Racine’s Phaedra

Category: Love, Tragedy

Last Updated: 18 Apr 2023

Pages: 2 Views: 461

Phaedra, a tragic play created and popularized by Jean B. Racine is an account of the possible pros, cons, and eminent ills or frailty experienced by love-stricken people depicting their own strength and weaknesses. The play implicitly showed different types of love that are prevalent in reality where there could be a kind of self-giving and sacrificial love that makes a person stronger and pushes the lover to exert one’s best and do good in life (that love of Hippolytus to Aricia); the self-centered, selfish, and possessive love (the kind of avenging love showed by Phaedra with respect to his unfaithful husband, Theseus; and her incest love for her stepson, Hippolytus); and last but not the least, the disloyal and unfaithful love of Theseus to his wife, Phaedra.

Body Racine presented in this play the different attitudes of men when under the spell of love: it is implied as that “it makes or breaks a person”. At best, love could not only make a person (the lover) to attain one’s full potential of doing good due to the inspiration attained from the object of love; but also, at worst, love can lead to hatred and vengeance once the expected love is not returned or is abused by pain-crashing disloyalty.

Moreover, as love’s pros and cons are demonstrated by the author in this literary piece, good and evil was also portrayed by effects and consequences of each kind of love discussed in the aforementioned statement. Conclusion Love thus, follows the principle that “You reap what you sow”; if used as a weapon to avenge the painful sorrow, it may bring and lead to one’s own destruction and further injury (bad karma). Once love is used and treated as inspiration, it has good results and it motivates (good karma). However, if one feigned against love, treachery would be its same cost.

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