The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine
of her short, sad life and her horrific death); as Racine tells us, Nero hated her, and, undoubtedly, for just those attributes that she so conspicuously shares with Racine’s Junia. It may be, then, that when Tobin suggests that Nero wished “to replace one female presence with another,” the female presence he wished to replace was not Agrippina but Octavia. Given Nero’s sadistic personality (of which additional evidence will be adduced later), nothing seems more likely than that, having extracted from his relationship with Octavia all the pleasure to be derived from torturing and, ultimately, destroying her, Nero, like a serial killer, craves a new victim to demean, degrade, and destroy, and who more eligible than Junia, who, her virtuous reputation having preceded her, would surely prove an enticing and entertaining challenge to debauch or, failing in that attempt, a helpless victim on whom to unleash his sadistic vindictiveness?
XVI
We have established, then, Nero’s possible motives for having abducted Junia, none of which relates in any way to his being in love with her, but all of which can be subsumed under the general heading of wanting, in some sense, to possess himself of Junia, which is consistent with my contention. What is more than merely consistent with my contention, however, what offers compelling corroboration for it, is the “supreme cunning” (the expression I employed earlier in connection with Nero’s selection of Britannicus as the perfect victim to demonstrate the destructive aspect of omnipotence) with which he has selected Junia to appropriate, since, on close inspection, her most salient characteristics all bespeak an inaccessibility, an untouchability, that would make such a conquest a conspicuous triumph and most loudly proclaim his omnipotence.
Junia’s “qualifications,” those attributes and circumstances that render her such a clear first choice for the achievement of Nero’s ulterior objective, are not difficult to discern. Put in simplest terms, she is the most forbidden fruit, and withal, almost out of reach, one might say: she is not even at court, being in self-imposed exile, and so must be abducted from her retreat. And a retreat it is certainly is: she is there, “nursing in obscurity her woes” (II.iii.89), as she later tells Nero, those woes including, in addition to losing her parents, whom “she saw extinguished in her infancy” (II.iii.88), the suicide of her brother, Silanus, four years ago. Indeed, when Nero surmises (fantasizes, rather, I would say) that she “thinks I’m to blame for her poor brother’s fate” (II.ii.40), we can suspect that he finds in such a surmise an additional inducement to possess himself of her. (One is reminded of Richard of Gloucester’s grotesque wooing of Lady Anne as she stands mourning over the body, practically still warm, of her father-in-law, the late Henry VI, whom Richard, as she well knows, has recently slain. True, Nero has not murdered Silanus, nor is the latter so recently deceased, but there is the same malevolent covetousness underlying both men’s intrusions on a grieving relative, and if Nero has not yet murdered Junia’s fiancé, as Richard had recently slain Edward, Anne’s husband, he fully intends to do so.)
Then, as Racine takes care to have Nero point out, she is egregiously (in its literal sense of “standing out from the crowd”) virtuous — the only moral, incorruptible woman in all of Rome:
It’s just this virtue, not at all the fashion,
Whose perseverance stimulates my passion.
There’s not one Roman woman, I maintain,
Whom my attentions have not made more vain,
And who, embellished with alluring art,
Has not made an attempt on Caesar’s heart;
Junia alone, withdrawn, all modesty,
Regards such honors as ignominy.
(II.ii.45–52)
Next, Junia is practically engaged to Britannicus, having several years before been promised to him by Claudius (as Junia will aver and Nero himself acknowledge in their first, lengthy meeting), and Agrippina has taken it upon herself to reconfirm that promise, which Nero’s abduction of Junia has placed in jeopardy: “In vain I’ve named Britannicus my choice.... I gave him hope this marriage would take place” (I.ii.123, 125). Furthermore, Junia and Britannicus are in love with each other. Although Nero coyly asks Narcissus, “Tell me, Britannicus loves her as well?” (II.ii.55), Agrippina has already made clear that Nero “well knows — how could such love be ignored? — / That by Britannicus Junia’s adored” (I.i.51–52). Moreover, there is the obstacle, on Nero’s side, that he is already married — to Octavia, Britannicus’s sister, that marriage having actually been arranged by Agrippina, who Nero justly anticipates will be furious at seeing “the sanctity of knots she’s tied” (II.ii.114) desecrated. Finally, Nero also could expect to encounter resistance from Burrhus, who, although he attempts to rationalize Nero’s abduction of Junia to the outraged Agrippina, trying to pass it off as a dynastically prudent political move, will later roundly lecture Nero about the impropriety of his alleged amorous interest in Junia.
Clearly, then, before having cast his eyes on Junia, Nero was well aware of those peculiar attraits (charms) of Junia’s that rendered her the ideal object for his purposes — that she was, to appropriate the romantic phrase, “the one.” And those charms, we shall find, form a far more convincing body of evidence to corroborate my view than any that we will be able to discover to support the view that, after catching a brief glimpse of Junia upon her arrival at the palace, Nero determined that she was, in the romantic sense, “the one.”
XVII
Of course, it would be helpful for our present purposes if Nero were given a soliloquy that would settle the question of whether he is really in love with Junia or not. But, after all, would that not strike at the heart of Nero’s interest as a character, namely, that, as mentioned earlier, he is a “riddle”? On the other hand, who knows but that such a soliloquy would draw yet another veil of inscrutability over him, since, as C. M. Bowra (32) observes, he is “a man... so corrupted by falsehood that he himself does not always know whether he means what he says or not.”
It is noteworthy that none of the four principal characters in this play is given a soliloquy. (Nero has one brief moment when he talks to himself [III.x.1–5], which is not, however, strictly speaking, a soliloquy, since, although Nero is unaware of his presence, Burrhus overhears him; in any case, it is as unrevealing as it is brief. Oddly enough, Narcissus and Burrhus are granted soliloquies, but in each case it is, again, only a single, brief, inconsequential one.) Interestingly, Nero and Junia are denied soliloquies, but for diametrically opposed reasons, as befits their position as protagonist and antagonist. In Nero’s case, it is because, in communing with himself, there would be a chance — when he is not lying to himself — that he might reveal what is actually going on in his mind, which is clearly exactly what Racine wishes to avoid: he wants us never to be able to trust anything Nero says, nor, for that matter, does he want us to be able to mistrust with certainty anything he says.
In Junia’s case, she has no need for a soliloquy, or, rather, the audience has no need for her to deliver one, since one of her most salient characteristics — along with her courage, her virtue, and her empathy — is her honesty: she always speaks her mind, regardless of who is there to listen. By the same token, she is given no confidant. Of course, her having been abducted so suddenly, in the middle of the night, would explain why she has none, but if there had been some need for her to have one, it would hardly have been impossible for Racine to have devised some plausible explanation for her having an attendant in tow. The point, in any case, is that Junia has no need of a confidant, the dramatic purpose of a confidant being to enable the protagonist to divulge to the audience information, feelings, or plans that it would be ill-advised or even dangerous to reveal to any or all of the other characters, an irrelevant consideration for someone like Junia, who is uncompromisingly honest, even, as we have seen, when being so is not in her own interests.
There is another, far more telling reason for Nero’s not being accorded a soliloquy, namely, that soliloquies are usually reserved for characters who inwardly waver: characters caught in a dilemma (usually hopeless), torn between two options whose advantages and drawbacks they find themselves constantly in need of assessing and reassessing. (Hermione, Roxane, and Agamemnon are three