Lecture 7

Contents
• JEAN RASINE’S ROLE IN XVII CENTURY FRENCH

LITERATURE AND HIS LITERARY ACTIVITIES.

• ANALYSIS OF MAJOR THEMES AND CHARACTERS IN

“ANDROMAQUE”

• GENERAL ANALYSIS OF “ANDROMAQUE”

Jean Racine (1639 – 1699 )

 was a French dramatist
 one of the three great playwrights of 17th-
century France, along with Molière and 
Corneille,
 and an important literary figure in the Western
tradition.
 Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing
such "examples of neoclassical perfection
 Literary activities

Tragedies
 Andromaque (1667)
 Britannicus (1669)
 Bajazet (1672)
 Iphigénie (1674)
 Phèdre (1677)

Comedy
 Les Plaideurs (1668)
 Andromaque (1667)

 Andromaque is a tragedy in five acts by the French playwright Jean Racine written in alexandrine verse.  This is the third of
Racine's plays, written at the age of 27, established its author's reputation as one of the great playwrights in France.
 In Andromaque  Racine replaced heroism with realism in a tragedy about the folly and blindness of unrequited love
within a chain of four characters. The play is set in Epirus after the Trojan War. King Pyrrhus vainly loves his captive, the
Trojan widow Andromache, and is in turn loved by the Greek princess Hermione, who in her turn is loved by Orestes. Power,
intimidation, and emotional blackmail become the recourses by which these characters try to transmit the depths of their
feelings to their beloved. But this form of communication is ultimately frustrated because the characters’ deep-seated
insecurity renders them self-absorbed and immune to empathy.
 Murder, suicide, and madness have destroyed all except Andromache by the play’s end, which is original in that Racine
overturns the legendary account of the Trojan War and allows a Trojan queen to triumph over the Greeks. Andromaque’s
audience was fully aware that it was witnessing a new and powerful conception of the human condition in which
passionate relationships are seen as basically political in their means and expression. Andromaque is more skillfully
crafted than Racine’s previous efforts: its exposition is a model of clarity and concision; the interplay of love, hate, and
indifference is subtly yet compellingly arranged; the rhetoric is forceful but close to normal speech; and the innovative
use of the offstage to direct the audience’s attention beyond the visual to the imaginary is remarkable.
The map of the characters

Achilles Orestes
Hector
lov
son es
wife

Pyrrhus engaged Hermione

Andromaque

Par-
son ents

Menelaus and Helen of

Astyanach
Troy
 Major characters

The characters are Greeks and Trojans whose lives are joined by love
and separated by their varying goals and allegiances.
 Andromache (Andromaque)
 Pyrrhus
 Hermione
 Menelaus and Helen of Troy
 Oreste
 Andromaque

She is the widow of Hector, the Trojan hero, and mother of his small son Astyanax. Andromaque, now a slave of the
Greek hero Pyrrhus, spurns his advances; she has promised to be true to her dead husband. Pyrrhus does nothing to
bring Andromaque to a real understanding of her situation as his slave. Frantic with love for her, Pyrrhus threatens to
kill her son if she will not marry him, but he counters his extravagant threats against the boy’s life with equally
extravagant promises for the future of Andromaque and her son. Pyrrhus actually fosters Andromaque’s capacity to
live in a dream, in a world of words, of codes, of courtly manners, until her mind is filled with a view of her past
estate so incurably romantic that she cannot comprehend her present condition. Pyrrhus finally abandons hope of
marrying Andromaque and repledges himself to Hermione, whereupon Andromaque begs Hermione to spare the life
of Astyanax. Still jealous of Andromaque, Hermione rejects her plea. Andromaque, to save the life of her son,
consents to marry Pyrrhus, but she remains full of unrealistic contrivance. Having obtained Pyrrhus’ promises to
guard her child forever, she plans to kill herself immediately after the wedding rites. Andromaque is still on this high
note of idealistic foolhardiness when Pyrrhus is killed by the soldiers of Oreste.
 Pyrrhus

Pyrrhus , the king of Epirus, Achilles’ son, betrothed to Hermione. He has come to
regret his exploits in the Trojan War because they may have cost him Andromaque’s
love. He tries to move Andromaque by threatening to kill her son. He is so wild
with love that, like Oreste, he becomes unreasonable and unmanly. Aristocratic and
demanding, he must have his way with Andromaque, whatever the cost and despite
his pledge to Hermione, who also must have her way. Caught in a situation designed
to reveal the follies of a passion out of control and out of bounds, Pyrrhus is not so
much a character as passion’s ruin.
 Hermione

Hermione ,the daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Troy. Oreste loves her, she loves Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus loves
Andromaque, who has solemnly vowed to be true to her dead husband Hector. This situation brings out the worst in
the four lovers. Each seeks his or her own satisfaction so that not a single altruistic action is born from the love of
one for another, and tragedy ensues. While Pyrrhus vacillates between his promise to marry Hermione and his
desire to wed his slave, the beautiful Andromaque, haughty Hermione vacillates between loving and hating Pyrrhus.
Hermione rejects Oreste to accept the hand of Pyrrhus, encourages Oreste when Pyrrhus turns from her, rejects
Oreste and triumphs over Andromaque when Pyrrhus returns to her, recalls Oreste to her side when Pyrrhus again
rejects her, and arranges with Oreste the murder of Pyrrhus. After the death of Pyrrhus, the proud and wretched
Hermione spurns Oreste once again. She admits to him at last that she has always loved Pyrrhus and that she lied
when she told Oreste she could not marry him because she was betrothed by her father and bound by her duty as a
Greek princess to Pyrrhus. Although cruel and treacherous, Hermione is also pitiful in her plight. She commits
suicide after viewing Pyrrhus’ body.
 Oreste

Oreste , the son of Agamemnon, sent to Epirus to demand the death of Astyanax.
Oreste morbidly longs for his own death. He is melancholic, self-centered,
adolescent, and driven to frenzy whenever his passions are thwarted. Oreste
believes himself born to be a living example of the wrath of the gods. For
Hermione’s sake, he forsakes the course that his honor and his reason suggest to
him. Careless of honor and duty, he arranges the murder of Pyrrhus on Pyrrhus’
wedding day, only to have Hermione reject him because he has murdered the man
she loves. Wild with disappointment, Oreste takes leave of his senses and in
madness is borne from the stage.
 Menelaus and Helen of Troy

Hermione’s parents were Menelaus and Helen of Troy. As a dutiful daughter, Hermione follows
her father’s wishes that she become engaged to Pyrrhus, who is tempted to abandon her for
Andromache. Hermione’s pride leads her to reject Andromache’s plea for her help in saving
Astyanax. In her anger and jealousy toward Pyrrhus, she toys with Oreste’s affections. Spurned by
Pyrrhus, she aids Oreste in planning his murder. Confronting the reality of her fiancé’s death and
her role in it, brought home by seeing his body, propels her to suicide

Céphise
Andromaque’s good friend and counselor, another voice of practical good sense and duty in the
midst of the emotional storms that agitate the characters in this drama
Major themes

Deception and Selfishness

False Virtue

The Insignificance of Human Life

 Deception and Selfishness

This play is filled with deceptions, mostly deceptions motivated by love. The character of
Hermione in particular, inspired by her pathological affection for Pyrrhus, deceives and
manipulates Oreste, even to the point of regicide. However, she is far from alone in her
deceptions. Pyrrhus, whose lack of conviction in the face of Andromache’s sorrow leads him to
alternate between the play’s two principle female characters, resulting in him giving each
woman false hopes in turn. What the play’s many deceptions have in common is selfishness. All
the characters, with the exception of Andromache, have responsibilities as influential political
figures, but none of them act for any other reason than for gaining the individual they love, or in
Andromache’s case, preserving the life of one she loves.
 False Virtue

The characters in this play initially appear as manifestations of classical virtues, which the playwright then
undermines. In his initial decision to deny the Greeks' request for the life of Astyanax, King Pyrrhus comes across as
a strong and principled figure, yet his subsequent threat to kill the boy if Andromache doesn’t marry him reveals that
he made this stand to impress her and win her affection. Similarly, while Oreste is initially unwilling to assassinate
Pyrrhus at Hermione’s request, preferring the more honorable course of war against him, he allows himself to be
persuaded when Hermione promises to marry him as a reward. Hermione herself laughs at the debt she has to Hector
in his championing her mother against his countrymen when Andromache evokes it, and she later makes use of the
feminine ideals prevalent in classical Greece to preserve herself from guilt. She explains to Oreste that he was wrong
to listen to her, that she had been rendered irrational by the grief and distress that she as a woman had suffered
following her rejection by Pyrrhus. Even Andromache, the play’s most sympathetic character, is shown in the earlier
version of this play’s ending to act opportunistically, seizing the instruments of power after the death of Pyrrhus.
 The Insignificance of Human Life

Human life in this play is portrayed as having little value. Pyrrhus and Oreste talk of war
casually, as a means of obtaining glory, giving little regard to the cost war would have in
terms of human life. Astyanax is little more than a pawn, a means of manipulation wielded by
various characters in order to obtain their desires. Even his mother chances his survival on the
strength of Pyrrhus’s principle, trusting that after her suicide he will honor the pledge he
made to her. The instinct to survive consistently comes after the emotional compulsions of
romance and of sex, as exemplified when Oreste, having been informed by his men that his
life is in danger, appears not to care, submitting to a state of apathy in the knowledge that his
lover is dead.
 Style of Andromache

Racine had at his disposal a limited number of colorless words, chosen for their aura of elegance and nobility. He could not
use the arsenal of sounds, scents, tastes, and colors of the daily vocabulary, because they were not sufficiently "noble." He
was also forbidden the introduction of images, except those consecrated by usage, for the seventeenth century did not prize
originality.
Furthermore, all plays had to be written in verse and the rules of versification were extremely rigid. Plays were written in
a twelve-syllable line called the alexandrine, with a pause after the sixth syllable called the caesura. This unimaginative
rhyme consisted of alternating pairs of feminine lines (ending in -e and masculine lines (any other ending). The
enjambement (run-on line) which carries the meaning over into a second line was forbidden.
But Racine triumphed over his limitations. He subtly relieved the regularity of the versification by occasionally dividing his
lines into three parts, or giving one half of a line to one character and the rest to his interlocutor. With similar dramatic
effect, he often evokes a startling contrast within the two halves of a single line. Racine also uses repeated or subtly shifting
vowel and consonant sounds to establish a mood and exploits the melody of the language to such an extent that his dialogue
is sometimes pure music.
Quotations- Quote 1

“Pyrrhus: Well, lady, well, it seems I must obey:

I must forget you, or must rather hate.
Too long I've shown you love's violence
To lapse into a dull indifference.
Consider well: from now on, my heart,
If it must not love, must take hate's part.
I'll spare nothing in my righteous anger;
The son pays for the scorn of the mother;
Greece demands him; I'll not undertake
To waste my glory saving an ingrate.”
 Analysis of the quote 1

This lays out the major choice that Andromache must make at the beginning of the
play. Greece wants to murder her son because they fear the havoc he'll wreak in the
future if he decides he wants to get revenge for the death of his father. They have
asked Pyrrhus to give the boy to them, and he has refused. However, he doesn't
actually care if Astyanax dies. He only wants to use the boy's life to convince
Andromache to marry him. It doesn't matter that he is engaged to another, and that
Andromache doesn't want him; he wants her, and to him, that justifies any choices
or threats he makes.
Quote 2

“Hermione: Must one then credit every crazed lover?

Could you my deeper thought not discover?
Could you not see by my inner torment,
My heart spurred my speech in every moment?
Though I wished it, why must you then agree?
Did you have to make me say it endlessly?
Before the deed you came to question me,
To return again: or rather to avoid me?
Why not leave me then to my own vengeance!”
 Analysis of the quote 2

After Oreste's men kill Pyrrhus, Hermione is distraught. Even though she
worked against him during the play and was the one who convinced Oreste to
kill him, she loved Pyrrhus. Without him alive, she feels despondent. She
doesn't even want to be near Oreste, even though he did everything for her
love. This is an example of how violence in the name of love is nothing but
destructive. No one gets to end up happy when people are doing harmful
things in the name of love. Instead, people are injured and conspire against
each other, resulting in bloodshed, broken hearts, and madness.
Quote 3

“Andromache: No, No, Cephisa, you must not follow.

To you I confide my dearest treasure:
If you'd live, live for this child of Hector.
Sole sanctuary of Trojan hopes now, think
How vital you'll prove to that line of kings.
Watch Pyrrhus closely; see that he stays true:
You may speak of me still, if you must do.
Make him value this marriage; in a breath,
Remind him I was bound to him by death.
That his resentment must now flee him,
That, leaving him my son, I esteem him.
Let our son know of our heroic past;
As soon as you can, lead him on that path”.
 Analysis of the quote 3

Andromache ultimately decides that she can neither live with Pyrrhus nor see her son
killed. She decides to give in, marry him, and then kill herself. She believes that Pyrrhus
will be honorable enough to keep her son, his stepson by marriage, alive. Furthermore, she
asks Cephisa to keep him safe and raise him to do what Greece fears he will do: grow up
and seek revenge on behalf of the Trojans. Each of the characters loves someone they
cannot have, and that is what ultimately leads to tragedy in their lives. Andromache
especially doesn't have the chance to be with the person she loves because Hector is dead.
She can't imagine a life without him; in the same way, Pyrrhus, Hermione, and Oreste all
cannot imagine a life without the object of their affections.
THE END