The first-person narrative is the driver of storytelling, of demonstrating and describing experience that maintains a realness driven by the power of empathy and of understanding. Through the format of a first-person narrative, the retelling of the experience remains in the hands of the original owner—the story is theirs to portray as they wish. It delivers an agency to the individual. Agency, as a term, tends to derive meaning from the fact that a single person can find it for themselves, and can use it to regain a power and/or presence that was once lost or stripped away. But, to view agency in binary terms, of either the individual engaging with the process themselves or not at all—the loss of agency, or the absence of agency—an entire perspective on agency is lost. Can agency exist for an individual if they are not explicitly retelling the narrative themselves? Does the existence of true agency fundamentally root itself in the need for the original person to tell their story? If another person recounts an individual’s story, does it inherently disqualify the capacity for the person whose story is being told to acquire a form of agency? In many ways, the question of the root of agency—whether it is present or not—appears to exist in a paradox of the power of telling a story no matter what, or of only telling a story if it comes directly from the individual to which it pertains.

In part, this dissonance can be superficially understood through the context of imitation and subjection originating in the importance of perspective. If the recounting of a story does not come from the person who experienced the history themselves, an argument against the presence of true agency steams from a general understanding of perspective: without truly embodying another person and feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching an experience as they did, how can the story represent a fraction of the truth. Observation in an experience is only a subset of what it means to tell a story. The multi-faceted process must engage with personal experience. And yet, not engaging with a story if it does not come from the original person removes any possibility of agency as silence takes its place instead.

The center problematic of this analysis and artistic exploration roots itself in this layered questioning—if the possibility of re-appropriating one’s story by another permits an existence of agency, despite being filtered through a secondary, or even tertiary source. Greenblatt states in “Self-fashioning” how “Autonomy is an issue but not the sole or even the central issue: the power to impose a shape upon oneself is an aspect of the more general power to control identity—that of others at least as often as one’s own. What is central is the perception…” (Greenblatt 1). This aims to complicate the understanding of agency with the concept of autonomy—whether one informs the other, or whether one is necessary to invoke the other. Does agency steam from an autonomous being? Can autonomy be in peril while still maintaining a level of autonomy in the narrative? If agency must come from the first-person experience of an individual, then it originally appears defined within a framework that purports an achieved level of autonomy. And yet, if Greenblatt’s argument regarding the growth and establishment of self-fashioning in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe is invoked, then autonomy itself is created through a form of self-regulation, in an attempt to create a self that is autonomous. If autonomy, which originally seemed to act as a pillar of one’s agency, is so superfluous, then perhaps the definition of agency is less rigorous than previously imagined.

With this context in mind, Racine’s Iphigénie places this problematic at the forefront, where a questioning of agency appears in relation to three female figures in the play: Iphigénie, Éréphile, and Diane, the goddess of the moon. From a high level, there are two prevailing readings of the text. The first is where the female narrative is reduced by the male gaze, the male perspective, and hence the male reduction of a set of experiences lived by women. In terms of Iphigénie, this can be observed through her father’s sad yet finally unwavering commandment of her ultimate sacrifice, of her “imprisonment” that removes her access to her love, Achilles, and of her seemingly lost presence of autonomy. In terms of Éréphile, this can be observed by the fact that her death is the result of the gods’ exigence of her death to give the men of the army the power and favor to wage war, and by the fact that her death is experienced only through the version that Ulysse desires to explain to those who were not there, an appropriated narrative of her own self-sacrifice. In terms of Diane, this is observed by the fact that the Ulysse explains her descent to the stage of the sacrificial slab as one for the men of the army, to collect that which solidified the wishes of the army: « Le soldat étonné dit que dans une nue / Jusque sur le bucher Diane est descendue / Et croit que s’élevant au travers de ses feux / Elle portait au ciel notre encens et nos vœux » (Racine 1785-1788, emphasis added). From one point of view, « notre encens and nos vœux » frames the death of Éréphile as one that belongs to the army and their prideful military goals in which Diane is complicit in its fulfillment.

Yet, in returning to an uncertainty around the fundamental framework of how to define agency with regards to the presence of an autonomous self, the portrayal of these women in the eyes of men can be read instead through the lens of an establishment of self-fashioning in which the wholly autonomous self is, per Greenblatt, a representation of what it means to create the self in the first place (make a footnote about Munichin). Therefore, the second reading of the text is informed by a more subtle understanding of agency, one that does not prescribe to the need for an autonomous self to narrate the instance of agency. It is either the underlying components of character or the result of an act that establish agency.

With regards to the same characters of Racine’s play, in terms of Iphigénie, this change in narrative can be observed through the strong moral presence of her character and her final resignment to be taken to the alter to be sacrificed—contrasted with her father who tries to hide his tears under a veil. Her resolve acts as her own version of agency despite intending to be sacrificed, agency that, from other perspectives, would have appeared non-existent: « Il me cédait aux Dieux, dont il m’avait reçue / Ma mort n’emporte pas tout le fruit de vos feux / … / Daignez m’ouvrir vos bras pour la dernière fois / Madame, et rappelant votre vertu sublime… / Eurybate, à l’Autel conduisez la Victime » (Racine 1658-1659, 1664-1666). Without crying, with intention and with clarity, she takes that which has been forced upon her—her own imminent death—and explains to her mother that her death will not destroy her parents’ marriage and that they must hug goodbye. Her stoicism can be perceived as self-defining and as evidence of internal strength.

In terms of Éréphile, this can be observed in three capacities, portrayed within the following six lines: « Déjà pour la saisir Calchas lève le bras / Arrête, a-t-elle dit, et ne m’approche pas / Le sang de ces Héros, dont tu me fais descendre / Sans tes profanes mains saura bien se répandre / Furieuse elle vole, et sur l’autel prochain / Prend le sacré couteau, le plonge dans son sein » (Racine 1771-1776). While fully recounted by Ulysse, she takes ownership through her actions, and she, despite already being dead by the time this story is told, maintains the power of the present tense and the first-person voice. First, she undermines Calchas, who was going to grab her and sacrifice her—he was likely expecting against her will. Here, her actions become her own instead of those or anyone else around her. Second, not only does she defame the hands of Calchas, telling him to stay away, Ulysse presumably says her words verbatim. She has already sacrificed herself, and yet, the present tense allows her to exist still. From one point of view, one might argue that Ulysse is appropriating her voice, but from another, one might assert that her voice supersedes that of Ulysse’s, where he acts like more of a vessel than an active power. Third, she takes the knife and sacrifices herself, dissolving the possibility of anyone else standing witness to deprive her of the owner of her death—she took her own life. It remains within her hands.

In terms of Diane, this problematic of agency takes root in the image of the goddess herself and the verb tense that informs her presence to the audience. While her descent to retrieve the results of the sacrifice are described in the past tense, a mechanism that removes her active presence from the scene per Ulysse’s retelling, she is also not “seen” because of the descriptor. On the slip side, this reinforces the concept that Certeau explores in “Extase blanche” where you cannot see everything because the foundation for being able to see is informed by the binary, that something must then be invisible, unseeable. Furthermore, that which is “unseeable” maintains a degree of power because it because people tend to have a voracity of sight, a deep desire to consume the visible: « Supprimez ce que vous ne voyez pas, et vous supprimez aussi ce que vous voyez. Alors se crée un grand éblouissement aveugle, extinction des choses vues » (Certeau 316). In consuming the visible, the object can be thought to be “understood,” to be digestible, or even controllable. Dian remains invisible, so her true intentions are only speculation by what Ulysse wanted to recognize in her apparition.

This concept of seeing allows for an engagement with what is considered agency. Iphigénie and Diane act as foundations to complicate the definition of agency in Racine’s piece. Again, if agency is originally perceived to originate in the first-person narrative, can agency still exist if the person is not there to retell their experience? Éréphile, therefore, acts as case study and as a lens into a deeper understanding to the question of violence inflicted on or off the stage. The case study takes root in the use of photography, where sight is complicated by the question of whether seeing really “proves” anything, or if agency must be adapted dependent on each context. In short, we have established that Éréphile, depending on perspectives based on reading the text, allows for an understanding of her potential agency but is complicated by the fact that the audience does not see her final act. They hear it through a mediator, which may initially seem to discredit her agency. But would seeing her final act have validated the power over her own narrative in a more significant way? Or does her act of violence, in many ways, exist as “irrepresentable” to give the scene even more power, leaving people wondering, imagining, what her death looked like? Maybe the more accurate question that is desired to be answered is not what the violent act looked like but what was going through her head as she grabbed the knife and plunged it into her own chest. Maybe the real desire is to see something unseeable, her own internal mechanisms: « [Cette configuration] argumente sur l’impossibilité interne de la représentation, sur le fait qu’un certain type d’objet la met en ruine en faisant éclater tout rapport harmonieux entre présence et absence, entre sensible et intelligible » (Rancière 127). This idea of presence and absence informs the methodological choice of using photography to explore the concept of representation in so far that photography purports the capacity to show a presence and reduce the amount of absence. Additionally, photography sits at the intersection of the problematic being explored. Always subject to the photographer’s perspective, it is a subjective medium despite the idea that sight must show the truth, an incorrect assumption regarding objectivity. This connects to Ulysse’s retelling of Éréphile’s story as he is telling how he saw the event transpire, similar to how the photographer tells, with images, the way they saw the event unfold. Neither is subjective which, as an argument against the presence of agency, means they claim a form of ownership over what was seen. And yet, as previously described regarding the power that Éréphile maintains in Ulysse’s description of her death, photography can embody the same power. She lives “presently” in Ulysse’s dialogue just as the continued use of photography to either capture the present for the future or depict the past for the present propagates her existence in “present tense.”

To engage with the dissonance between photography as incorrectly objective as well as the embodiment of past movement (and experience) in the present, no photograph has any post-editing. The only form of “editing” is in the chopping of the images to further identify how perception is marked by lapses in memory. All the movement visual in each photo was done in one shot so as to challenge the idea that an image captures one “true” moment in time, and instead can capture a multitude. The prevailing theme across the set of photographs is the stillness of the hands, their clarity and sharpness, contrasted with the blurry movement of the face and head, less defined and uncertain. The images are imitations of events, and are also representative of something you, as someone watching the event in real time, would not have seen (Rancière 127-128). Eyes do not capture a paused set of seconds as one image. Eyes tend to capture stills; therefore, this representation purposefully shows the variability in perception, and how perception informs memory. Moreover, the interpretation of an event, even if it is described through a first-person narrative is “always embedded in systems of public signification, always grasped, even by their makers, in acts of interpretation” (Greenblatt 5). The photography of myself would seem to satisfy the original definition of agency over a narrative, of what is seen is driven by my own depiction for an audience. And yet, it is exactly this definition of agency that these images contradict. Where Éréphile’s narrative did not maintain the visual of her first-person narrative, what these images show is that, even with this representation, much is left up to interpretation. So, the more powerful component of her invisible violence is that it was not seen which drives people to want to see it even more, if we return to Certeau’s emphasis on voracity. The question of agency derived from the personal narrative can be instituted non-rigorously then.

            In many ways, photography does not provide an answer, but leaves the experience of the image up to interpretation. Nonetheless, this exploration of Racine’s Iphigénie in conversation with Rancière’s “S’il y a de l’irreprésentable,” Greenblatt’s “Self-fashioning,” and Certeau’s “Extase blanche,” in light of a photography-based methodology, leaves questions that should be defined further: What is representation if it is but subjective? How can vision be manipulated during the event itself? For sacrifice versus self-sacrifice, where is agency regained and how can it be seen in continued representations of an event from the past? Is there value in being re-interpreted? What does sacrifice mean when it originates from the thread of defiance and less from the act of purity of soul and desire to “help”? Does sacrificing yourself give you power over your own destiny, or is destiny inescapable as a force that controls beyond any power of a human act?