"Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles

The first time I read this book I was in sixth form, so I was about maybe sixteen or seventeen. The way in which I discovered this book was actually only because my teacher was talking about it for a brief time in a class about Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and the Freudian Complexes of the play. I’m not going to lie, at first I was actually only interested in the Sophocles play because of the fact I hadn’t read it - but when I started reading it I was then thoroughly disgusted. I stayed up for most of the night reading and annotating my tattered second hand copy and then, when all was done, I put it down and didn’t really pick it up again purely because it was a bit too gross. The next time I’d pick it up, my opinion of Ancient Greek Plays was already fully formed and I understood that they were all absolutely disgusting.

My favourite character in the play was Jocasta because she seems to get the dead end of everything in this chapter of the story. She has to give birth to this morally incorrect child whom the oracle predicted would be questionable and problematic in his behaviour towards his parents. Then she has to have him taken off her for her own safety. After this, her husband is killed and she marries a man who is actually the son she gave away. She’s had his children and now she wants to die. The one thing that makes Jocasta so great is that constantly, she is the endurer of everyone else’s bullshit. She is the one who must grin and bear it because she is the Queen of her people. She is also the one who needs social mobility to help her, so must take a new husband when hers dies. Unfortunately, her biggest fault is that she stays quiet in times of strife. She doesn’t use her voice in order to grasp on to her emotions and so, we must go off mainly her actions in order to determine what she is really feeling. Her words can be often misleading. I believe that Jocasta represents all the repression of the female soul. The want to protect themselves and stand up to order, but the other want to blend in and not be such a seen figure. Jocasta is everything that a Queen should be seen as - she is strong in her soul but calm when she is required to show her face. However, she is conflicted and beautiful. Even if she is the mother of Oedipus, she is a woman who cannot escape the fact she once had to give her son away and therefore, represents the maternal instinct and what happens when it is forced away from the subject. It is incredibly psychological and her character is so repressed it really does make you feel sorry for her in the end.

A key theme in the book is love. There are so many different kinds of love that change and impact the way in which we read the play. First of all, the theme of love entails the love between the King and Queen for they have a child together called Oedipus. Then we have the maternal love from Jocasta to Oedipus until she gives him away. We then have the strange romantic love that forms when Oedipus comes home, his mother doesn’t know who he is and she’s grieving for her husband. This romantic love is between Jocasta and Oedipus. Then there is the new maternal love that forms between the characters of Jocasta and Antigone and the rest of the children. Finally, there is the love that Jocasta seems to have for death when she finds out that the oracle was right and nothing can really be avoided at all. The characters who play out love are mainly Jocasta and Oedipus from the very start of the book and so, we can honestly say that it was foreshadowed in some way from the very start. This theme, I believe, is used to depict the way in which love can harm as well as help situations. It is the way in which love is also a villainous feeling and can really damage a situation through blindness to truth. It impacts the way in which you read the book because if you take out the feeling of love from the various relationships and say, you replace them with friendship or with the more commonplace, tolerance and content - you will see that the storyline no longer works because the plot lacks character reason and logic. When you use something as strong as love and as associated with being illogical as being in love you get a reason for the characters lacking their general want to find out, detect and reason with themselves. This would make sense when it comes to providing a reason for why Jocasta does not know who Oedipus is when he arrives in the Theban Court. She doesn’t question it, she doesn’t notice that he looks a little familiar - maybe he looks like his mother or father in appearance. But she’s in love, so it explains why she doesn’t give a crap.

This book means quite a lot to me because it was the first real Ancient Greek Play I’d read properly. I’d read Ancient Greek Poetry before, but nothing quite like this. It has impacted my later reading experiences extremely because it was from here that I started to discover Ancient Greece more and that’s when I read my favourite Ancient Greek Play “The Bacchae” by Euripides. Through my re-readings I have discovered that “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles is more about how love makes us blind, how oracles are actually telling us a singular truth rather than what could possibly happen, and how connections can form bonds, but when bonds form and things go wrong - there is an extreme and normally overwhelming reaction. This is the best thing about the book - the overwhelming reaction is often quite entertaining.

I think people should read this book because of the fact that it is a great footing for learning about Ancient Greek Culture and Theatre. But I think that there are people who read this book today because it connects to many psychological theories and other literatures of the world. On my next re-read, I would like to examine the way in which Jocasta falls in love with Oedipus and how her language changes from grief to vulnerability.