Oedipus The King Research Paper - Essay Example

ouses in us both pity and fear, Aristotle explains: “For pity is aroused by someone who undeservedly falls into misfortune, and fear is evoked by our recognizing that it is someone like ourselves who encounters this misfortune.” (51) That powerful combination of emotion made the story so popular that John Dryden, writing in the mid-1600s, said that the story had “worn so threadbare by the pens of all the epic poets” (170) that “people so soon as ever they heard the name of Oedipus, knew as well as the poet, that he had killed his father by a mistake and committed incest with his mother, before the play; that they were now to hear of a great plague, an oracle and the ghost of Laius.” (171) And, indeed, modern critics have echoed these opinions: Jennifer Lewin’s aptly titled “Oedipus Rex: Possibly the Greatest of all Tragedies” argues that the play represents the apex of dramatic achievement for tragedies.

Even the chorus of the play itself reflects the tragedy of Oedipus: Even the Freudians acknowledge the tragedy of Oedipus, even as they psychoanalyze his experience. In the 1950s, Charles Rado read the Oedipus myth in Freudian fashion, revealing it to be a battle between Oedipus and his own unconscious urges, culminating in self-destruction. Rado, of course, makes much of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, pointing to the riddle of the Sphinx as a metaphor for that union: “The riddle of the Sphinx is thus interpreted: four refers to the primal scene (four parental legs), the result of which is two, the legs of the child, who later develops a third leg, the penis.

The Sphinx personifies the mother in her aspect of Medusa; the child splits her into mother and whore.” (233) Still, there appears to be no question that Rado views the conflicted hero who gave his name to the Freudian’s pet complex with sympathy. Still, the insistence on viewing Oedipus the King as a tragedy leaves a very real space of