Phaedra a Tragic Character
Phaedra, is a play by philosopher and dramatist
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, which tells the story of Phaedra, wife of King Theseus
of Athens, and her consuming lust for her stepson, Hippolytus. Based on Greek
Mythology and the tragedy Hippolytus by Greek playwright Euripides, Seneca's
Phaedra is one of several artistic explorations of this tragic story. Seneca
portrays the title character as knowing and direct in the pursuit of her
stepson, while in other iterations of the myth she is more of a passive victim
of fate. This Phaedra takes on the scheming nature and the cynicism often
assigned to the Nurse character.
On
moral grounds, Phaedra as a character deserves punishment for her incestuous
dark desires; she cannot be denied a tragic status for certain reasons. No
doubt, the root cause of Phaedra’s tragedy is that she is a victim of
unrequited love. However, a close inspection reveals that there are several
other factors which drive Phaedra to indulge in sexual perversity which reluctantly incurs her inescapable doom.
Firstly, Phaedra owns a hereditary curse upon
herself. From mythology and from the play itself we know that Venus has loaded
the whole race of Phoebus with ‘shame unspeakable’ as Apollo once exposed the
love between Venus and Mars. As a result, Phaedra’s mother Pasiphae was doomed
to fall in love with a bull and Phaedra with her stepson Hippolytus. As the
play opens, we find that Phaedra has an anguished moral awareness about her
bestial desires and she alludes to her bestial ancestry: “I recognize the
deadly evil [that afflicted] my unhappy mother”. Then when the nurse
advises her to smother her incestuous passion, Phaedra declares, “I know, dear
Nurse, that what you say is true; but passion forces me to take the worse
path”. She further complains, (“What can reason do? Passion has won and
rules supreme, and a mighty god has control over all my soul”. Thus it
can be said that Phaedra is a victim of some independent fatal forces upon
which she has no control.
Secondly and importantly in the Senecan version
of the play, Phaedra’s husband Theseus is much to blame for creating scope of
Phaedra’s illicit passion. At the outset of the play, Phaedra expresses her
preference for being a faithful wife but fails because of her frustration about
Theseus. She directly refers to Theseus’ sexual exploits and her accusations
get strong proof when we learn that currently Theseus with his friend
Peirithous has gone underworld in order to kidnap and rape Persephone. When Phaedra
deplores, “Shame does not hold him back––in the depths of Acheron he seeks
fornication and unlawful bed,”- we actually hear the voice of a neglected wife
affronted by her husband’s constant philandering. It can be argued that
had Theseus been a more faithful husband, much of Phaedra’s perversity would
have been averted.
Phaedra’s next error is that she makes wrong
response to the counsels of the Nurse. She refuses her counsels when she should
accept and accepts them when she should refuse. Thus up to the point of
revealing her desires to Hippolytus, she never gives a positive ear to the
Nurse’s counsels, but when she is rebuffed by Hippolytus, she follows the
nurse’s advice word for word: “Crime must be concealed by crime”. Resultantly,
Phaedra treacherously accuses Hippolytus of having raped her and wrecks
destruction both for her and others.
Thus it can be said that lust is the engine that drives the tragedy of Phaedra. However, like Euripides, Seneca does not present Phaedra as a lustful woman. By nature a good woman, Seneca’s Phaedra declines because she is a victim of unrequited love whose origins already been mentioned above. In the character of Phaedra, Seneca, the stoic, beautifully dramatizes how passion can lead man towards bestiality and throw him into the pit of hateful damnation.
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