View of Free Will Is Reflected in Seneca’S Phaedra, As Will Be Discussed Later
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)ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2019 Exploring Guilt and Shame Through the Myth of Phaedra Ravital Goldgof Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES EXPLORING GUILT AND SHAME THROUGH THE MYTH OF PHAEDRA By RAVITAL GOLDGOF A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: [Spring, 2019] Goldgof 1 Phaedra1: a queen cursed by her bloodline to fall in love with her stepson. Since first authored by Euripides, the myth of Phaedra has been revisited, as Linda Hutcheon termed “adaptated,” over centuries and mediums. Seneca the Younger, Jean Racine, and Sarah Kane, a modern British playwright, have all been inspired by the myth. Taking inspiration from a study by Kevin Calcamp on the sexuality of Hippolytus in several versions of the text, I have extended the conversation to include Kane’s play, while shifting focus away from issues of sexuality and moving towards shame and guilt, as they relate to free will. While many studies on adaptation work on the movement between mediums, through this specific study, I hope to better understand how emotions are created or evolve through retellings of the same medium over time, and how those emotions may be influenced by a specific time period’s cultural milieu. My hypothesis is that there will be a correlation between representations of free will and determinism in a text and the characters’ level of shame versus guilt. In times of a renewed sense of determinism, the characters’ levels of guilt will be lowered in comparison to a more free-will oriented space. While each adaptation’s plot varies on the whole, the myth follows Phaedra, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. Pasiphae was cursed to fall in love with a bull, and therefore create the Minotaur. Phaedra continues suffering from the same curse which afflicted her mother, forcing her to harbor incestuous feelings towards Hippolytus, the son of her missing husband, Theseus. Consumed by remorse, in all the adaptations, Phaedra admits her feelings to a confidant and later to Hippolytus.2 To avoid a wholly tarnished reputation, the confidant recommends that Phaedra 1 Throughout my study, I will be using the Anglicized forms of the characters’ names in the myth. For consistency and simplicity, even when considering Racine’s adaptation, I will stick to the designation of Phaedra, Hippolytus, Theseus, etc. 2 It is interesting to note that in Euripides’ adaptation, the nurse tells Hippolytus against Phaedra’s wishes about her forbidden feelings. Furthermore, the adaptation by Euripides is actually the second version of this story by him. The first version featured a Phaedra who lacked Goldgof 2 accuse Hippolytus of raping her. This action sends both Hippolytus and Phaedra towards their inevitable death. It is important to note, in certain adaptations, there is a heavier presence of goddesses and, on occasion, Phaedra’s confidant, a nurse, plays a more mischievous part in the play and tells Hippolytus of Phaedra’s feelings behind her back. These plot differences cause great variation in the levels of responsibility, and therefore shame and guilt that Phaedra and other characters experience. Jean Racine himself remarks on the subject in his preface, “For Phaedra is not altogether guilty, and not altogether innocent” (23). This focus on Phaedra’s internal struggle by all of the authors and the fact that these emotions are the ultimate catalyst for the play’s action, motivated me to focus on these concepts. In order to evaluate how emotion varies over time, one must first understand the terms of shame and guilt, and their related subjects, such as responsibility and culpability. Their definitions can be interpreted through a historical, psychoanalytical, psychological, or even a linguistic perspective. It should be noted that the concept of shame had a large influence on Grecian culture, as honor and reputation were extremely important. Douglas Cairns discusses that there was an “emphasis on the good of reputation [and] on one’s public persona” (44). Defining guilt and shame as separate concepts has its issues, as emotions can be interpreted and defined differently depending on the time in history. Ancient Grecian and current western interpretations of emotion are distinct from one another. A major problem for discussing Phaedra’s guilt and shame is that there is no separate word for guilt in Greek. There is only “aids,” which is translated as shame in English, despite encompassing other emotions such as embarrassment. Therefore, when it is unclear whether guilt or shame is being referred to, I will use the psychoanalytical definitions of the two emotions. Guilt, as we recognize it today, was any sense of shame or guilt around her curse. Not popularly received, Euripides rewrote his play to what we know of today. Separately, Kane’s interpretation of the myth is quite different. For more specific details on Kane’s plot changes, see page 21-22 of paper. Goldgof 3 defined in the realm of psychoanalysis in the 19th century (Heimowitz). Sigmund Freud describes guilt as a feeling of tension after violating a moral code, and the desire to relieve that tension is what prompts someone to take action. Shame, on the other hand, is a “response to a failure, shortcoming, or other transgression of what society expects or what a person expects of him or herself” (Ungvarsky). A person can feel both shame and guilt at the same time; however they are distinct from one another. Guilt is caused by internal sanctions that people place on themselves, whereas shame is caused by the fear of external sanctions (e.g. criticism from society). According to psychoanalyst Gerhardt Piers, guilt is created when a boundary is touched or transgressed, whereas shame occurs when a goal is not being reached.3 In other words, Phaedra feels guilt about her feelings for Hippolytus and shameful about not living up to her queen mother title. Guilt is also more closely related to free will: people feel guilty when they have crossed a boundary themselves, whereas shame can occur whether the person is responsible for their actions or not. As will be enumerated later, in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra is mostly relieved of a sense of culpability, as the goddesses openly admit their own role during the beginning and denouement of the play. However, this does not stop her from feeling a massive sense of shame. Phaedra laments at length about “bringing disgrace upon [her] husband [and] the children [she has] born” and mourns her lost reputation (51, 53). In a more deterministic world, the feelings of the characters are skewed towards those of shame. In Hippolytus, where the characters believe most of the time that the gods are responsible for what they are enduring in the human world, guilt is more rarely felt. The amount of free will depicted in the plays correlate with the emotions of each character. Since Plato’s time, philosophers have debated whether it is free will or determinism 3 Read more about shame in the context of Ancient Greece in “Aidōs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature” by Douglas Cairns. Goldgof 4 that rule our lives. A broadly accepted definition for free will is the power of human beings to choose certain actions, uninhibited by any type of coercion (Ruth). Of course, one must acknowledge that Phaedra is under the influence of the gods, but does she have any agency to impact her own fate? In order to open up the possibility of that question, I adhere to American Philosopher Harry Frankurt’s interpretation of free will which argues that free will is the choosing between a person’s base impulses, or first-order desires, and their more intellectual option, second-order desires (O’Connor). In contrast to a more deterministic way of life, seen heavily in Racine’s work, Frankfurt’s definition means that while Phaedra was pushed towards the incestuous impulse of Hippolytus, she could have chosen a harder path where she did not confess her feelings. This view of free will is reflected in Seneca’s Phaedra, as will be discussed later. In order to numerate and compare the subjects discussed above, I classify instances in the plays as evoking guilt versus shame and free will versus determinism by tracking specific words and phrases, as well as interpreting certain passages as demonstrating these themes. Where it is not clear, I refer to these themes’ psychoanalytical definition. This reversion to psychoanalytical interpretation occurs most frequently in Euripides’ Hippolytus, due to the lack of named emotions in the ancient Greek language. Some of the specifically tracked words are: guilt, culpable, shame, honor, dishonor, responsible, doom, and free/free will, to name a few.4 Hippolytus mentions the word “doom” frequently in Kane’s adaptation (e.g. Kane 29, 30). The word doom evokes images of helplessness—as if Hippolytus has no ability to change his fate, therefore implying a lack of free will. Doom is therefore a signifier of a deterministic-leaning world. However, in the same text, there is free will, as previously noted, as that is what makes 4 This includes any variation of the base word, including related verbs and synonyms. For example, in the case of guilt, I will be searching for guilt, guilty, to guilt, etc. Goldgof 5 humans different from animals (Kane 35). In Racine’s Phèdre, words such as “coupable” and “honte,” which roughly translate to guilty/culpable and shame, are tracked. Although in a different linguistic and cultural perspective, I treat these French words with the same psychoanalytical distinction, as their extended definitions are similar.