Jean Racine Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Amy Wygant

Critical Essay by Amy Wygant

SOURCE: Wygant, Amy. “Medea, Poison, and the Epistemology of Error in Phèdre.” Modern Language Review 95, no. 1 (January 2000): 62-71.

In the following essay, Wygant offers a Freudian interpretation of Phèdre, suggesting that the title character is the figure of tragedy whose suicide represents Racine's professional suicide and his contrition to his Jansenist fathers.

The critical effort to understand the death of Racine's Phèdre as an allegory of the end of his production of profane theatre has by now a certain history. Most notably, in a study that originally appeared in 1980, Marc Fumaroli claimed that Phèdre signifies in two registers that reflect upon one another: she is the heroine of the tragedy, and she is the tragic muse in action, a character ‘en abîme’ of a tragedy both of her own destiny and that of tragedy itself.¹ Fumaroli understood this self-reflexivity in genre-historical terms. That is, the tragedy...
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