Romance Notes

Abstract:

The importance of the eye (visual metaphors, seeing and being seen) and more specifically the gaze in Jean Racine's theatrical corpus is well established (Barthes, Mauron, Starobinski), but under-analyzed in the construction and disintegration of Emperor Titus' identity in Bérénice. This article contests the critical tradition that interprets Racine's Bérénice as a tragedy of the lovers' painful parting and the contention that Titus makes a conscious decision to rule without his lover. Instead, it locates the tragedy in Titus' crisis of identity, a consequence of the conflict between his libidinal gaze and the paternal gaze of Roman Law and posits Titus as a character who attempts to reconcile incongruent, conflicting images of his own identity. Therefore, I argue, Titus becomes a figure for the double revealed in three configurations: lover/ruler, child/Father, and victim/executioner. Titus experiences these disparate selves as incompatible and hence suffers anagnorisis (leading to self-immolation) thus fulfilling Freud's three characteristics of modern drama.