40 pages • 1 hour read
Jean RacinePhèdre
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1677A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Act Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Fire
Fire is the most prevalent symbol for love used throughout the play. In Act I, Phaedra tells Oenone that she felt her body “freeze and burn” (186) with love; Hippolytus later tells Phaedra, “Your soul is ever burning with your love” (196), and Oenone cautions her about feeding “a flame / That ought to be put out” (200). Racine also turns the cliché image of love’s fires into something more, tying it to issues of fate and agency: Phaedra traces her fateful forbidden love to the fact that she is descended from the god of the sun, the great heavenly fire. Indeed, there are on multiple occasions celestial resonances behind Phaedra’s references to the fires of her love, as when she exclaims:
What news has beaten on my ears!
What half-extinguished fire within my breast
Revives! What thunderbolt (212)!
Finally, Phaedra’s death is also described in similar terms, as a “burning” that gives way at last to “unimagined cold” (225). Thus, Phaedra’s love comes full circle, ending with the same sensation that started it.
The Body
The body becomes another important symbol for the effects of love. While references to the heart are especially common, other parts of the body feature prominently as well, especially when highlighting the physical manifestations of love. Phaedra experiences her love for Hippolytus, for instance, as physical weakness and even illness. The body appears elsewhere too when Oenone speaks of how Hippolytus, “With cruel eyes his obstinate rigor let [Phaedra] / Lie prostrate at his feet” (200), or when Phaedra refers to his “haughty ears” (202). Just as the body can betray that one is in love, so too can it betray one’s resistance to love.
Captivity
An important motif throughout the play is captivity, which is also linked to the entrapment of Forbidden Love and Desire. Aricia is literally Theseus’s captive but also figuratively the captor of Theseus’s son Hippolytus, whose love for her makes him a “strange captive / For bonds so beautiful” and who is “now enslaved under common law” (194). Phaedra’s forbidden love for Hippolytus, similarly, becomes a “yoke of shame” (200), while love in general is described as a terrible “yoke” that afflicts and “conquers” mortals as well as gods. Imprisoned by their feelings, none of the characters in the play are really free: Their actions are governed by either their own feelings or by others’ feelings for them.
