Racine/Moliere Characters Essay

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Racine/Moliere Characters In the seventeenth century after the Renaissance, a period commonly known as neoclassicism arose. The neoclassical period was a time where writers took things from the past and expressed them in the present. This new time of thought and innovation brought on many ideas that shaped the characters of famous writers. Some ideas were religious hypocrisy, bitter scandals, and moral controversy. During the neoclassical period everyone wanted to express their thoughts broadly to the society and two great writers, Jean-Baptiste Moliere and Jean Racine, did it through their writing. Being the geniuses they are they didn’t just create a great tragedy or comedy. They both sought to teach indirectly through the character types they created. Racine took the ideas of the neoclassical time and shaped his characters to show the undercover bad times of this era. Racine did not want the laughter and comedy that most writers were covering things up with, to show in his work, Phaedra. He wanted every bit of the wrong moral values to come to light through his characters, and he most defiantly succeeded. Racine showed through his characters that this was a time where instead of people taking the blame for their own actions and wrong doings, they would put the blame on the gods. Nobody of this time took the fall for their own downfalls. In Phaedra, Readers want to blame Oenone for Phaedra downfall and Phaedra claims she is cursed by the gods, but in reality it’s Phaedra’s own fault. Phaedra, by far, wasn’t the only person struggling with forbidden love and Hippolytus and Aricia weren’t the only ones who couldn’t express their love openly during the neoclassical period. Racine did a wonderful job creating this tragedy to open the eyes of society about bad moral values and peoples inability to take the blame for their own actions. Now when it comes to
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