Contemporary Phaedra and Hippolytus Myth: Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love

The Greek tragedy that primarily served as the inspiration for both Eugene O'Neill's 1924 play Desire Under the Elms and Sarah Kane’s 1996 play Phaedra’s Love is the Phaedra-Hippolytus myth. It is the story of Phaedra, the shameless and lustful wife of Theseus, the king of Athens, falling in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, most famously adapted in Euripides' Hippolytus and much later in the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s Phaedra. O'Neill explicitly seeks to adapt the themes and plot elements of primarily Euripides' version, specifically the dysfunctional royal house narratives, and place them in a modern rural American setting. Kane, on the other hand, draws most directly from Seneca’s version and creates a brutally graphic, and nihilistic modern portrait of a royal family consumed by nihilism and boredom. Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin, this paper argues that the myth is used in the selected plays to portray the grotesque body to make a social critique of modern life. By undertaking close readings of specific moments in the plays, my goal is to reveal how modern characters perform mythic resilience with tragic exploration of existential emptiness and the brutal nature of love/desire in modern life, rather than focusing on gods, curses, and fate.