Deracination: Phedre's Monstrous Pedagogy

Abstract

It has become a commonplace in Racine criticism to point to the apparent discrepancy between the preface to Phedre and the play itself. The former, along with the famous letter to Bouhours, is generally taken to represent Racine's rapprochement with his former mentors, the assertion of the possibility of reconciling his art and his religion. Phedre, Racine tells us, is a lesson in morality: Les passions n'y sont presentees aux yeux que pour montrer tout le desordre dont elles sont cause; et le vice y est peint partout avec des couleurs qui en font connailtre et hair la difformite (I 747).1 This, the proper end of theater, represents, we are told, a return to its classical heritage. For the theater of the first tragic poets was une ecole oui la vertu n'etait pas moins bien enseignee que dans les ecoles des philosophes. The composition of works full of utiles instructions, aiming autant 'a instruire leurs spectateurs qu'a' les divertir, would be a means, Racine argues, of rehabilitating tragedy, recently fallen, in certain religious circles, into disrepute. Against the optimism of this didactic project is juxtaposed Racine's well-known retreat from the theater after the writing of Phedre, the silence which has caused so many critics to mourn the lack of many a thing they might have known. This silence, it is argued, points to Racine's recognition that the demands of his art and of his religion were not to be mediated. There is something about the play Phedre, something perhaps about art in general, which would give the lie to the conservative, conciliatory rhetoric of the preface. The latter is thus dismissed more or less out of