ANDROMACHE BY RACINE

The tragedy of Andromache - A war - A genocide.
It is not by chance that Pyrrhus gets a troubled look when his eyes fall upon his captive…
It was not by chance that Racine took liberties with history in Andromache and decided Astyanax was going to live a few years longer. Through him goes Pyrrhus's future fatherhood,"the project" which his love for Hector's widow triggered in his mind: founding his own dynasty, founding the dynasty which will unite the victors and the defeated. A redeeming utopia after the Trojan genocide, a new vision of the world which goes beyond his father Achilles's heritage and opposes it, in which Hermione does not have a place anymore…
In Hermione we can see, in the course of that day, as her love and pride are being trampled on, how the essence of murder arises. Split, after a year of uncertainties, she will break “live”, not without trying to destroy those who cross the path of her suffering in a “desperado's momentum”. Another "desperado" is her cousin, Orestes, the doubting man, the black prince who screams at the world for answers and cries his obsessive love for Hermione, a quest almost as inaccessible as Pyrrhus's…

Andromache, after Hector's death, acquired the status of Astyanax's father by force of circumstances. The fact that she is ready to hand it over to Pyrrhus at the price of the sacrifice – the annihilation – of her body reveals how ambiguous, how retained, how secret the joust linking her to the Trojan warrior is…

Andromache is certainly one of Racine's characters in whom "the body, the soul and the shadow" battle in the subtlest way…