Source: Pasiphae and the Bull, illustrated by Jason Lenox
Sleep: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Good morning! I think this is my first five-star sleep night in a longtime! Today you will be hearing, perhaps for the first time, from Lucid Tati! Yesterday I missed my call with Julian and it bummed me out so hard. But they will return to me soon. When will my husband return from the war? Later this week probably! This is a Phaedra post after this paragraph, you’ve been warned.
Previously on #phaedraposting: Miguel Unamuno’s Fedra, Salvador Espriu’s Otra Fedra, Si Gustáis
Today’s Phaedra is “Fedra, en la Alemania Romantica de Schiller y Goethe” by Manuel Carcedo Sama. By the way, yes, the plurality of extant Phaedras I could find are Spanish or Spain-adjacent, but we’ll leave the Iberian peninsula soon enough. I have a good dozen or so Phaedras to talk about, but if you have a suggestion or a PDF, tell me and I’ll get to it.
Why place Phaedra in pre-reunification Germany? Who knows? It ends up making no difference to the text. Truthfully, this isn’t even really a Phaedra, despite her presence along with Hippolytus and Theseus’. What this is is actually a remake of the Loathsome Unamuno Adaptation, and it manages to redeem that insipid text.
The author was a doctor before becoming a writer and you can tell he is interested in interrogating the medical gaze. Phaedra’s myth is a great story for this since from the earliest version it raises questions about the relationship between “sickness” and power: power determines who is “sick” and who is not by dictating what behavior is aberrant and what behavior is acceptable. To modern eyes, Euripides’ Phaedra is not just sick because she is thinning, delusional and dying, but because the society that produced her is even more misogynistic that our own, and women are not much more than property, so we perceive it as sick because it goes beyond our boundaries of acceptable misogyny. Why should she die for a desire that her husband gets to indulge in without a second thought? Isn’t banging your step-son a common, bland kind of fetish, top of the ranks in porn searches? Well…
To the Ancient Greek imagination, her desire to go outside and enjoy the fields like Hippolytus does is a veritable symptom of madness. To them it was as natural and reasonable as diagnosing with the DSM-V is to us. One can read Euripides!Phaedra’s desire for Hippolytus as a sublimation of her desire for his freedom. But the power structure around her makes the idea of her own freedom impossible to even conceive, much less achieve, and thus she experiences it as a “forbidden lust” for Hippolytus that is at least possible to fulfill. This is the root of Pasiphaë’s curse.
Pasiphaë was a goddess of witchcraft and a daughter of Helios, and was the first Queen of Crete. Yes, Pasiphaë stands at the limits of woman’s power, but her story is that she is punished for her husband’s actions with a shameful lust for a bull. After this, she is not to be mentioned except in hushed terms and circumlocutions because she has become a shameful woman. But why? If it was her husband who committed the crime and Poseidon who forced her to mate with a bull… why does the shame fall on her? Is Poseidon not the shameful one for wanting to see this happen? Is Minos not at fault for failing to butcher the Bull? The curse is that it’s her fault, regardless, because other men get to dictate the terms that describe her. Not even a Queen is free from this subjection and thus we get the point: a queen is just the highest ranking slave. The most forbidden desire is for power unfettered by men.
Back to the text at hand, it manages to salvage the Marcelo character from the Unamuno adaptation by not just making him textually gay (I called it!) but gay for Hippolytus: a competitor for Phaedra that’s much more interesting than the typical generic maiden that Racine popularized. In having both competitors open up their hearts to Hippolytus he manages to give him an unusually compelling dramatic situation. Just as an aside, maybe I’m just queerbrained but since I called Marcelo earlier, let me call this Hippolytus: he can be credibly read as transmasc in this version.
What I loved most above all was that it gives us a Phaedra that, through her opportunistic homophobia, is willing to perpetuate the power structure that engendered her own wretched situation. A lot of Phaedras are victims, some are villains, and a few get revenge, but finally we get a Phaedra that just fucking sucks; a Phaedra that makes her own shitty situation worse because she’s petty and controlling and who only knows to exert power in the same shitty way that power is exerted over her, one who knows enough to call bullshit by the way she’s treated, but also stops short of wanting to understand how the structures that control exist also within herself, and what her role in perpetuating them is. She’s not fully victim, not fully villain, not fully redeemed… she’s just herself and she sucks. That’s great! More of that please.
Unfortunately that’s about as interesting as the text gets, because it inherits the ambient christianity and anti-dramatic interest in the Theseus-Hippolytus relationship from Unamuno that deflates the end of the play. While this is a much better take on Unamuno’s idea, it still ends up suffering from its constraints. The bourgeois setting, the over-literary asides and the pretentious stage directions end up making the character’s desires feel unreal, like half-hearted justifications to themselves, whereas their prejudices and mutual hatreds are much more compelling and fun. Those parts got that Huis Clos energy that’s so energizing.
It’s definitely worth a read, especially in lieu of Unamuno’s version, and it has some of the best character drama I’ve seen in an adaptation. Just be aware that it doesn’t make it to the finish line.
PS: The text also implies that the Nurse is also attracted to Hippolytus but does nothing with that. I just wanted to mention it because it’s the first five-way love polygon I’ve seen a Phaedra attempt.
