The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 3: Iphigenia

Iphigenia: Discussion

iphigenia: discussion i While there might be some truth in the observation that in both Iphigenia and Bajazet a key element of the drama involves the stoppage of the wind, the fact that in Iphigenia the wind in question is in the sails, whereas in Bajazet it is in the windpipe, is indicative of the marked contrast between the two plays. Encountering Iphigenia after Bajazet, with its tenebrous, stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere (Akhmet’s plea to Roxane to “let the bright sun at last greet Bajazet” [Bajazet I.ii.25] — and he might as well be speaking of the play as of its eponymous hero — is never heeded), one soon senses that Iphigenia exudes a far more breathable air, and this is in keeping with its more benign outlook and its unequivocally happy ending, neither awful nor elegiac, a unique phenomenon among Racine’s secular tragedies. Iphigenia begins in the predawn twilight (“Its feeble rays could scarcely light your way” [I.i.5]), which is soon overtaken by day (“Already I see the rising sun aglow” [I.i.159]), and ends in a radiant sunset — or is it the refulgence of Diana’s benison? (“The heavens, flashing lightning, opened wide: / By those blest beams we all felt sanctified” [V.fin.sc.64 – 65].) Geoffrey Brereton remarks (Brereton, 196): “It is the only one of Racine’s tragedies which gives the illusion of happening in the open air, under a clear sky 2 S Iphigenia on the shore of a windless sea. The lightness and grace of its atmosphere rise almost palpably from the poetry even as it stands on the printed page.” (And in fact, the play was first presented before the royal court, al fresco, in the gardens of Versailles.) The only shadows that darken the ending of Iphigenia are those cast by hindsight, by our knowledge of the eventual fate of the protagonists, of which no hint is allowed to mar the play’s final moments. And some of the heaviest of those shadows are cast by Racine’s own, earlier Andromache (a “presequel”), which treats the aftermath of the Trojan War and the ordeal of its survivors; but that play’s shadows are produced less by any dark allusions to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Achilles, or Iphigenia than by its recapitulation of their tragic destiny in that of their children. After all, each of the four protagonists in Andromache is the child of characters who appear or are mentioned in Iphigenia : Hermione is the daughter of Menelaus and Helen; Orestes is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; Pyrrhus is the son of Achilles (but, clearly, not of Iphigenia — rather, of Deidamia, but that is quite another story); and Andromache is the daughter-inlaw , if not the daughter, of Priam, being the widow of Priam’s son Hector, the great Trojan hero. In this play, however, we are dealing with a tragicomedy, in its older, stricter sense, that is, a tragedy in which a tragic outcome is averted. (In its more colloquial sense — a mixture of tragedy and comedy — the term better applies, surprisingly enough, to Bajazet.) Part of the “wholesomeness” of the play arises from the dominant presence of a coherent, healthy family, also a unique phenomenon in Racine. Roland Barthes maintains that the family “is in fact the central character of the play. . . . In Iphigénie there is an intense family life. In no other play has Racine presented a family so solidly constituted, provided with a complete nucleus (father, mother, daughter), with collaterals (Helen, around whom the dispute rages), relatives (husband and wife hurl them at each other), and an imminent alliance” (Barthes, 114). If we scour Racine’s other plays, we find that the familial relations on display there are more often characterized by indifference, jealousy, or downright hatred. In The Fratricides (the title tells the whole story), Creon cynically but accurately observes: “When strangers hate, it’s not of discussion S 3 long duration; / When nature’s bonds, though, suffer violation, / Nothing . . . can bind again / Those whom such potent ties could not restrain” (The Fratricides III.vi.67–70). Creon himself, whom “nature’s bonds” scarcely incommode, dismisses the death of his son Haemon with the brutally callous line “Heav’n rids me of my rival with my son” (The Fratricides V.iv.33). In Phaedra, the drama centers on a family that, its integrity having been compromised by the wife’s infatuation for...