Two Fragments on Anne Carson, Euripides, and Phaidra

Below are two fragments from the larger thesis I completed for my Masters thesis on Grief and Eros at Rice University

Phaidra

The perilous cost inherent in Homer's method finds a powerful and visceral demonstration in Carson's final essay of the text Grief Lessons (2008), "WHY I WROTE TWO PLAYS ABOUT PHAIDRA. By Euripides" In this work, Carson probes what happens when raw, uncontained passion is forced into the frameworks society uses to stabilize it. From the outset, she names her central bewilderment: “I don’t understand, I could never have predicted, your hatred of this woman.” Writing as Euripides, Carson addresses the audience directly, assuming the playwright as watching them “suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour” only to “cool, flicker out” when confronted with Phaidra herself, “for no reason [Euripides] can name.”

The essay continues;

It was a few years ago now I gave you a woman, a real mouthful of salt and you like salt. Her story, Phaidra’s story, that old story, came in as a free wave and crashed on your beach.

This conception of "salt" resonates with what Carson elsewhere in Decreation names "badness": the felt contradiction of our finitude against what exceeds us. Drawing on Simone Weil, Carson writes:

Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our badness and the sense of our badness is the sense of reality. For we do not invent our badness. It is true.

Here, "badness" is not something to be corrected, or even to be conceived as failure. Rather, it is a natural condition that must be endured—it marks the collision between our limited, temporal selves and the boundless demands of desire, divinity, or Being.

Phaidra’s "white hot" eros stages precisely this collision: “an incision into some other layer of life, some core" forcing into view the very excess audiences recoil from. Her passion becomes "bad" only insofar as it exposes what Weil calls "the sense of our badness," the unavoidable recognition that eros makes of our limits. Carson’s point, then, is that Phaidra’s salt—her raw, unmediated intensity—is not wrongness to be punished but contradiction made visible, and it is this visibility the audience hates.

This point is affirmed in the title of the essay making reference to Euripides' two attempts to dramatize the myth of Phaidra's disastrous infatuation with her stepson, Hippolytos. Carson graciously gives us a footnote to further clarify;

The Athenian tragedian Euripides (c. 484-c. 406 bc) appears to have made two attempts to compose a tragedy on the myth of Phaidra and her disastrous infatuation with her stepson Hippolytos. We have one complete tragedy called Hippolytos (produced 428 bc) and some fragments of an earlier version called Hippolytos Veiled (date of production uncertain). The earlier version was a flop. It seems to have offended audiences by portraying Phaidra as a bold sexual predator who confronts Hippolytos directly with her desire. The later version reimagines Phaidra and her virtue: she agonizes about keeping her lust a secret; is shocked to find her feelings betrayed to Hippolytos by an old Nurse; recoils from addressing the young man face-to-face; overhears him saying bad things about her and hangs herself offstage.

What Carson highlights here is that Hippolytus Veiled failed precisely because it confronted audiences with Phaidra’s bold and unveiled eros. Its immediacy offended them; its lack of mediation exposed something they could not tolerate. In the revised Hippolytos, by contrast, Euripides rewrote Phaidra into veiled restraint: she hides her desire, dies unseen, and becomes legible as virtuous through secrecy even if the culmination of it is Phaidra’s suicide. For Carson, this shift dramatizes what happens when eros is forced into forms meant to stabilize it: the excess of salt is displaced, veiled, and recoded as wrongness. The audience’s preference for this second version testifies to which seems to be a hatred of eros itself when it appears too directly because her direct passion is displaced into concealment, appeasing the need for order but enacting, as Carson phrases it towards the end of the essay, “the salt of absolute cruelty.”

This cruelty aligns closely with the “badness” discussed in Decreation as the felt recognition of contradiction that exposes the limits of our being. Drawing on Marguerite Porete, Carson quotes:

Lord you are one goodness through opened out goodness, absolutely in you. And I am one badness through opened out badness, absolutely in me.

Thus, this “badness” is inseparable from reality: it arises at the juncture where human finitude meets what exceeds it, producing the kind of rupture Phaidra embodies. To see her “salt” is thus to glimpse, however briefly, what Marguerite calls the “opened out” truth of our insufficiency, a truth so stark it elicits hatred. The audience’s demand for veiling—its preference for a Phaidra suffocated by secrecy—becomes a refusal of this insight, an attempt to neutralize contradiction by recasting it into a palatable narrative of shame and self-destruction.

The later, successful version, ‘Hippolytos’, appeased this societal demand. Here, Phaidra "agonizes about keeping her lust a secret" and ultimately hangs herself offstage, effectively removing the direct confrontation and the raw desire that audiences found so disturbing. This transformation of direct passion into agonizing secrecy and self-inflicted death reflects the way fixed epitaphs, in their quest for stability, abstract and thus displace dynamic, fluid experience into an unavoidable confrontation with contradiction and cruelty. This is underscored by the audience's very preference for this version, showcasing a dangerous societal inclination to avoid looking straight at "real passion" because, as Carson notes, "looks can kill." This "’feminine’ talent for veiling a truth in a truth," while seemingly a survival mechanism, for Phaidra at least, ultimately leads to a tragic blindness where there is "no moment of confrontation or truth."

The prevailing societal view, and Euripides' refined portrayal, offered a contained version of Phaidra's anguish. But Carson dares to ask a question that is both unsettling and yet also deeply nourishing to anyone who might also identify with Phaidra's pain: What if we've been looking at desire itself falsely?

Writing as Euripides, Carson will tell us the following story;

Phaidra didn’t care about you. She didn’t care about property. She didn’t care about the game. She didn’t even really care about Hippolytos—but she cared (was this what you saw?) about the core. Eros itself. She knew that was real. And knew she would fail it. Even as she wrapped its white heat in economic arguments, royal bed, palace power, his, his, his, this! this! this! ultimate sexual casino of stuff and honor and winning, she saw her own apostasy. Too many truths in between and Hippolytus just one of them, the lovely, careless, wry boy.

Here, we are immediately plunged into the abysmal truth lurking beneath the layers of societal veiling: Phaidra's desire was never truly for Hippolytus, nor for power or status, but for “the core. Eros itself.” This elemental craving, raw and terrifying in its “white heat,” directly contradicts the contained, commodified passion audiences preferred. Phaidra's tragedy thus becomes a visceral demonstration of how reducing desire’s uncontainable essence to a “sexual casino” of superficial gains inflicts a loneliness on the soul, as it forces the authentic self into agonizing apostasy.

Phaidra's tragedy, then, is precisely that she becomes monstrous in the eyes of a society participating in the alienating logic of fixed forms, despite her unique position outside it. As Carson puts it, "Truth is often, in some degree, economic," leading to a tragic misinterpretation where Phaidra's spiritual passion for Eros is reduced to a base concern over "property rights—ditch the old man, marry the son, keep the estate." Phaidra's longing didn't objectify the beloved, yet this objectification is displaced onto her own internal truth. She is re-categorized and reduced.

The stakes are made as Carson continues,

And maybe that was the reason she killed herself in the end—realizing the object of her heart’s desire could become just one more skin in the endless process of paring compromise off compromise, bid from bid, seduction from seduction, turned her against her own life.

The raw despair of Phaidra's final act, as articulated by Carson, culminates in a horrifying clarity: she “turned her against her own life” upon “realizing the object of her heart’s desire could become just one more skin in the endless process of paring compromise off compromise.” This existential collapse is born from perceiving the total absorption of vital, fluid desire into the rigid, alienating framework of societal transaction. When every “bid from bid, seduction from seduction” reduces the profound to the superficial, there is no longer a ground for genuine reciprocal connection, nor for the self to truly exist outside of being objectified, leaving only the stark choice of annihilation.

It is from this devastating understanding that Carson returns to the misunderstood core of Phaidra's anguish—a shame rooted not in societal transgression, but in a deeper, philosophical insight into the nature of her own soul's potentiality towards authentic relation;

There was shame in her but not the kind you wanted to see, not woman’s modesty. She was ashamed at the core. Ashamed to have veiled Hippolytos in himself. What do we desire when we desire other people? Not them.

Something else. Phaidra touched it. You hated her for that.

This passage immediately positions Phaidra's agony as a radical challenge to a world that prefers palatable, commodified versions of human experience. Her "shame at the core" stems precisely from her devastating compromise: to "have veiled Hippolytos in himself"—an act of

self-betrayal where she participated in reducing the divinity of Eros within him, and thus within herself, to a “skin” or an “object.” This genius is Carson's revolutionary insight: "What do we desire when we desire other people? Not them. Something else." Phaidra's unique capacity to "touch" this unnameable, essential "Something else" posed such a radical threat to the commodifying gaze of the world that her truth was met with visceral hatred, for it shattered the illusion of clean control over human passion.

It is this very hatred of raw, un-commodified truth that propels our larger inquiry related to this chapter: how does one navigate the restless instability of Being, which is to say, Grief, without succumbing to the static confines of fixed epithets? If the problem is perpetual, well, then how do we get around it?

A Reckoning

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

These lines strip the mood of any facade. They insist that rage is interwoven in the entire plot we’ve traced so far, the visceral consequence of grief that has not found its outlet or its form. And if grief and rage are kin, then we need contains that can safely hold both of them.

To this, Carson will tell us that

There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.

Carson's quote has reframed the purpose of tragedy as a mechanism for engaging with our deepest darkness. The nourishing quality of this engagement stems from the unique role of the actor, who descends into the pits of grief and rage on our behalf, creating a space for communal catharsis. This sacrifice is indeed a sacred gift, transforming a potentially overwhelming personal journey into a shared experience of "deepest intimacy with your own life." The actor's performance, by embodying the raw, unbearable stories we hold in silent shame throughout our lives, the audience is safe to confront these emotions indirectly, without being consumed. It's a carefully orchestrated descent that, if successful, offers a unique form of release and self-recognition.

The brilliance lies in the tragic form's capacity to lead us to the edge of our own unacknowledged pain, yet hold us there through the skilled "acting for you" of the performer. This mediated experience is what prevents us from passing by the crucial lessons of rage and grief, ensuring

that the touch of catharsis does not leave us behind, but rather facilitates a deeper, sustained connection to the complex emotional landscape within ourselves.

I think of the first Phaidra, whose play, we assume, still ended in tragedy, and wonder if Euripides had to learn this the hard way. This first play on Phaidra, Hippolytus Veiled, was a resounding failure, seemingly because it presented Phaidra as being too true.

Recalling the essay ‘WHY I WROTE TWO PLAYS ABOUT PHAIDRA,’ Carson, imagining herself in Euripides shoes, puts it like this;

Your faces, I don’t understand them. At night I stand at the back of the theater. I watch you suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour in a weird kind of unresisting infant heat, then for no reason you cool, flicker out. I guess for no reason is an arrogant thing to say. For no reason I can name is what I mean.

This honest admission of perplexity cuts to the core of the challenge in bridging the gap between an artist's intention and an audience's reception of raw, uncontained emotion. The "infant heat" with which "sex, death, devastation" is initially consumed, only to "flicker out," signals us towards the sadness that even when the artist is attempting to convey embodied truths, these truths are not easily digested or fully embraced without sophisticated mediation.

This initial "flickering out" acts as a necessary feedback loop, compelling the artist to recognize the inherent complexity of their material and the audience's capacity. Thus, the quote suggests that true artistic growth demands a humble acceptance of "not knowing" and a willingness to refine their chosen container of tragedy. This ongoing refinement constitutes the crucial work of “correcting” the decay of our unmanaged emotion, ensuring that the powerful truths they hold can be truly absorbed by the collective, rather than simply glanced at and then abandoned.

Through this mediation, artist and audience together walk the difficult path of confronting what is unbearable together. Ultimately,if the artist is paying attention, placing the audience at the center allows a fostering within the art that can prevent alienation and leads to deeper self-recognition.

Yet, the success of this mediation, which places the audience at the very core of tragedy's transformative power, does not imply a final or permanent resolution. Even as artist and audience walk this difficult path together, confronting what is unbearable, the possibility of sudden disruption persists. The intensity of the emotions being managed, and the constantly shifting landscape of human receptivity, demands an enduring attentiveness. The efficacy of the tragic form, and its capacity to foster lasting communal absorption, rests on a continuous, unwavering care, acknowledging that the insights it offers are hard-won and perpetually vulnerable to the unforeseen.

Given this inherent fragility and the crisscrossing paths that defy simple resolution, the artist and audience alike stand at a critical juncture. There is a choice to be made: whether to resist the inevitable ebb and flow of human emotion with lamentation or to find a different kind of song within it. This is the paradoxical truth of the tragic experience: that through the deepest expressions of sorrow and lamentation, a flood of tears and sighs, a clarifying light can break through, offering a way into darkness, a path into its depths. We must be willing to face our own shame.

So I guess, in the end, the failure of Hippolytus Unveiled makes sense.

We all burned our hands on that Phaidra, didn’t we? It was her shame that ate the play. And her shame wasn’t simple. It pullulated and turned on itself and stank at the bottom of the pit of the question of desire—what is the question of desire? I don’t know.

This final question leaves us with a heartbreaking truth; The Phaidra who is too true, is unrelatable. Thus, the initial failure becomes a vivid demonstration that some emotional landscapes, like Phaidra’s shame—which "wasn’t simple" and "stank" up the play—cannot be confronted head-on without risking injury. When dealing with desire like Phaidra's, a subtle hand is required. This realization compels the artist to abandon the pursuit of simple closure and, instead, cultivate a reverence for the mystery itself.

This pivot transforms the artist into a kind of sojourner in the wilder emotional landscapes of human experience. When dealing with truths as vast and ungraspable as Phaidra's shame, the task is not to conquer or fully contain them, but to navigate them with humility and careful adaptability. If the problem is that we don't trust yet, these displaced sacrifices of actors in story need to be believed.

The question, therefore, remains, how does one return to trust after failure? Euripides faced this exact question after his initial play proved unrelatable within his social system. His response, however, was not to abandon the challenging subject matter but to engage in a familiar visionary mechanism—the palinode.

Just as Stesichoros, in his palinode to Helen, fashioned a correction to invent a new relation to story, so too did Euripides have to retract his overwhelming portrayal. He did not abandon the truth of shame and desire, but reinvented its presentation, creating a second version, Hippolytos, that subtly navigated these difficult emotions. This re-telling was an act of artistic humility, a deliberate limitation that aimed to rebuild the audience's trust in him as well as his trust in his audience.

By reinventing the presentation of Phaidra's overwhelming shame and desire, Euripides made the art more widely digestible. So even if one finds the stark trueness of the first Phaidra more viscerally desirable, the subtle navigation of these difficult emotions allowed the play to be truly believed by the social collective. Though, for those of us who liked the first Phaidra, the use of the palionde assures us she is not fully gone. Carson points this out herself, affirming that such a universally resonant encounter leaves no room for remorse, when she tells us,

So, Phaidra—a work in motion, surpassing her, surpassing itself—disappears again and again into Phaidra after Phaidra, but she is not gone, her disappearance in fact reverberates everywhere in this so-called second version. I wrote it to show how that feels. Phaidraless world.

The first time I read these lines they shocked me. I, one who longs to share Phaidra with Phaidra, recognize my lack. But perhaps, if I was brought up to her face-to-face, I would have felt fear instead. Such a direct encounter, devoid of the subtle forms that could shepherd me, would likely have left me not with understanding, but with the paralyzing terror of confronting a truth too immense to eat for such a small stomached being as me.

The terror of confronting a truth reveals itself to be an obstruction to human understanding. Give us grief, give us rage, but don't make us afraid. We don't like to be truly afraid when we are lost in time. So in lieu of the nightmare, we turn to make friends. The characters in our stories thus become like true companions of the heart. Through their devoted sacrifice, they act in remembrance of me.