Le Sang et les larmes: le suicide dans les tragédies profanes de Jean Racine by Tom Bruyer (review)

Nine characters take their own lives in Racine’s eleven tragedies. One of these is a non-appearing character (Ménécée in La Thébaïde). Six of these suicides take place offstage and are reported in narrations. Three are seen onstage: Phèdre takes poison offstage, but comes onstage to make her confession and breathe her last; likewise, Mithridate has fallen on his sword on the battlefield, but is brought onstage to expire after making peace with his loyal son; only Atalide actually kills herself onstage, in the closing lines of Bajazet. After three hundred pages, Tom Bruyer regrets, in his Conclusion, that he has only been able to scratch the surface of his subject and suggests the need for more monographs to explore it more fully. What might seem like a small body of raw material has produced a rich and tentacular study thanks to Bruyer’s centrifugal approach. His book is divided into two parts, each with three chapters. The first part aims to describe the raw material and thereby identify the specifics of Racinian suicide. One chapter discusses what can count as suicide; one explores the places associated with suicide, focusing in particular on the altar and its ambiguity as a place of both sacrifice and marriage; and another reviews the instruments of suicide (sword, dagger, rope, poison, drowning, opening the veins, jumping from a height). The second part turns to the role of suicide within the dramatic economy of the plays. The first of the chapters in this part is theoretical and examines how theorists in and before the seventeenth century treated violence and the question of its representation on stage; La Mesnardière is the theorist who most fully addresses suicide and thinks it the form of violence most suitable for performance. The next chapter explicitly adopts Georges Forestier’s genetic approach and considers Eriphile’s and Atalide’s suicides in the light of the overall construction of Iphigénie and Bajazet and the dramatist’s orchestration of emotional effects. The final chapter examines La Thébaïde, the play with most suicides, and Bérénice, the play with no suicides and no deaths, and shows how the dramatic and emotional dynamism of Bérénice is dependent on the increasing threat of three successive suicides, avoided only in the play’s closing lines. Bruyer’s approach is richly contextual as well as closely textual. He draws on the theoretical and polemical contexts as well as on the dramatic traditions of the ancient world and of the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries within which Racine was constantly working. The social and political contexts are in evidence too: galanterie and orientalism (the latter enriching the discussion of Atalide’s suicide). Bruyer’s discussion embraces not only the nine suicides, but the problematic case of Créon (who might or might not die), the instances of expressions of a desire to die, and substitutes for suicide (like Junie’s flight to the Temple of Vesta). This is a serious and useful contribution to Racine scholarship (with rather more typographical errors than there should be).