Racine's Phaedra and Ibsen's Hedda: Transformations of Ariadne*

Conflict arises in Racine's tragedy when myth, ordinarily suppressed, threatens to overwhelm the play's form. Thinking of these two principles spatially rather than in a pure abstract, a substratum of myth erupts into the surface of the playworld's action as a pre-conscious breaking past its barriers into consciousness. The myth principle therefore represents a psychic necessity which must be recognized by the characters and integrated into formal reality, and the aim of the entire play is to bring the two forces into right relation. Moreover, since imbalance in the playworld is mirrored by the heroine's conflict, her resolution accomplishes the play's aim. Racine conceives of both mythic and formal orders as grand and their antagonism as cataclysmic. In a world yet divine, moral authority is imminent in its social arrangements; therefore myth, in that context, represents antithesis and takes force from its embodiment as the power of nature—formless, ungovernable, fundamentally regressive.

In Ibsen's drama, myth and form tend to correspond rather than oppose each other. Alternate realities exist on the same plane, exerting horizontal rather than the vertical tension implied by tragedy. Moreover, the modern myth functions almost descriptively, as a frame of reference to provide additional rather than suppressed meanings. Whereas in Racine's world, myth is received as a natural or moral given, in Ibsen's it is a construct to organize imprecise and individual perceptions in a recognizable pattern. The aim of the play can thus be said to ask that its audience share such perceptions as ‘explanatory’ of form, a task accomplished when the heroine resolves a dilemma, rather than a conflict in the classic sense. These shifts in structure