Innocence, Origin, and Sin in Phaedra, Blake, and Melville
This essay examines the intertwined themes of origin, innocence, and sin across three seemingly disparate literary works: Racine's Phaedra, William Blake's "The Lamb," and Herman Melville's Billy Budd. The paper traces how each work treats the question of supernatural origin—from Blake's theologically pure child-lamb to Phaedra's divine but tormented lineage—and how innocence is destroyed by forces of passion, jealousy, and rigid law. Drawing on textual evidence and secondary scholarship, the essay argues that Phaedra is the most complex of the three, embodying contradictions of guilt and victimhood, while Hippolytus and Billy Budd emerge as parallel figures of unjust suffering.
- Introduction: Connecting Three Works Through Theme: Three works linked by origin, innocence, sin
- Origin and the Question of Supernatural Lineage: Divine ancestry in Blake and Racine compared
- Innocence Destroyed: Hippolytus and Billy Budd: Parallel innocent figures undone by others' evil
- The Law, Authority, and Tragic Punishment: Vere and Theseus enforce law over conscience
- Phaedra's Inner Conflict: Passion, Guilt, and Darkness: Phaedra's passion, guilt, and self-awareness
- Blake's Lamb as Pure Innocence and the Incarnation: Blake's lamb as theological emblem of purity
- Conclusion: Sin, Suffering, and the Complexity of Phaedra: Phaedra most complex figure across all three works
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The essay builds a coherent thematic framework—origin, innocence, and sin—and consistently applies it across three very different literary works, giving the comparison intellectual discipline.
- It uses close textual quotation from all three primary sources, grounding interpretive claims in specific language from each work rather than relying on plot summary alone.
- The paper acknowledges translation difficulties with Racine, demonstrating scholarly self-awareness and adding nuance to the analysis of a non-English primary text.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The essay demonstrates comparative literary analysis: it identifies a shared thematic cluster across works from different languages, centuries, and genres, then reads each text against the others to illuminate contrasts and parallels. This technique—using one work as a lens to sharpen understanding of another—is particularly well executed in the parallel drawn between Hippolytus and Billy Budd as innocent figures condemned by authority.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an orienting claim and road map, then moves through the theme of origin (Blake's poem, Phaedra's divine ancestry), shifts to innocence and its destruction (Hippolytus and Billy Budd), examines the role of law and authority, explores Phaedra's internal conflict, returns to Blake for the purest expression of innocence, and closes with a synthesizing conclusion that elevates Phaedra as the most thematically complex figure.
Introduction: Connecting Three Works Through Theme
As Bernard Grebanier states, Racine's Phaedra speaks "with the violence of life itself" (xiv). If one were to compare the French playwright's most famous female lead to the English-speaking world's most famous male lead—as Grebanier does—it would have to be to Hamlet, whose passionate assessment of life is likewise problematic. Indeed, Phaedra raises many themes, including the importance of origin, innocence, and sin—themes that may be found in such seemingly disparate works as William Blake's "The Lamb" and Herman Melville's Billy Budd.
While Racine's Phaedra is the tale of a woman torn by a passion that possesses her so cruelly that it destroys not only her own life but the lives of those around her—including the innocent man who is her obsession, Hippolytus—Blake's poem deals with the triple theme of origin, innocence, and sin from the perspective of the Christian God, and Melville deals with the same triple theme from the heavy perspective of the law, followed to the letter rather than to the spirit. This essay analyzes Phaedra and the triple theme of origin, innocence, and sin, and shows how it compares to Blake's poem and Melville's novella.
Origin and the Question of Supernatural Lineage
The difficulty of dissecting Phaedra in any language other than the original French is something that has plagued translators of Racine, as Robert Lowell demonstrated in 1961 (Ricks 44). Patrick Swinden also insists that Racine's "hexameters won't go into English" (209). In a sense, it is absurd to contemplate such a theme as origin when one cannot even analyze the play in its original language. Yet origin is essential to understanding Phaedra. As C. H. Sisson explains, "The subject of Phaedra is mythological" (xi), and thus deeply concerned with beginnings—and, conversely, with ends. Phaedra's origin is important because it underscores the tension in her character, which is wracked by passion and experience. Perhaps the best way to analyze her origin, therefore, is by way of comparison.
If Blake's "The Lamb" brings together the balladic repetitions of song with childlike precision and simplicity to effect a touching theological lesson, what makes it so effective is that it conveys a message of spiritual origin in a manner that the mind and heart of a child could grasp. The poem is addressed to a child—a point which makes its simplicity all the more endearing—and begins with the basic question of identity: Blake calls the child a lamb (a possible reference to Christ's admonition to Peter to "Feed my lambs" [John 21:15]) and asks, "Little Lamb, who made thee?"
It is not merely a question of parentage. It is a question of supernatural origin. The same question of supernatural origin is made explicit in the very opening of Racine's Phaedra—"la fille de Minos et de Pasiphae"—the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, who was herself the daughter of Helios, god of the Sun.
Innocence Destroyed: Hippolytus and Billy Budd
The difference between Blake's child and Racine's Phaedra is that the former is innocence itself—the poem was, in fact, written for Blake's Songs of Innocence—while the latter is, on the contrary, guilty of destroying innocence, specifically that of her stepson Hippolytus. Hippolytus may be compared to Melville's Billy Budd: a strong, passionate youth whose heart is good and pure. Hippolytus, like Billy, finds himself at the center of an evil plot born of jealousy. Hippolytus is unjustly accused of a crime he did not commit, and Billy Budd is unjustly punished for manslaughter. In both instances, authority is to blame: in Phaedra, it is Theseus who allows himself to be deceived into thinking that Hippolytus is guilty; in Billy Budd, it is Captain Vere who sends Billy to the scaffold against the better wisdom of his own heart.
Conclusion: Sin, Suffering, and the Complexity of Phaedra
The innocence of Blake's Child/Lamb is also found in both Hippolytus and in Billy Budd. Billy is innocent of all malicious intent—just as Hippolytus—and yet both, like Blake's Lamb, suffer a wrongful death. In other words, they go to the grave because of the sins of others. In this sense, all three works embrace themes of innocence, origin, and sin. But it is Phaedra who poses as the most problematic of the three—for she embodies the complexities of origin, innocence, and sin in her very being.
Works Cited
Blake, William. "The Lamb." Songs of Innocence and Experience. Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.
Grebanier, Bernard. Phaedra: An English Acting Version. Barron's Educational Series, 1958. Print.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. Penguin, 1986. Print.
New Testament. Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 1948. Print.
Racine, Jean-Baptiste. Phaedra. Bartleby. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
Ricks, Christopher. "Racine's 'Phèdre': Lowell's 'Phaedra.'" Arion, vol. 1, no. 2, 1991, pp. 44–59. Print.
Sisson, C. H. "Introduction." Phaedra. Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.
Swinden, Patrick. "Translating Racine." Comparative Literature, vol. 49, no. 3, 1997, pp. 209–226. Print.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.