Of Love and Bondage in Euripides’ Hippolytus

Abstract

In his ferocious tragedy of passion gone awry, Hippolytus, Euripides portrays the destructive power and violent rippling effects of antagonistic eros, giving dramatic expression to a traditional image he inherited from earlier Greek writers and artists.2 When the ancient Greek poets articulated the universal feeling of erotic desire, whether expressed by a male or female poet or character in a poem or play, it was almost never described as a pleasant experience. Eros in Greek poetry is characterized as having both hostile intentions and deleterious consequences.3 The poets depict the experience of erotic desire using metaphors of war, athletic contests, natural disasters, disease, madness, with all of these attacks leading inexorably to total physical and mental devastation. Eros can be depicted as a harmful outside entity, aggressively pursuing victims, a supernatural force that attacks and invades the body and mind of the lover in order to assume control and ultimately to demolish the individual into tiny indistinct fragments. These Greek literary images of the power of eros suggest a dynamic where offense anddefense both take the field at once, in a struggle between the integrity of the self and a dangerous coming-into-contact with the other: the onset of desire becomes something of a tangiblepersonal threat, where the substance and coherence of the lover’s body are made vulnerable to violation. From the Greek poets we get the impression of an acute sensibility about personal boundaries, an intense concern for preserving the definition of the self, the very unity of which is at risk under the onslaught of eros.4 Anne Carson describes the aftereffect of this collision: “The self forms at the edge of desire.”5 The lover, in an effort to resist erotic disintegration, is compelled to acknowledge and appreciate the enclosure of his or her own bounded identity at the very moment those edges are perceived as being loosened, unfastened, blurred, melted, torn apart, and utterly plundered by desire. What the lover experiences, then, is the loss of personal integrity, and an unraveling of one’s sense of self. These Greek literary descriptions of the effects of the erotic experience suggest that a suddenperception of the breach inside the lover’s vital connective tissue may be what eros is all about: the verb erao, eramai in Greek denotes “to love, want, long for, lust after, desire eagerly.”6 An individual in love longs for what he or she does not have, and wants to satisfy that hunger for remembered connection, and to fill the hollow in the belly that desire has gnawed open.7 As Carson argues: “The presence of want awakens in him the nostalgia for wholeness.”8 The lover is immediately, painfully, alerted to the nature of that glowing vacancy-sign in the Eros Motel: it is the space between the self and the desired other, and the only way to negotiate this immense distance is through the extremely hazardous gesture of reaching outside the self across the boundary of flesh in an attempt at physical fusion. Joy Harjo portrays the intrusive reach of eros in her poem “Motion”: “I tremble and grasp at the edges of myself; I let go into you.”9 In Greek literature, sexual activity is often described by the verb mignumi, as well as by the noun mixis, which connotes a kind of “mingling”: you “blend” yourself with the beloved, blur your distinctions, and “mix it up” in the act of lovemaking.10