I love the story of Oedipus, although Oedipus himself is not a particularly likeable character. He is egotistical: When confronted with the suffering of his subjects at the beginning of the play he declares, “I know how cruelly you suffer; yet, though sick, not one of you suffers a sickness half as great as mine. Yours is a single pain; each man of you feels but his own. My heart is heavy with the city’s pain, my own, and yours together” (50). He is pompous in his empathy and selfish in his solution. When he accepts the charge of finding the former king’s murderers in order to end the blight, he readily admits, “The man who murdered him might make the same attempt on me; and so, avenging him I shall protect myself” (53).
He is also a braggart: When he first appears in response to the lamentations he says, “I myself am come who fame is known to all—I, Oedipius” (49). In twelve words he refers to himself four times. There is a bit of dramatic irony here as well, since the audience knows the real reason for his lasting infamy. But his hamartia is really shown when he doubts Teiresias’ prophetic abilities and brags about his own cleverness: “When the Sphinx chanted her music here, why did not you speak out and save the city? …You were no prophet then; your birds, your voice from Heaven, were dumb. But I, who came by chance, I, knowing nothing, put the Sphinx to flight, thanks to my wit—no thanks to divination!” (61). As Albert Camus comments, his emphasis on man’s ability to solve problems without the help of the gods reflects the paradigm shift occurring in Athens at the time: a transition from “a sacred society [to] a society built by man.” However, even atheists such as myself might still feel that Oedipus’ harangue against Teiresias is a bit overdone.
Oedipus is also unlikable because his anger so quickly turns to violence: When he is fleeing Thebes, he has a right-of-way skirmish with another carriage, and in a fit of road rage his kills his father and his father’s entourage (although he does not know their identity as such), ending his account of the incident with the unapologetic statement, “I killed them all” (75). Later on his journey to self-discovery, an elderly Theban shepherd refuses to answer Oedipus’ questions. Oedipus suggests torturing the answer out of him: “Here, someone, quickly! Twist this fellow’s arms!”(88). A moment later he threatens, “Die you shall, unless you speak the truth” (88).
He is also quick to accuse others: When the blind seer, Tieresias, tells him he is the cause of the plague, he refuses to listen and instead accuses Tieresias of being a crony of his brother-in-law Creon, whom he suddenly thinks is trying to overthrow him. He also jumps to conclusions when his wife, trying to protect him from the true knowledge of his birth and relationship to her, pleads “Seek no more! ….O may you never learn what man you are!” (85). Oedipus misunderstands and thinks she is afraid of learning that he is of lowly birth. Oedipus declares “My birth, however humble, I am resolved to find. But [Jocasta], perhaps, is proud, as women will be; is ashamed of my low birth. But I do rate myself the child of Fortune, giver of all good, and I shall not be put to shame” (85). Again, dramatic irony is employed here, because we know that he is the child of his wife, which is a great misfortune.
Thanks to Freud, most people associate Oedipus with a son desiring to sleep with his mother. However, Oedipus ends up sleeping with his mother precisely because he is trying to avoid sleeping with his mother. He doesn’t know his adoptive parents are not his biological parents, so when an oracle tells him the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he immediately runs away from Corinth so that he doesn’t murder Polybus and sleep with Merope. It is in fleeing Corinth that he runs into his father at the place where three roads meet, slays him, then proceeds to Thebes where he solves the Sphynx’s riddle and wins marriage with the queen (his mother) as his reward. In running from the prophecy, he runs straight into it.
If you focus only on the murderous, incestuous parts, it would be easy to dismiss this story as merely an ancient Greek tragedy set in the days before it was regarded as important to let children know they are adopted and when gods controlled your fate. But I think Oedipus’s real problem was not sexual in nature, as Freud’s co-opting of the name would have us believe. His real problem was that he failed to see that he was the cause of the problem because he was so quick to accuse and blame everyone else. In this sense, we all have an Oedipus complex.
In the beginning, Oedipus sends Creon to Apollo to find out the cause of the plague, and Creon returns with this message: “There is pollution here in our midst, long-standing” (51) because the murderer of king Laius has not been found. There is no way Oedipus could know that it was him, at the point. But shortly after Creon’s report, Tieresias tells Oedipus point blank that he is “the man whose crimes pollute our city” (60). As Oedipus’ insolence makes Teiresias angrier, Teiresias says, “You have your sight, and yet you cannot see where, nor with whom, you live, nor in what horror” (62).
It’s a bit cryptic, and you can’t entirely blame Oedipus for not understanding. But what we can blame him for is that he doesn’t even try. He immediately starts accusing Creon of hiring Teiresias to say this about him, in order to usurp the throne. It is only when Oedipus sees for himself that he is the cause of the pollution that he finally believes it. Of course, we’re not all failing to see that we are living in incest. But we’ve all, I’m sure, failed to see that we are the problem. We are quick to blame others, as Oedipus blames Creon and Tieresias, and this clouds his ability to understand what they are telling him.
This crops up frequently in my own life, in fairly innocuous ways. I’ll get done doing the laundry and come up one sock short, and I’ll immediately think Zac has put it in his sock drawer by mistake, or that it’s lost under his pile of clothes. I generally blame Zac, silently, for anything that goes missing because I am the neat organized one who never loses things, just like Oedipus clings to the fact that he saved Thebes from the Sphynx, so surely he couldn’t also be the one bringing ruin to the city. But I’ll find the sock behind the hamper a week or two later, where I didn’t think of looking because I was so sure someone else had lost it, not me. At a restaurant the other day, we were dividing up the check, but ended up with $10 dollars too much. I had been collecting money and making change, and I was sure someone else had put too much in. Of course, when I finally demanded a reenactment of the monetary transaction, it was revealed that I was the one who had mistakenly put in the extra ten bucks. “Hah,” I said. “I’m like Oedipus. I’m blaming others for the problem and it turns out it is me.” Oedipus is really about seeing things clearly.
Freud also co-opted Electra from Sophocles, to name the lesser-known Electra Complex: When a girl, in love with her father, wishes to kill her mother. This one is a little more aptly named at least, as Electra does seem rather obsessed with her father, Agamemnon, and openly wishes for the death of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her step-father, Aegisthus. It should be noted, though, that most of the time she is pining for her beloved brother, Orestes, to return from exile and slay her mother and step-father, who are responsible for the murder of her father. It is her brother who actually kills their mother, as retribution for the murder of their father, which seems to fly in the face of Freud’s Oedipus Complex.
Electra can also teach us a few things, but not necessarily about matricide. Rather, it is a story about longing for revenge. The chorus counters Electra’s grief by reminding her that although her father is dead, and that’s a bad thing, “he has gone to the land to which we all must go” (107). Still, Electra feeds her sorrow and lusts for retribution. She sees it as a daughter’s duty. Her mother points out that she killed Agamemnon as retribution for Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter. Electra counters that Agamemnon had to kill the daughter, as Artemis was holding their ship hostage until she received retribution for a stag that Agamemnon had killed. We see the cycle of revenge that has led to this moment, and we are given a hint of the cycle of revenge that will continue. After Orestes successfully slays his father’s murderers, we can imagine that now Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s children will be obligated to slay Electra and Orestus as retribution for their parent’s murder. So the moral, really, is don’t kill one of Artemis’ deer, her (read as Gollum would say it) precious.
When reading Electra, you want to root for the protagonist; you want to want Lady Clytemnestra to die, as Electra’s grief is poignant and she is treated no better than a slave. As a foil, Electra’s sister is also mad about their father’s murder, but she pleads with Electra: “Why do you indulge this vain resentment? I am sure of this: Mine is as great as yours. If I could find the power, they soon would learn how much I hate them. But we are helpless; we should ride the storm with shortened sail, not show our enmity when we are impotent to do them harm” (113). While yielding one’s principles in the face of obstacles is not very noble, Electra’s obsessive and excessive longing for revenge isn’t to be emulated either.
Sophocles’ Electra ends rather abruptly, after all her whining and pining, with her gleefully hearing her mother’s last wails, followed shortly by her step-father’s demise. I don’t find it the cathartic ending promised by Greek tragedy. Electra’s cruelty as she savors their deaths is not something you can or should identify with. At the end of Oedipus, you can pity him, because for all of his faults, he was not to blame for his crimes. He was an unfortunate, albeit egotistical, plaything of the gods. They made a prophecy, and any student of Greek mythology knows that the prophecies always come true. However, Electra and Orestes were not fulfilling any pre-ordained prophecy, but rather a man-made code that calls for blood retribution. At Clytemnestra’s death, the chorus proclaims, “The cry for vengeance is at work; the dead are stirring. Those who were killed of old now drink in return the blood of those who killed them” (149). This provides comfort for Electra, but for those of us who believe the dead stay dead and are no longer sentient, we know the dead can gain no additional comfort from vengeance. In a modern, secular society, we know man-made codes can be changed and adapted to avoid fates that only vengeful gods could foist upon us.
After Clytemnestra’s death, Aegisthus returns and Orestus takes him inside the house to murder him, explaining, “Go in, and die on the same spot on which you killed my father” (152). Orestus wants Aegisthus to die in the same way his father died, without realizing that he is therefore making himself the same as the aggressor he hates. The oppressed is now becoming the oppressor. Aegisthus has children of his own, who may one day kill Orestes in the same spot that Orestus killed their father. Orestus, unlike our modern superheroes that always show restraint and stop short of murdering the villains, crosses a line and forfeits any moral superiority that he might have had.
As a country, we have done the same thing time and time again. The hypocrisies are endless: We fought the oppression of the British empire, only to oppress slaves and native Americans. We defeated Hitler while being allies with Stalin and putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps. During the cold war, the US government, led by senator McCarthy, employed many of the same tactics against its own citizens that the communists were using against theirs. In fighting the enemy, we emulated the enemy.
Similarly, in our current war on terror, we have become terrorists. We violate human rights, kill innocent civilians, squash dissent, and endorse torture. We are Electra and 9/11 is our Agamemnon. Or maybe, more comparably, we are Artemis and the WTC is our stag. We demand an excessive recompense: toppling two sovereign governments and wreaking havoc on untold numbers of non-terrorists, which touched off a cycle of revenge and violence that has no foreseeable end. While the terrorist attacks were cruel and tragic, the victims have only gone where we are all going, where numerous Americans go every day due to other causes that we do not condemn as vehemently.
In going to these extremes to fight our “enemy,” we eliminate the moral superiority that separated us from our enemy. We are Orestus—feeling quite justified stepping into Aegisthus’ position and mimicking his murder, without seeing clearly that doing so eliminates the moral distinction between “us” and “them.” Being the victim of an injustice does not make us morally superior—it is only in our response to the injustice that we can show our integrity. Like Oedipus, our national narrative is pompous and egotistical, focusing on the good we have done, to the extent that we are blind to the sins we commit. Our anger, our fear, and our sense of superiority are faulty justifications for the perpetration of violence. The problem is as Aegisthus points out shortly before he is killed: “This house of Atreus must, it seems, behold death upon death, those now and those to come” (152).
Work Cited:
Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra. Trans. H.D.F. Kitto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
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