Later scene


                                                            Phaedra


     My own perverse transgressions are to be made an open display only to the secrecy of Theseus’s private heart.  I will be my last claim on Theseus, on my husband.  He will be the final trasncripter of all my fear-woven perversity, all of which will become his private conscience, his guarded tomb within himself.  Theseus will become the true tomb of my heart, of my whole soul itself.  It will be by the fibres and delicately pernicious weaving of his conscience that my salvation will be articulated into law.  His conscience, by its will and by its law to protect the privacy of what it contains, will become the authority of my salvation.  Theseus will become my guardian of my honour.
     Hippolytus’s righteousness casually inverts all postures of this world, all names and desigation of status ware propped by him on a a stage to esubjected to an exposure o their supposed stagey nature, to be transformed to artifice, to be paled into awkward stage props, into things with no posture of their own.  I feel myself already turning to artifice.  I feel it in my sensations.  It is by the dictates of Hippolytus’s present social instincts, by the inevitable intentions of his righteousness.


                                                                        (pause)


       The destruction of my identity in this world is the only basis for any future action on my part.  The public shame implies only suicide as its honourable requisite- the expungement of  the will of the offending organ, the decay of the root of social corruption, but the sin itself yet kept undisclosed to public propriety .  The sin feels within myself undivided from his own nature, such is the invasion of his persecutions. 


                                                            (pause)


     The exposure of the peculier sin to public propriety will however be his indiscretion, his transgression against social decorum.  I resolve to affirm it so.  He will be known as indiscreet where I am modest and chaste in manner; the transgressions will be appropriately divided to their actors.   (She sits down to write)  All of the poisonous fantasies of my heart will conglomerate into my last testament written finally upon tablets to Theseus, all of my confession, all of the dark abysmic nature of my reality, of my horror rendered invisible to all by my practiced decorum.   (She reads out loud as she writes)  “Ah, Theseus.  What horrors laden within my heart can brook this tragedy.  My heart has become an encrustation of horrors.  I cannot feel where or whence the invasion ends and I begin.  The invasion is an abyss within me, has hollowed out my feeling, rendered me within myself a corrugated mass.  Did you detect a soul within me as I busied about the house   It was but the effective imposture of soul much practiced by me.  Oh, Theseus, he!  The he.  He heightens all to a purity of a thing’s essence.  He has an eye for the essence of all things.  He brought me to my essence.  He made me pure to my essence, made the outward consciousness the inward cravings, seekings and burrowings, all within myself that burrowed deep within depths I’d just as well have let bury themselves to my vision, all these depths of instinct he brought all my senses and sensibilities to an attuned comprehension of.  He made me comprehensive of myself.   He brought me to the horrors of self-comprehension.  He’d invaded me, had brought me to the impulse of devouring myself.