Athaliah, there are two episodes that we would be hard pressed to explain away as having anything but a supernatural basis: Athaliah’s dream and Jehoiada’s prophetic vision. As to the latter, it has no bearing whatever on the action of the play: Jehoiada himself retains no memory of it when he comes out of his trance, and none of the other characters mentions it, alludes to it, or, indeed, gives any sign of its ever having taken place. (The chorus react to it in their act-ending ode, but only to express their puzzlement over this “dark mystery” [III.viii.26]: “Who can explain to us its sense?” [III.viii.23].) And as to the former, one should take note of the fact that the last recurrence of Athaliah’s dream (she has had the same dream three times: “Twice more to this same dream I’ve fallen prey” [II.v.63]) has already taken place before the action of the play unfolds. And, of course, neither Jehoiada’s vision nor Athaliah’s dream is necessarily unearthly in itself; each will be revealed as having been uncannily prophetic only by subsequent events: Athaliah’s dream within a matter of days, when she sees for the first time the very boy of her nightmare serving the high priest in the temple, Jehoiada’s vision only over the course of years (thirty, to be precise, in the case of Joash’s ordering Zachariah to be stoned to death) and even centuries (in the case of the destruction of the temple, the ruin of Jerusalem, and the coming of the Savior).
Whereas the most indubitable intrusion of the supernatural — indeed, the only intrusion — in any of Racine’s other plays, namely, the eruption, toward the end of Phaedra, of the fantastic sea beast, which leads to Hippolytus’s death, can be plausibly read as a “monstrification” of unbridled passion (Phaedra’s “monstrous” love for her stepson), a symbol of its destructive force, Athaliah’s dream lends itself to no such easy interpretation. Granted, within the context of the dream itself, it is not hard to perceive a clarifying nexus between its two apparently disparate halves: “Racine presents two visions clearly seen and described, first of the dead Jezebel, then of the living Joas, and the prophecy of the former is rendered explicit by the dagger thrust of the latter” (Lapp, 182). But if, reluctant to accept Jehoiada’s preemption of God’s role in bringing about Athaliah’s downfall, we would wish to construe this oneiric omen as the sort of God-sent miracle that Jehoiada has led Abner (and us) to believe is forthcoming (after all, as he rebukingly asks Abner, “With miracles was ever age so filled? [I.i.104]); if we would prefer to believe that it is this stratagem by which Athaliah is betrayed (and Joash enthroned), and not Jehoiada’s much deprecated (even by Racine himself) indulgence in some dirty pool (see note 16 for Act V), then we must applaud Him for having cannily foreseen (or artfully predetermined) the lengthy and intricate concatenation of circumstances that would lead from Athaliah’s sudden urge to visit the temple (“To the Jews’ temple I was, by instinct, led: / I thought I’d try to appease their God instead” [II.v.70–71]) to her equally urgent second visit, this time with the idea, not of bearing God gifts, but, rather, of bearing them away (in the form of David’s fabled hoard), the many links of the chain thus coming full circle, beginning and ending at the temple. But is this the form one expects God’s miracles to take? Rather than being dependent on the fluctuating psychological states — however predictable — of those He would manipulate, His miracles are wont to dispense with Jamesian subtlety and go for “high concept” drama, something that screams “blockbuster.” In a matter of fourteen lines, Jehoiada is able to rattle off “the spate / Of prodigies that God’s poured forth of late” (I.i.109–10), an impressive list, ranging from tyrants toppled and personal vendettas gorily gratified, through climate change on an epic scale, to the raising of the dead. Try condensing the convoluted narrative of the “miracle” of Athaliah’s downfall and death — if we insist on believing it a product of divine intervention — into anything less than a completely worked-out “treatment.”
If, on the other hand, we dismiss this episode as being merely uncanny rather than literally numinous, then we are free to regard Athaliah’s tragic end as the (if not inevitable, then certainly plausible) result of a combination of regrettable character flaws, potentially self-destructive in themselves, but craftily exploited by her archenemy, Jehoiada. And, in fact, Athaliah herself, while she professes to have been outsmarted, outmaneuvered, outplayed by an inimical God (“God of the Jews, you win!” [V.vi.24]), makes no mention of her dream’s having formed part of her opponent’s strategy, accusing Him only of having instilled in her breast an arrogant self-satisfaction (better known as hubris) that, by implication, she querulously disclaims as being entirely alien to her nature(!), and of having “played” her, having “set me against myself repeatedly” (V.vi.32). She may credit God with the victory, but it is hard to see Jehoiada as a mere cat’s paw: he seems to be the one pulling the strings. Indeed, when Jehoiada assures Joash, right before the final contest with Athaliah, that “next to you / the exterminating angel stands” (V. iv.9–10), he might well be speaking of himself.
After all, we can perhaps make a more convincing case for her nocturnal visitations being the doing of Baal! After all, they would seem to have been thoughtfully designed to caution her, and quite unequivocally at that, about the boy, warning her, no less “pointedly” than she was stabbed through the heart, that he represented some clear and present danger, a threat to her very life. One might, in that case, be further warranted in believing that it was Baal himself who redirected her footsteps from his own temple to that of the Jews (“I meant to pray to Baal for absolution.... / To the Jews’ temple I was, by instinct, led” [II.v.67, 70]), so that she might encounter this very threatening apparition in the flesh and take necessary measures to safeguard herself against him. Once the encounter has taken place, however, and both deities have retired to the sidelines to await the outcome, it simply comes down, for her, to what Martin Turnell describes as “a head-on collision between a ruthless secular tyrant and an equally or an even more ruthless religious leader who eventually outwits the tyrant” (Turnell, 302).
iii
It would appear, after all, that the presence of God in this play is no more relevant than the presence of “the gods” in Racine’s Greek plays. Rather, it seems likely that Racine, while recognizing the propriety of choosing a biblical subject, in keeping with both the predilections of Madame de Maintenon, who in effect commissioned the work, and the proposed venue for its production, chose one that would nonetheless afford ample scope for his treatment of the subject most dear to his heart — one which had been so from his very first play — namely, unbridled human passion, here manifested variously in a fervent believer, a ferocious tyrant, and a flagitious apostate priest.
Certainly, in his particular choice of the biblical story of Jezebel’s daughter, Racine made no concession to the delicate sensibilities of either the virginal cast or the audience. One is reminded of the distinction Mathan makes between himself and Jehoiada:
And while Jehoiada’s rigorous, rude address
Offended their proud ears’ soft tenderness,
I learned to charm them with my dexterous lies,
Hiding unpleasant truths from all their eyes.
(III.iii.83–86)
Unlike Mathan, Racine has no interest in “hiding unpleasant truths” from our eyes: with its background of blood feuding and wholesale slaughter, the story of Athaliah quite outdoes in violence all his earlier plays, even those dealing with the internecine histories of Oedipus (The Fratricides) and Agamemnon (Iphigenia); nor can Bajazet, set in the heart of the “barbarous” Ottoman Empire, boast a bloodbath on the epic scale of those described in Athaliah (see the second and third passages quoted just below). Indeed, just as in his first play he had chosen the subject that, in the words of his preface, was “the most tragic theme of antiquity,” so at the end of his career he scoured the Bible for this unparalleled tale of dynastic strife and bloodshed, whose pattern of murder and retaliation is so involved that he felt compelled to provide a précis of prior events in his preface. All that need be said about that history here is that the warring factions seem equally bloodthirsty, as the following accounts (by Jehoiada,
