[A prominent French poet and critic, Valéry is one of the leading practitioners of nineteenth-century Symbolist aestheticism. His work reflects his desire for total control of his creation; his absorption with the creative process also forms the method of his criticism. In his prose, Valéry displays what is perhaps his most fundamental talent: the ability to apply a well-disciplined mind to a diversity of subjects including art, politics, science, dance, and aesthetics. His critical writings are collected in the five volumes of Variéte (1924-44; Variety) and his personal notebooks, the Cahiers (1894-1945). In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1942, Valéry ruminates upon the psychological inferences of Phèdre's character.]

After reading Phèdre, or seeing the theater curtain fall, I am left with the idea of a certain woman, a sense of the beauty of the verse; a future reserve resides in me in these durable effects and values.

The mind resumes its normal course, which is a riotous stream of sensations and thoughts, but unknowingly it has selected from the work the elements that it will henceforth treasure among its supply of ultimate standards and criteria of beauty. It never fails to single out, unconsciously, these elements from the pretexts and combination of happenings which had to be contrived so that the play might exist. The plot, the intrigue, the incidents soon fade, and whatever interest may have attached to the dramatic apparatus as such vanishes. It was merely a crime: wished-for incest, murder committed by proxy, with of course a god to carry out the act. But what can be made of a crime once the horror of it has subsided, once justice has been done, and death has claimed the innocent and the guilty alike, for death like the sea closes over every temporary scheme of events and acts. The emotion born of the presence and condensation of the drama disappears along with the decor, while the gripped heart and eyes, which had so long remained fixed, find relief from the constraint exerted upon the whole being by the speaking, luminous stage.

Everyone disappears, save the queen: poor, pitiable Hippolyte, the moment he lies shattered on the resounding shore; Théramène, his message just declaimed; Thésée, Aricie, Œnone, and Invisible Neptune himself—all melt into absence. They have stopped pretending to be, having been only to serve the author's essential design. They were not made of lasting substance; their roles have used them up. They live only long enough to incite the ardor and wrath, the remorse and terrors typical of a woman insane with desire; they are used to bring forth from her Racinian depths the noblest expressions of concupiscence and remorse ever inspired by passion. They do not survive, but she does. Memory reduces the work to a monologue; within me it changes from its originally dramatic form into a purely lyric one—for lyricism is precisely that, the transfiguration of a monologue.

Love, provoked beyond measure in the person of Phèdre, has none of the tenderness it assumes in Bérénice. She is ruled by the flesh whose sovereign voice calls, unanswerably, for the possession of the beloved's body and has one single goal: the perfect attunement of concordant ecstasies. Life thus falls prey to images so intense that its days and nights, its duties and its falsehoods are torn apart. The power of physical passion, forever thirsting because it is never slaked, may be compared to an open wound which keeps aggravating itself: it is an inexhaustible source of pain, for the pain can only increase while the wound remains open. That is its law. By definition, one cannot get used to it for it insists on its hideous presence as though it were always new. It is the same with an incurable love lodged in its victim.

With Phèdre, nothing veils, mitigates, ennobles, adorns, or elevates her sexual frenzy. The mind, with its profound, subtle, shifting play, its outlets, its intuitions, its inquisitiveness, its refinements, can do nothing to embellish this consummately simple passion or divert it from itself. Phèdre has read nothing. Hippolyte is, for all we know, a fool. What does that matter? This incandescent queen needs only enough mind to serve her vengeance, invent stratagems, and enslave itself to instinct. As for the soul, it becomes nothing more than its obsessive power, the ruthless and unwavering will to clasp its prey, draw him under, to moan and die of pleasure at his side.

This love, devoid of metaphysics, is love as described or presupposed in the literature of an age which rarely mentioned the soul except in philosophical speculations, an age when lovers were never seen invoking the universe between embraces and fretting over "the World as Will and Idea" by their bedside….

Racine knew better than to sweeten that desire in the raw which Phèdre radiates and sings. She could scarcely have inherited from her makers, Minos and Pasiphaë, what was not in their nature. It was not given them to feel as we do, when we yield unreservedly to the weakness of cherishing another person, a surge of tenderness that deliciously calms and eases all the forces of the soul. They were a callous pair of beings. Primitive love, as it appears in most myths, shows nothing but its implacably instinctive essence. It is, at this stage, simply a "force of nature," borne and acknowledged as such. It does not yearn for the exaltation that comes of One and One uniting beyond, through, above their keenest mutual spasm: it is satisfied to be this visceral lurch, for nature requires nothing more enduring than a flash. In simple love, anything that distracts from the consummation of pleasure runs contrary to nature. This necessary and sufficient love is too intent on seizing the body of its prey to spare its sensibilities; it will get what it wants by hook or by crook. It is not at all above fraud, rape, abduction. The gods of that age, whose sole function it was to enact the designs vainly suggested to us by our desire, accomplish effortlessly what we can only dream of doing: they make sport of feelings as well as of natural laws and, by force, by guile, or even by corrupting if need be, they satisfy their cravings. Mythology is essentially bestial. Zeus turns into a swan, an eagle, a bull, a shower of gold, a cloud, thus refusing to take advantage of his identity. The conquest itself is all that matters to him: he does not care to figure in dreams. But perhaps these metamorphoses are only symbols of the various tricks and ploys men use to achieve their sensual goals, replying, as the occasion and their wits dictate, on one advantage or another, on a repertory of grimaces, exploiting their visible manliness, their fortune, their fame, their brilliance—or the opposite of all these, for there are unfortunates whose misfortune, whose ugliness, even to deformity, will excite a feeling of pity verging on love, and move some heart to give its all; nothing is impossible where human taste is concerned, and I have observed the oddest conquests.

Though his Phèdre is largely ruled by instinct, Racine presents her feral nature in the most elegant terms, revealing its depths as the drama unfolds. The particular case that his tragedy lays bare would, moreover, appear to be less anomalous than deplorable. Unrequited love cries for vengeance. God Himself says to us, "Love me, love me or I shall deal you eternal death." And in the Bible we read that "Joseph, being well-made and comely, it came to pass that the wife of his master cast her eyes upon him, and said, 'Lie with me.'" Courteously rebuffed, Potiphar's wife denounced him, charging him with seeking to take her by force, just as Thésée's wife accused Hippolyte and so brought down upon him the paternal curse, executed by Neptune. I fear, then, that in our mind's eye we must see Phèdre in the same pitiless light as Rembrandt saw Potiphar's wife. In his engraving he showed her furiously twisting and stretching toward Joseph, who is straining to get away. The etching is remarkable for its powerful lewdness. In it, the biblical female, her belly naked, fleshy, dazzling white, exposed, clings to Joseph's robe, while he strives to tear himself from the clutches of this stark madwoman whose transport drags not only her ponderous flesh, but the whole soft bulk of her devastated bed, spilling a tangle of sheets to the floor. Everything focuses on this delirious belly, which sustains, concentrates, and radiates the painting's luminous power. Never has desire unleashed been portrayed so brutally, with a keener sense of the ignoble force that compels flesh to offer itself like the yawning of a monster's jaws. The Egyptian woman is not beautiful, but there is no reason why she need be. Through her plainness she shows how confident she is that her aroused and desperate sex will prevail unaided. This is not an uncommon error; it is not always an error. Yet I cannot imagine Phèdre otherwise than very beautiful, in the full flower of beauty, of her beauty, which I shall come to presently.

The passion of love secretes a fatal poison that is, at first, only faintly active, easily eliminated, and passes unnoticed. But a few trifles can quicken it so that, suddenly, it can overwhelm all our powers of reason, and our fear of men and gods.

By this I mean that, in becoming strongly enamored of

someone, we unconsciously invest the object of our love with a power to make us suffer which far surpasses the power we grant him or her (and look for) to make us rapturously happy. And if the need to possess some one person takes such complete hold of us as to form the condition of life itself (which is the way absolute love works), this now-vital affection, once it is torn by despair, sets little store by life. It familiarly entertains the idea of murder. This soon mingles with the idea of suicide; which is absurd, thus natural.

Having lost hope, Phèdre kills. Having killed, she kills herself.

Phèdre cannot be a very young woman. She is at the age when women who are truly, one might even say expressly, born for love, come into possession of their powers. She has reached that moment when life recognizes its fullness and its unfulfillment. In the offing are physical decay, rebuffs, and her own ashes. But here and now, bursting with life, she can experience feeling to its uttermost degree. What she is worth dictates, in the recesses of her mind, what she desires, so that her burdensome resources very gradually devote themselves to some potential but unknown plunderer who will take them by surprise, exalt and then exhaust them; whoever he is, for he has not even appeared yet, he is already gifted with all the charms conferred on him by impatient suspense, by a thirst every moment more searing. The internal processes of our living substance lose their normal function, which is to assure the survival of the organism. The body comes to anticipate the self, and to see farther ahead. It floods with a superabundant sense of being, and the mysterious anxiety arising from this excess riots in dreams, in temptations, in risks, in feverish attention alternating with lapses of mind. The flesh itself becomes a proposal. Like a plant overwhelmed by the weight of its own fruit, and bent forward as though begging to be plucked, woman offers herself.

Perhaps this has to do with some dark conflict being waged between the forces that so strangely coexist in our beings—and ones which continually produce us, that is, which keep us living, and the others which tend only to reproduce us. The individual succumbs to the species, which insidiously promotes itself throughout the whole person whose sensibility and general economy are invaded by the energies of a minute egg as it ripens, becoming at once the product, the disturbing component, the enemy, and finally dominating the whole living body. The injunction to outlive struggles and pits itself against the importance of living. The indefinable sensations provoked by an unmated seed influence, by remote control, the whole mental disposition, which has been so primed for the coming adventure that it will see in it, when it does unfold, an event of infinite magnitude. Venus calls the tune and Psyche plays.

Phèdre is in the midst of her second puberty, and embodies all the alienation, the anxiety of that age.

What I have said up to now was by way of preparation for that eminently noteworthy adjective set in the famous line:

C'est Vénus tout entière….

So Venus is the culprit, and Venus "tout entière." How can this name Venus be translated into nonallegorical language, and what is the precise meaning of "tout entière," an expression so admirable and felicitous that I hesitate to belabor it? Racine could take such perfection in his stride, without lingering over it, but today these words have connotations which his age did not as yet clearly recognize. We are able to uncover treasures the author did not suspect he had buried and see in his words evidence of a prescient mind. This prescience refers to the physiological aspect which, for lack of knowledge, I shall not explore, but I believe I have suggested the lines that someone more expert might follow, and I shall confine myself to what little I can say, offhand.

With Phèdre having come to the unstable pass I have described, her life has all the makings of an emotional tempest. Suddenly the event takes place. Someone appears and is at once recognized as the very one who was destined to appear. Why not someone else? We are always free to wonder if any other captain of handsome presence might have brought matters to a head. But no, it was Hippolyte, who draws down upon himself the burden of desire that weighed so heavily on her uneasy soul. Instantly, everything is transformed, within her—and around her. The days change color. Even the passage of time becomes irregular. The body's organic routines are upset. The heart is caught, and the breath as well: a glance, a hesitation, a hint, a footfall, a shadow will quicken or suspend them. The basic functions of life have found their master … in a phantom, in a troubling figment. Incredible superstitions gain credence. Her mind has astonishing lapses, or pays obsessed attention; it gives birth to the maddest inventions, or falls into a stupor lasting for hours, for days during which it shows no palpable signs of thought, as if it were arrested, like the body of a wounded man who expects intolerable pain to come of his least movement. All those vain ornaments, those veils, would not seem so heavy to the queen were she not a woman already overwhelmed by love. Her entire life is reorganized around a fundamental anxiety, all values are at the mercy of a whim that is not hers, subordinated to the infinite Value she attaches to Another, to the promise he seemed to embody. And when, having offered him her entire being (a gesture that in itself compromises her organic, psychic, and social equilibrium), this all-embracing gift is answered with resistance and refusal, then all the honey of prospective ecstasies, all the sap of hopedfor love, whose influence had overcharged her inmost vitality, all this turns into a poison of the rarest virulence. There is nothing which that distillation of hatred and fury does not attack, corrode, and eat away. The vital exchanges, the natural functions, the habits, the ethical and civil laws that firmly establish a person within his life, fall apart. C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée. When Venus first grew fast to her, the woman in love appeared transfigured by a relish for life, by a will to ascend the highest heights of ecstasy, her desire exerting such influence that her very flesh grew increasingly desirable as her desire grew increasingly ardent. Phèdre, beautiful in her own right but, like all beautiful women, beautiful even before love, attains the full splendor of her beauty when she declares her passion. I say splendor because the fire of a decisive act illumines her face, makes her eyes glow and animates her entire person. But afterward, that sublime brow falters; it is overwhelmed by pathos; it sags beneath its burden, and the eyes grow dim. Pain, the lesion of the soul, contrives a new and frightful beauty—a mask whose pinched features alter to those of a Fury. Venus is at last abandoning her prey. The venom of love has done its work. A woman has passed through the successive stages of passion; there is nothing left for her to do on earth. One draught of a different poison, the product of ordinary chemistry, will spirit her to Hades for a final reckoning.

As for the language of this play, I shall not importune the reader by saying the obvious, or what has been said before, very often and very well. I shall not sing the praises of a form that achieves the consummate synthesis of art and the natural, that carries its prosodic chains so lightly as to make of them an ornament, a kind of garment draping the nakedness of thought. In Phèdre, the strict discipline of our Alexandrine retains and fosters a higher form of freedom; it makes eloquence sound so easy that one does not at first realize what craft and labors of transmutation that ease must have entailed. I shall take the liberty of relating an experience I had once, for in my mind it is inseparably bound to what I have just written. I hope that this personal anecdote will not be seen as an intrusion of vanity. Not many years ago, I composed the libretto of a cantata, and had to do it rather quickly, in Alexandrines. One day, I laid this work aside to go to the Academy and, my mind still absorbed in working out the cadence of a period, I found myself gazing absent-mindedly through a shopwindow on the quai, where a lovely page of verse stood on display, beautifully printed in large typeface. A remarkable interchange sprang up between myself and this fragment of noble architecture. As though still at work on my draft, unconsciously, for the better part of a minute I began to try out word conversions on the exhibited text. I felt like a sculptor who had seized a chunk of marble, while dreaming that he was molding soft and still moist clay.

But the text would not allow itself to be rehandled. Phèdre resisted me. I thus learned, through direct experience and immediate sensation, what is meant by perfection in a work. It was a rude awakening.