Dorothy Van Ghent
CLARISSA AND EMMA AS PHEDRE
The great traditional love-stories present an ironic antagon–
ism between instinct and society, instinct and law. Love is an occult
power, an enchantment working automatically. It is obstructed by
the most rigorous taboos. By the coupling and multiplication of
taboos, all social institutionalism is represented and the terms of the
opposition are tragically equalized. The lovers are sacrificed to their
passion, which thus equates elliptically with the passion for death.
This intricately structured form of the love-myth retains, with varying
emphasis, its archaic sacramental significance. Sacramentally, the
fertility god or goddess dies to renew life, the movement toward
death is uninvolved, and there is no "obstacle." In Racine's
Phedre,
the image of Venus as a great gluttonous bird, with talons fixed
in her prey, reflects the destructiveness and inhumanity of the pure
sensual passion; but the formal terms of the action show the passion
as destructive, not primarily in its own nature, but because of its
selection of a particular kind of barricaded object (Racine multiplies
obstacles by giving Hippolyte a lover). Then as Phedre falls back
from one rationalization of her impulse to another-from the enmity
of Venus, to Oenone's bad advice, to her own ancestry- the image
of the great bird is displaced by one more bestial, that of the sun-bull.
Phedre's original doom, the doom of her priestly family, is used as
an additional pressure in the tragic structure of oppositions between
instinct and society. That is, the archaic, sacramental significance of
the myth gives oblique enforcement to the sense of the automatism
of instinct, its uncontrollable independent working, even though, in
the more complex mythical structure, the center of significance is no
longer renewal of life through death, but the relationship between
individual and group--with the taboos, rebellion of instinct, outrage
of law, and defeat that this relationship implies.
