Phèdre

Forbidden love and desire—and their destructive consequences—are at the heart of Racine’s Phèdre. Phaedra exemplifies the consuming nature of forbidden love and desire in her vain pursuit of Hippolytus, but Hippolytus also succumbs to the power of forbidden love when he falls for Aricia, a political enemy of his father’s. Though Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus and Hippolytus’s love for Aricia are very different kinds of love—for one, Hippolytus’s love is reciprocated while Phaedra’s is not—they are both doomed, and both have fatal consequences for the royal family in the play.

From early on in the play, Phaedra’s passionate feelings for Hippolytus and the symptoms of these feelings are depicted very vividly. To everybody else, Phaedra appears ill. Before Phaedra first enters the stage, Oenone describes her still-mysterious illness as a “continual disorder” and “restless affliction” (183) that causes her to be weak and faint. Phaedra herself speaks of her condition as a kind of madness, referring to “[her] lost reason” (187) and asking Oenone to “serve [her] passion / And not [her] reason” (201). Oenone tells her on a few occasions that her love is inappropriate, not only because it is adulterous but because its object is her stepson (“you feed a flame / That ought to be put out” [200]) and Hippolytus himself, of course, rejects Phaedra on precisely these grounds.