“I have revealed enough. Spare me the rest. / I die and my sinister secret dies with me. (Racine 193) Phèdre has a huge secret: she is in love with her stepson, Hippolyte. She has recurring suicidal thoughts and wants this burden to be eased. Her forbidden passion has a huge impact on her mental abilities and her ability to be independent. She doesn't want anyone to know about her loathsome desires for Hippolyta, and her sanity slowly begins to weaken the more she keeps this information to herself. Taking a closer look at Phaedra's life, we discover that she exhibits a lustful, weak-minded, guilty, gullible, and dependent personality. Phaedra has a very lustful personality. She lusts after her stepson and can't control him. This love is forbidden and frowned upon, which is why Phèdre keeps it secret for so long, just as Tartuffe keeps his love for Elmire secret in Molière's Tartuffe. “I made a complete inspection of the neighboring rooms; / No one is there; and now I can finally…” (Molière 77) Even though Phèdre’s situation is different from Tartuffe’s, it can still be considered a similar situation in terms of forbidden love. Even if Phèdre wanted to stop lusting after Hippolyte, she couldn't. According to Lattimore, Aphrodite announces "that she made Phèdre fall in love with Hippolyte, that Phèdre keeps the secret and loves to die, but that she is a necessary instrument for the young man's punishment." (7) She cannot separate herself from this world to spare herself misery because it is necessary to inflict punishment on Hippolyta. Without her husband Theseus, imagine how much greater Hippolyta's appeal is. "While Theseus is away for more than six months on one of his adventures, she burns with...... middle of paper......" (Critchley 17) Works Cited Braga, Thomas J. " Double Vision in Racine's Phaedra. » The French Review 64: 2 (December 1990): 289-298. JSTOR. Internet. March 11, 2014. Critchley, Simon. “I want to die, I hate my life – Phaedra’s discomfort.” New Literary History 35:1 (Winter 2004): 17-40. JSTOR. Internet. March 11, 2014.Lattimore, Richmond. “Phaedre and Hippolyte”. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1.3 (Fall 1962): 5-18. JSTOR. Internet. March 11, 2014.Racine, Jean. Phaedra. Literature of the Western world. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. 187-227. Print.Reckford, Kenneth J. “Phaedra and Pasiphae: The Pull Backward.” » Transactions of the American Philological Association 104 (1974): 307-328. JSTOR. Internet. March 11, 2014. Roisman, Hanna M. “The Veiled Hippolyte and Phèdre”. Hermès (4th quarter, 1999): 397-409. JSTOR. Internet. March 11. 2014