through millennia of evolution, spiritual reformation and ethical redefinition, human beings must all endure irony, misfortune and retribution.  The story of “Phaedra,” an installment in the book of Hippolytus, and a corollary to the saga of the great Greek warrior king, Theseus, is a tragedy of such a proportion, offering a vexing duality of interpretive possibilities.  Indeed, it is not the plotline or outcome of “Phaedra” that is crucial to our understanding of the characters, as the inevitable results seem most assured from the outset by explicitly morbid foreshadowing. Instead, this story is a study of that most elusive affliction of the human condition, love.  The Jean Racine interpretation of the ancient Greek text conveys a story that is driven by emotion ration than plot, with the internal struggles of Phaedra and Hippolytus spilling over into manifestations of complicity.

Works Cited

Hughes, Racine. Phedre. New York; Farrar and Straus, 1998