[In the following essay, Biet explores the aesthetic, anthropological, and ideological aspects of the motif of tears in Britannicus and Bérénice, focusing on the tears of the characters Junie and Bérénice.]

In a previous study on Racine, with a focus on the ‘passion of tears’,¹ I was struck by the fact that the dramaturgical and emotional principle of tears was of primary importance in the majority of the Racinian tragedies, particularly in Britannicus, Bérénice, and Andromaque. Similarly, theatrical effects and their ideological consequences were connected in such a way that the tears of women, heroes and kings, and also the tears provoked by tyrants, constituted not only a significant issue but were also polysemic signs linking all Racine's plots. Although tears were initially characterized by an aspect galant, intended to attract a particular public, they rapidly outstripped this professional concern and came to signal ways of acting, of writing and thinking the body, of naming the passions, even of proposing access, albeit uncertain, to the divine. In this chapter, I want to develop my earlier analysis and attempt to understand the issues surrounding the aesthetic, anthropological and ideological motif of tears by focusing on the tears of Racine's female characters, and in particular those of Junie and Bérénice.

THE PLEASURE OF EXPERIMENT

It is evident that, in his plays, Racine constructs the image of tears according to the public he seeks to attract. Racine is a great experimenter and, with almost every successive tragedy, changes or broadens his objective through his choice of subject and the aesthetic mode he adopts. His first play, La Thébaïde, allowed the young poet to gain a foothold in theatre by referring firstly to Greek tragedies (particularly those of Sophocles and Euripides), then explicitly to Aristotle (who, in his Poetics maintains that Œdipus Rex is the only truly tragic play),² to Rotrou, and also, implicitly, to Corneille (Œdipe, 1659). Focusing La Thébaïde on the story of the entire house of Œdipus, Racine reveals how the Theban family is subject to a devouring libido dominandi, particularly between the frères ennemis, a theme to which he often returns. At the same time, the play succeeds in its aim of establishing the two essential tragic passions as recognized in the Poetics: terror and pity. In Alexandre le Grand and Andromaque, the two plays which followed La Thébaïde, pity takes on a more genteel aspect. With Alexandre, Racine seeks the approval and recognition of his sovereign by striking the right note of émotion galante so favoured by the ‘young court’. With Andromaque, he finds what would become his most faithful public, the socialite mondains, by adopting a plot borrowed from mythology and structured like a pastoral romance (A loves B who loves C who loves D …, in Barthes's now-famous formula), in which tears are the essential vector of the aesthetic developed. This prompted the galants and the mondains of a social élite, a considerable number of whom were women, to weep upon seeing the play thereby giving it all the appearance of success. Later, Britannicus provided Racine with an opportunity to convince an even wider public, more or less successfully, that his own weapon of sensitivity, allied to the technique of tears, matched Corneille on the latter's territory of Roman history. However, Racine's notion of pity, which he willingly acknowledged should feature in theatre, diverged somewhat from strictly held contemporary theories. For if the couple Junie-Britannicus is destined to arouse pity, the other couple, Junie-Néron, seems to be playing an entirely different game. Although this is centred on tears, the pity elicited is sometimes overwhelmed by a distinct sense of Schadenfreude, a point I shall return to below. Finally, with the creation of Bérénice, the significance of pity and tears changes once again. This time it seems Racine is anxious to rework his choice of a Roman setting for his tragedy. He also appears to want to push the question of dramatic simplicity even further, and to guide the spectator on a deeper, more complete, more troubling journey as regards pity and tears. Hence, he writes a tragedy of 1518 lines, adjusted to 1506 lines,³ with very little action, bloodshed or death, and with only the tears we find inventoried in the words of the three main characters. Indeed, all three express an ‘hélas!’ which is destined to become the play's emblem and which, in Antiochus's final line, is the very last word of the play.

If Racine's experiments in tragic dramaturgy are a bid for professional success, and designed to conquer an ever-wider audience, he also uses tears as a technique; similar to that used frequently by the religious in their intercessions, it is aimed at uniting the stage and the theatre, that is to say the characters and the audience, through a shared spirit of emotion. The sorrow and the chagrin of the stage character arouse the spectators' pity and move them to tears. The resulting elegiac tone reflects at once the characters' affliction and the spectators' compassion, allowing both to share in a compelling theatrical experience. Tears thus become a genuinely rhetorical effect and, in this case, a genuinely theatrical effect, a means of uniting the fictional characters with those watching them in the same physical, moral and aesthetic emotion. This process takes place firstly within a sort of courtly ceremony, but consequently, through the emotion aroused, achieves a moral effect which surpasses both pity and the pleasure of crying. In other words, from Aristotelian pity is elicited compassion, a moral and Christian emotion.

As eighteenth-century theorists noted, in particular Luigi Riccoboni in his Discours sur la comédie à l'impromptu (1721), Racine foregoes applause by exploiting silence and tears. In other words, by ensuring that the audience do not appreciate the aesthetic to the point of showing their pleasure, he guarantees that compassion, i.e. the link uniting the sorrow of the characters to that which the spectator might feel, is not compromised. Through the interplay of their glances and facial expressions, the actors create and maintain this link, and allow the public to participate in the experience of regret. The therapeutic function of tears can thus give rise to a sense of suffering which, paradoxically, is pleasurable and thereby provides a means of physically and morally tempering passions. Tears, however, are also signs; in this function they can indicate the extent to which both the idea of sin and the will to take the narrow and uncertain road to salvation are simultaneously present in the modern tragic system. Tears, in effect, can lead both to sin and to conversion, and it is mainly through his female characters that Racine represents this double aspect.

In Britannicus, Néron effectively attains the sweet and dark pleasure of making an innocent victim cry, and in this instance suffering can be viewed as a beautiful theatrical spectacle. But these same tears can also be transformed into the suffering which leads Junie to conversion when, in tears, she decides to enter the Vestals' temple and devote her life to God in an act of triple motivation: escape from the tyrant's threat, vengeance against Néron, and a gift of self to God. For Bérénice, tears lead to a decision to leave for a remote and pious life, and indicate the emergence of a divine emotion, when reason and the passions have failed. Consequently, from their tears as social signals to the divine tears of conversion, women are at the centre of the Racinian dramaturgical and ideological mechanism; by their very nature, they illustrate humanity's profound sensitivity more forcefully than men. Where Néron represents the cruel face of tyrants who revel in their power to make the innocent cry, where Titus is uncertain as to whether he should follow in the tradition of saintly kings and hesitatingly confines himself to regret and spontaneous, ‘natural’ tears, Junie turns to God through the sensuous and emotional vehicle of tears, while Bérénice takes a less defined route where tears will be the only way possible. The question remains, however, whether the characters can find salvation through tears, or whether they can only desire it without any real hope.

JUNIE'S FLIGHT AND NéRON'S PLEASURE

In the well-known example of Britannicus, Junie is physically at the centre of all attention. It is through her that the crisis begins insofar as Agrippine drops everything to present herself at her son's private apartments in the early morning in order to question him about Junie's imprisonment. Agrippine has waited for four acts to see him, just to see him, trying in vain to impose her lost power on him, and by-passing the grand protocol of formal entries, departures, and exits. It was the sight of Junie which was at the origin of Néron's superb phantasm: seeing a naked Junie arriving in the middle of the night, surrounded by the guards, he describes her as ‘Triste, levant au Ciel ses yeux mouillés de larmes’, and later adds, ‘J'aimais jusqu'à ses pleurs que je faisais couler’ (Act II. 2, ll. 387 and 402). It is precisely because of Junie and the phantasm he creates of her that Néron converts his political passion into a devouring amorous passion: originally he had intended to imprison her for political reasons but now he keeps her in his power for emotional reasons. Under his spying scrutiny (libido sentiendi), Junie finds herself moved to centre-stage, where he forbids her all discourse, wanting to manipulate her mind, body and soul in his favour. Throughout all this, the only resistance Junie can offer is her tears. In Racine ou La passion des larmes, I suggested how Néron-as-author, with recourse to traditional theatrical sequences and aesthetic rules, and by playing on diversity and tragic combinations, subjects all the other characters to his will and proves himself unassailable.⁴ He highlights, directs and tries to impose on Junie, a role he has composed for her by limiting her freedom. He thus obliges the most innocent character, the most external to the tragedy, to abandon everything which is authentically her or hers except her silence, which he also knows how to penetrate. However, through her suffering, Junie quickly learns the secrets of the theatre, to the extent that she manages to play Néron at his own game by making him suffer. This allows her ultimately to defend herself through her tears, and Néron, writer, author and actor, is powerless against God. He can enslave, poison, exile or destroy her loved ones, but he cannot counter Junie's free will to seek refuge with God.

To escape the confinement imposed on her by Néron, she can only choose that offered by God. Junie neither can, nor wants, to disguise her own tears, so much so that this Christian femme forte, as Racine's contemporaries fully recognized, imposes her virtue by embracing the Absolute. In one day she has learned the reality of the world and the theatre. She has learned that she was unable, or did not want, to play a role, even under duress, and could bear suffering but without being able to hide it (‘Je trouvais mes regards, trop pleins de ma douleur’ (Act III. 7, l. 1010)). She knows, therefore, that she must go even further with her newly found insight, and that she must leave this theatre and choose God instead of the persona that Néron offers her. More than death, her decision, taken in tears at the foot of the marble statue of Augustus (Act V. 9, l. 1749), to exile herself in the divine world, defeats Néron. Only then do the tyrant's ‘regards égarés’ (Act V. 9, l. 1778) become powerless, as does Narcisse's profane gesture, punished by the people in his guilty blood: the tears of the blessed confront the blood of the impious. Like a Christian heroine in communion with the people, Junie is protected by them in her desire to worship the Lord and escape from Evil. Her flight leaves an empty dramatic space for political, moral and religious questions. The final outcome remains unresolved, allowing Burrhus to say that it is still possible for the monster to mend his ways if he can be moved and show remorse. Consequently, the audience is enthralled and likely to be moved by Junie's piety, and even to show proof of Christian charity in the hope that Néron will redeem himself, thanks to the sacrifice of the innocent. Junie's character has, therefore, resisted both violence and the imposition of inappropriate trappings. This resistance to playing a role translates naturally into the exit of a character whom Néron had forced upon his stage in the intention of keeping her there. Hence, the Evil represented on-stage is contrasted with the Good off-stage.

But the theatre remains what it is, a contradictory representation which, through its exploration of cause and effect, seeks a complexity which frequently defies moral explanation. In fact, if Junie escapes from absolute evil, from the villain of the play and bloody tyrant which Néron is, it must be said that her tears are not simply an opportunity for the audience to sympathize. It would be naïve to deny that, even in the seventeenth century, the sight of Néron taking pleasure in seeing Junie cry is not without interest. Indeed, could it not be said that enjoying the sight of an innocent woman cry is not in itself a theatrical pleasure? For there is a dark pleasure in watching Racine's tragedies, an indignant horror mixed with a particular sweetness when, for example, we see Athalie resist to the death, or witness Néron impose his cruelty on all around him; it is a pleasure which is opposed to the pleasure of pitying, through tears, the victims' misfortunes. If we are saddened at Britannicus's death and reassured to know that Junie has taken refuge with the Vestals to live in tears and prayer for the rest of her life, we cannot but doubt both Agrippine's final hope and the wish expressed by Burrhus.⁵ As we know, Néron still has a long and cruel future ahead of him.⁶ Therefore, the seductive power of cruelty, which we experience upon watching another cry and taking pleasure in it, can be explained firstly by the horror with which we witness it, but also by its technique, its cold mechanism and its irresistible dynamic. What interests the spectator and reader even more, is to observe the way in which cruelty is vainly denied, and also, because it is repressed, the way in which it appears outside the text as an unspeakable violence. Because it is concealed, shut out and repressed, this cruelty is all the more audible, visible and present. Racine shows that cruelty does not and need not find expression in overstated performance, and that when it is tempered, mediated or silenced, an even greater cruelty is obtained, an absolute cruelty established by a subtextual, and therefore all the more perverse, mechanism. In Racine, cruelty, like God and Evil, is hidden and inexpressible. It is obvious then that without cruelty through tears, which is an evil, we would have little pleasure in governing, living, writing and reading, and very little enjoyment in pushing open the theatre's doors. I feel this point cannot be overlooked especially as, in Britannicus, it occurs as a representation of the fact, a mise en scène of this very pleasure, which enables spectators to see, over Néron's shoulder, an innocent female character in tears as well as an actress acting out the most perfect distress. In spite of all its prohibitions, and the ethical and therapeutic aspirations of tears, could it not be said that the theatre is the place where Evil takes place for the greater pleasure of the spectator, a pleasure which involves the feelings of fear, pity, compassion, and also Schadenfreude?

THE TEARS OF BéRéNICE

Although it is obvious from the very beginning of the tragedy, the decision to dismiss Bérénice is taken in the play's final scenes. These scenes are dominated by women, tears, politics, emotional outpouring, sorrow and disappearance, and end with the famous ‘hélas!’, the ‘grand mot’ of the up-dated sublime. At the risk of paraphrasing, I should like to revisit these concluding scenes of the play, and illustrate from a dramaturgical, political and emotional point of view the manner in which that final decision is taken, in order to elucidate the role played by tears in the play's ending. The question raised by these final scenes is how can the stage be emptied of its characters without any of them dying? How can the danger of suicide be transcended by a movement towards emptiness, or towards the aesthetic abstraction that must mark the play's finale? Flight, the nullification of signs, and the disappearance of the theatrical space all combine to represent only the memory of suffering, which is forever re-enacted, night after night and forever called on to go away.

Between the fourth and fifth scenes of Act V Antiochus speaks these words:

Qu'ai-je donc fait, grands Dieux! Quel cours infortuné
À ma funeste vie aviez-vous destiné?
Tous mes moments ne sont qu'un éternel passage
De la crainte à l'espoir, de l'espoir à la rage.
Et je respire encore? Bérénice! Titus!
Dieux cruels! de mes pleurs vous ne vous rirez plus.

(Act V. 4, ll. 1309-14)

After this address to the gods and to the two other characters the stage empties, as Forestier states in his edition, without even liaison de fuite or liaison de vue.⁷ Tension, therefore, is marked clearly and spatially by a divergence with theatrical convention, and the spectator, faced with this minor aesthetic transgression, is able to fear for Antiochus who, threatening to render his tears efficient, is in other words capable of suicide: the rage to hope would give way to a rage of despair, to the point that the tears of despair would force the doomed hero to end his days. But there is another consequence of this transgression. Spectators, who throughout the play have been aware of the strict adherence to the principles of liaison des scènes and liaison des actes, as well as the tragedy's continuity in time and in a single space that has never been empty, now have no solution other than to wait until someone enters the empty space, exactly as at the beginning of a tragedy. Paradoxically, what does fill the space is, precisely, emptiness. This void functions, therefore, both as a sign and as a prolepsis: it announces the dénouement and characterizes the entire tragedy.

This conclusion, based on a misunderstanding, can only be partial because nothing is yet resolved with regard to the main plot. The empty stage of Antiochus corresponds to the empty stage of the two lovers, and all that remains is to mix the two systems so that the stage is entirely empty once Antiochus, Bérénice and Titus are gone. It is, therefore, primarily a dramaturgical, even scenographic problem that Racine poses here: how does he achieve an entirely empty stage? As we know from the preface, in order to accomplish this the dramatist decides against violent means, and chooses the dramatic efficiency of tears.

The fifth scene begins with a word often used by Racine at the beginning of his tragedies, a ‘non’ spoken by Bérénice (Act V. 4, l. 1315), which expresses a refusal of the situation in which the character is trapped, and the will to decide in spite of the situation, which could also be referred to as cruel fate except that, in this case fate is explained by purely human and legal circumstances. The previous action is therefore played over again, and the stage continues to empty, but this time with Bérénice as the central figure instead of Antiochus. There are no words possible, no prolonging or arranging of time, no employable space, nothing, save for the exit of all the characters from the cabinet in which the tragedy takes place. It is as if everything which has been endlessly distended for five acts (speech, time and the occupation of a space whose only meaning lies in the past) has reached its limit; as though the mechanism of postponement, based on hardening recollections and therefore a sense of loss for words, places and past time, once faced with the emergence of the present political urgency could no longer be prolonged. The foreign queen no longer hears Titus's words, and only hears the angry crowd, while she herself sobs: ‘Tandis que dans les pleurs moi seule je me noie’ (Act V. 5, l. 1328). Earlier she claims, ‘Il n'est plus temps’ (l. 1319). In the end, the tragedy's very space has lost all meaning to the point that the queen, most unusually for a tragedy, is prompted to comment on the setting which, never before so clearly, no longer resembles a conventional stage set:

Je ne vois rien ici dont je ne sois blessée.
Tout cet Appartement préparé par vos soins,
Ces lieux, de mon amour si longtemps les témoins,
Qui semblaient pour jamais me répondre du vôtre,
Ces chiffres,(8) où nos noms enlacés l'un dans l'autre,
À mes tristes regards viennent partout s'offrir,
Sont autant d'imposteurs que je ne puis souffrir.

(Act V. 5, ll. 1332-8)

What this means from a scenographic and dramaturgical viewpoint is that the space of the cabinet, where the prince and the foreign queen met and where the tragedy occurred, can no longer exist. All that remains are traces and monograms of Titus and Bérénice, in other words the letters T and B intertwined, noble graffiti which no longer have any reason to exist and are only the cause of regrets because they refer to another time (‘cinq années’ as Titus indicates precisely in l. 1351), when a father reigned as sovereign and the prince was responsible only for himself. Following the sovereign's death and the prince's accession to power through hereditary rights, the décor-as-witness of the lovers' meeting place must yield to the outside world. In Titus's case this means Rome (the ‘sénat auguste’), and for Bérénice an unknown elsewhere. From tragédie galante, we have come to tragédie élégiaque via the political question. During the tragedy, space has been eviscerated in tears, in a great elegiac process of discursive postponement. Now the verse, which commented on the interlacing love of T and B, must also empty itself. Because it no longer has any purpose, except nostalgia, it must disappear in tears and in exclamations of ‘hélas!’

The play's finale marks not only the end of the dramaturgical experiment of valedictory postponement and the emptying of space, but also the end of discourse, as the rest of the text and the history of the variants indicate. In order for the elegy to continue indefinitely, Titus would have to take pleasure in watching Bérénice cry, and also cry himself (‘Quoi, dans mon désespoir trouvez-vous tant de charmes? / Craignez-vous que mes yeux versent trop peu de larmes?’, Act V. 5, ll. 1359-60). This is dramaturgically impossible, so the play must end. The most canonically acceptable ending would require either Bérénice or Titus, or both, to die, and indeed that seems exactly what is indicated in the letter that the queen gives him, if we are to believe what is said in Villars's La Critique de Bérénice.⁹ However, the violent spilling of blood is not acceptable in Racine's system, because everything must disappear, not in a simple and convenient action, but in a thinning-out which goes beyond elegy: it is the disappearance of places, times and words, more than that of the ‘life’ of the characters, which must take place. This may explain why, after the second performance, the letter was no longer read aloud; spectators no longer have any access to the expression of the will to die. They can no longer enter into Bérénice's words over Titus's shoulder, and the reading of her letter can only be replaced by a moment's silence. Suppressing the expression of the will to commit suicide without suppressing the idea (the audience knows that Bérénice wants to end her days once Titus, having read the letter, says so) amounts, once again, to the creation of a moment of expectancy and tension for the spectator who listens to the silence, or, rather, the silent reading. Furthermore, this dramaturgical device allows death to be suggested but not entirely expressed, as though something else must be imagined, stronger than blood, stronger than tender or valedictory tears: a total disappearance of the play and all its dramatic components, i.e. characters, time, space, speech.

If death is forbidden, then only silence or the indefinite prolonging of elegy and of Titus's hesitation remains. The spectator, therefore, watches an exceptional jeu de scène, rare in this kind of tragedy and thus very important for its interpretation. According to the stage directions, ‘Bérénice se laisse tomber sur un siège’ (end of V. 5), and does not speak again until the next scene, 105 lines later, if we exclude an ‘hélas!’, to which I shall return. What is happening? Firstly, a queen seats herself, an action which is in keeping with her role because, in tragedy, the act of seating oneself is a sign of mastery. However, this queen is also a lover under constraint (on Titus's orders, she cannot leave), and who ‘se laisse tomber sur un siège’, defeated and silent. This explains why her muteness, combined with her posture, produces a double effect. Firstly, her tears (as represented by her ‘hélas!’) provoke the tears of the spectator. On the other hand, through the physical and symbolic mastery of this posture and the emotion she is supposed to show, Bérénice is in a position to take the only possible decision open to her. She is herself emotionally moved, similarly moving others, falls silent, makes up her mind, and finally speaks. While Titus repeatedly replays the plot and threatens either to abandon his responsibility (which is expressly forbidden if he wishes to be virtuous) or to attempt suicide, thereby pleasantly mixing galant tenderness and elegiac distress, Bérénice remains silent and bears the signs of suffering as she sits in the centre of the stage. There is an identifiable link between tears and conversion, we have also seen that it is time for the play to end, that the space is disappearing, that the characters are fading or wish to die, and that discourse exists only between a silent character and a fairly stereotypical lover. A decision must be made, both for the characters and for the author; a conclusion must be envisaged and can be none other than a conversion to another world: political in the case of Titus, if not already accomplished, and an undefined world of suffering and tears for Bérénice.

But, prior to this, Racine imagines another dramaturgical challenge which proves the extent to which he sought to avoid a reversal or a ‘coup de théâtre’: Antiochus enters, declares himself a rival both in love and in générosité and, like Titus, leaves the decision to the silent, seated character who dominates the entire stage. Once tender love has failed, as have pity, blackmail, passion and threats, once the emotional outpouring has taken place and reason has only led to a series of hesitations, another noteworthy jeu de scène is presented: the distressed queen rises to her feet. Before this, as she listened to the princes, Bérénice, quite literally, sat in judgement. Vanquished and seated, she played the role of the weeping lover. Read by Titus, she saw herself denied a blood sacrifice; now she, in turn, can deny sacrificial death to the other characters.

Everything then seems to have failed: political reason firstly, because it has been moved into a private space which it cannot accept, which it can resist only by suppressing; so too has failed the galant and mondain plot, characterized by modish tears and by an a-historical vision of the classical Roman world, to such an extent that, even after crying, the happiness of escaping to a distant elsewhere with one's beloved remains inconceivable. Redemption through tears has also failed since sensitive tears resolve nothing, and only end in an elegy incapable of resolving the story which has been related. If the characters share a compassion for each other, and the spectator for all three of them, this compassion only leads to a splitting of judgements which favours all three roles. As it is impossible to decide which character has suffered most or who is most guilty, the plot cannot be resolved. Finally, the aesthetic establishment of the plot itself fails because the text once again finds itself at an impasse and is necessarily compelled to repeat the same passionate impulses in a flood of tears. In this great dramatic ceremony, the spectators and the characters are on the brink of sharing similar conclusions and of feeling together the same effects of their emotions through their collective crying. How then can the process be interrupted or ended? To what extent can it be preserved? Can the actors be expected to express such emotion indefinitely, and thereby provoke the risk of spectator fatigue?

In consequence, after the anger of Bérénice comes her written decision (not read aloud) to kill herself; after reasoning, Bérénice (seated as queen) has simultaneously examined both the situation and her feelings, has hesitated (defeated as lover) between blood and tears, before finally taking the decision to remove herself. Bérénice is a foreign queen, who, in spite of Racine, has difficulty hiding her past errors; indeed, Villars claimed that her exploits and incest were well known, to the point that he calls her the ‘Surannée’.¹⁰ She cannot fight against the fundamental laws of the kingdom or the Empire (the laws of succession, the right of primogeniture, and the inalienability of the royal domain); she can only resist as a private individual against the State, the Senate and Roman virtue. As she has no legitimate status in Rome, she considers, therefore, that after her tears of departure, she must accede to the determination to want nothing other than the complete effacement of her private state, expecting nothing more than the memory and example of a tragedy without bloodshed.

Suffering and suffering alone replaces all the other arguments of decision, and it is indeed this female character, foreign to Rome and to the State, who ensures the continued existence of this very State. In one move, Bérénice suppresses the opposition between the private place of the past and the public place of the present, between a happy a-historical time and the time of History, between galant discourse and royal discourse. It is thus seated that this female character decided to end the elegy and the play: Bérénice, the play, will be ‘un exemple de vertu inimitable’/‘an example of inimitable virtue’, as we read in La Princesse de Clèves,¹¹ which echoes Bérénice's own brief summary of the tragedy. Bérénice, female character and foreign queen, external to Roman politics and outside History, knew how to end this tragedy by indicating through her tears that the difficult question to resolve is that of the soul and not politics, which, in itself, can be easily resolved (Roman law must triumph, as we know, from the beginning if we remain within the political domain). Bérénice transcends the plot by transcending her suffering, but in order to do so she must remove herself from the play and suppress place, time, and the political and romantic action, and, like Junie, go to a place where no one will follow her.

The question of the soul does not belong to tragedy, even if tragedy raises it, and it is by bringing this question into her private a-historical existence that Bérénice begins an inimitable journey after having been at the centre of a story of suffering. It is as if she had to trace an uncertain and distant path of salvation, which was unattainable in performance.

UNCERTAIN SALVATION AND THE PLEASURE OF SIN

In Racine, women's tears are not solely galant or mondain, nor are they based on a simple or single emotion. Tears can be dangerous, or they can become a sign of perversity, of dark pleasure. Women's tears can give pleasure to those who cause them to flow or to those who see them flow: Néron enjoys Junie's tears before being defeated by their double power (they resist his enjoyment because they fight him and allow her to flee him), Bérénice accuses Titus of being charmed by her tears, and even the spectators themselves cannot limit themselves to pure and Christian compassion because they can also place themselves behind Néron. Because of the ambiguity of the feelings they signal (and of which they are the sign), tears are the anthropological witness to a way of showing feelings and, for Racine, a way to deepen meaning in his characters and to gain mastery of the spectators' response. Through tears, Racine shows that salvation may be possible, or rather that an inevitably troubled and uncertain way towards salvation is possible. As a therapy for passions, tears alone can contain emotional overflow, if sometimes only momentarily. Faced with Néron's political libido dominandi (the passion for dominating others), with his libido sentiendi (sensual passion), and with his amorous libido, Junie's only weapon are her tears, but initially she fails and reinforces the power of the passions. The power of faith remains, which, expressed in tears, allows one to glimpse the possibility of escape from the vanity of passions. But nothing says that the way is sure and that there again the efficacy of tears will not fail. However, even if Salvation cannot be known, tears are the only possible way to approach it or even to think of approaching it, if God decides it is possible. Even on stage, tears can change the heart and mind of the spectators, via compassion. It is then possible to attribute to them a moral, even religious efficiency. Given his religious position and Jansenist past, Racine must assume this if he wishes to avoid condemnation from Saint Augustine, Nicole and Port-Royal, so denying him and the theatre any right to, or possibility of, moral utility.

Racine must show that the ceremony of tears gives a chance to approach salvation or at least to indicate the way, because crying for Bérénice and with her, we do not cry for ourselves or for a lost love but for our own finitude.¹² By showing Junie going to the Vestals to weep with God, and Bérénice in tears capable of taking a decision in the place of Titus and Antiochus, Racine moves the spectator and explains, or represents the fact, that emotion can lead those who cry, especially women, to a possible albeit uncertain representation of conversion and redemption. The audience, caught in the same tearful emotion, led by Junie as by Bérénice, can also take the same path, marked by the desire, intention and hope of salvation. After the despair and rationality, there is then a place for pure, useful emotion, for all parts of the theatre. But here again, the aesthetic mechanism, more apt, after a shared emotion, to incite reflection and distance, evokes again in the spectator uncertainty and judgement rather than an intimate communion with the characters.

It is as the hypothetical spectator, not being Bérénice, that ‘I’ cry for her, that I think about my own finitude, and that ‘I’ legitimately weep. It is because ‘I’ am not Junie, because ‘I’ cannot follow her to the Vestal convent, that ‘I’ realize my own failure. It is also because I take pleasure in seeing Néron enjoy Junie cry that I cannot reasonably envisage being holy or saved. These are the disappointing, even deceptive limits that Racine traces at the frontiers of his tragedies.

Tears, because they are emotional, are contradictory. They can be diabolical or show signs of holiness. Even if he realizes, and demonstrates, that they can be perverse, Racine must also show that they can mark a movement towards morality and salvation. As Saint Augustine said, ‘les larmes montent de l'abîme mystérieux de l'âme’ / ‘tears rise from the mysterious depths of the soul’, and the whole century knew that they can be a sign, sometimes false sometimes true, of conversion. They can also represent an invitation to a possible conversion for the audience and, through theatre, represent a step leading to something other than theatrical pleasure: meditation and contrition after the curtain has fallen. Through Bérénice and Junie, the spectator can think and meditate, leaving behind galant tears and ephemeral mondain pleasures, to convert their tears into moral and religious tears. It is important to understand here that Racine uses a technique of sacred rhetoric which Bossuet (who hated theatre) recommended, and which Bernard Lamy recommended to those who wish to stir in their audience a desire for conversion:

Les hommes ne peuvent pas remarquer que nous sommes touchez, s'ils n'apperçoivent dans nos paroles les marques des émotions de nôtre âme. Jamais on ne concevra des sentiments de compassion pour une personne dont le visage est riant: il faut avoir les yeux abattus ou baignez de larmes pour causer ce sentiment.

[People cannot notice that we are moved, if they do not perceive in our words traces of the emotions of our soul. Never would one feel compassion for someone with a happy countenance. A lowered countenance, and eyes bathed in tears are essential to evoke this emotion.]¹³

Through the dangerous and decried discipline of theatre, Racine demonstrates that his opponents are right to use tears; but, like them, he uses the same rhetoric and the same artifice, and for the right reason. If, as Saint Augustine says, tears are the ‘blood of the soul’,¹⁴ they are also the only way to find God. Obviously the problem is that Racine writes for theatre, a dangerous art that does not allow a single function for tears nor a single effect to ensue. Even if he thinks that it may be possible to separate himself from a sensibility which is solely human and galant in order to imprint on the soul, via tears, the necessity of morality and interest in virtue, Racine must also interest his audience, by showing on stage women crying, and must let his actresses seduce their captive audience with their feigned tears.

This is why Junie and Bérénice, representing female characters perhaps more sensitive than men, but above all conceived as external to the political intrigue (Junie is a political stake but has no political action of her own, and Bérénice is a foreign queen fighting against Roman law), can give a meaning to tears: a meaning at once private and apt to lead the spectator towards a reflection on the soul. If there is nothing to say that their sole status as women makes them more effective for this, we can infer, nonetheless, that it is because they are female characters that we can better observe the journey of their souls. Thus, more clearly than the other characters, they represent the status of all mankind.

Because they are different from Agrippine, for example, the roles of Junie and Bérénice are better suited to be at one and the same time objects for other characters and suffering souls who must decide their own way. It is impossible for Racine to glimpse the road to salvation without the necessary punctuation of tears, which is even more important than that of bloody sacrifice. Junie and Bérénice are not martyrs to be sacrificed but suffering souls, whose salvation is uncertain, and who nonetheless show that by refusing blood and taking the path of tears, it is possible to attain hope.

By observing this choice, the spectators can reflect on their own journey, can find themselves caught in their own enjoyment without escaping the pleasure but, by examining these examples, they can also convert their aesthetic tears into moral or religious tears, without knowing for all that if, by so doing, they will be saved.

Notes

1. Christian Biet, Racine ou La passion des larmes (Paris: Hachette, 1996). [See also parallel treatments in Christian Biet, ‘Mithridate, ou l'exercice de l'ambiguïté: “Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?”’, pp. 83-98 and Suzanne C. Toczyski, ‘Two Sisters' Tears: Paralinguistic Protest in Horace’, pp. 221-9 both in Claire Carlin (ed.), La Rochefoucauld, Mithridate, Frères et Sœurs, Les Muses Sœurs, Actes du 29^e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, coll. Biblio 17, no. 111 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998)].

2. Aristotle, Poetics, Chs 13 and 14, ed. Russell, pp. 106, 108.

3. The edition of 1671 has 12 lines more than that of 1697.

4. Biet, Racine ou La passion des larmes, pp. 67-79.

5. AGRIPPINE:

   Mais Burrhus, allons voir jusqu'où vont ses transports.

   Voyons quel changement produiront ses remords,

   S'il voudra désormais suivre d'autres maximes.

   BURRHUS:

   Plût aux Dieux que ce fût le dernier de ses crimes!

   (Britannicus, Act V. 9, ll. 1785-8)

6. Which makes reading Tacitus all the more pleasurable …

7. Forestier, Œuvres, p. 1481; n. 1, p. 502.

8. The word chiffres becomes festons in the 1697 edition.

9. ‘Cependant l'amoureux Titus estime [la] vertu [de Bérénice], et se laisse tellement aveugler par l'amour qu'il a pour cette belle Surannée, que voyant dans le Madrigal Testamentaire qu'elle lui baille à lire, le dessein qu'elle a fait de mourir, il se détermine aussi à se tuer’ [But the amorous Titus respects [the] moral quality of [Bérénice] and allows himself to be so blinded by love for this lovely Lady of the Past that, recognizing in the Testamentary Madrigal that she offers him to read, her intention to take her life, he resolves also to kill himself’ (Forestier, Œuvres, p. 513. See also p. 1482, n. 2, p. 504).

10. See n. 9 above.

11. [The reference is to the last line of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678).]

12. Here Racine disagrees with Saint Augustine, Confessions, I, 13. See Biet, Racine ou La passion des larmes, pp. 129-30. (See Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 15-16.

13. L'Art de parler (Paris: A. Palard, 1675), p. 66. See also Sheila Bayne's article, ‘Le rôle des larmes dans le discours de la conversion’, in La Conversion au XVII siècle, actes du colloque du CMR 17 (Marseilles: CMR 17, 1982).

14. Sermo, 351, n. 7.