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At the Crossroads: Gendered Desire, Political Occasion, and Dryden and Lee's Oedipus
Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2004 by Schille, Candy B K
III
There is a tremendous emphasis on carnality, even animality, from the outset of play. Act I.i, written by Dryden, insists on the drive-often brutal-toward sex and procreation. Alcander recommends that Oedipus (absent) "bring the Wives and Children / of conquer'd Argians to renew his Thebes" (50-51). Creon says Jocasta remarried in haste since she "Fear'd to lye single" (59), and he attempts to seduce Eurydice "For when the Gods destroy so fast, 'tis time/ We should renew the Race" even "in the midst of horrour" (113-14). Eurydice retorts by describing Creon's monstrous birth, at which "The Midwife stood aghast [....] And knew not, if to burn thee in the flames / Were not the holier work" (138-144), calling him only fit to mate with monsters like himself. Further, Act I introduces two occasions for incest, not one: the consummated incest of Oedipus and Jocasta, mother-son incest; and the potential, though ultimately unperformed, incest between Creon and Eurydice, uncle-niece incest. Likewise, there are two triangles: Oedipus/Lajus/Jocastaand Creon/Adrastus/Eurydice. The obvious difference is that Creon's rival is not his kin, whereas Oedipus's is. Oedipal incest, of course, involves the replacement of father with son; or, to put it another way, the son, in seeking to displace and replace his sire, to some degree becomes his sire, becomes husband/father. Thus, the Oedipal version of parricide and incest conflates identification and difference; they meet at the crossroads, if you will. Dryden represents this meeting, the doubled nature of the incestuous desire, in two early and crucial rhetorical moments: the plague and its consequentmeteorological manifestations is described in a figure that would seem to conflate Oedipus with Lajus, and Oedipus's earlier career with his ultimate fate: "Blind Winter meets the Summer / In his Midway, and seeing not his livery, / Has driven him headlong back" (1.1.10-12). Let me unpack these lines. Every one of the spectators, and each of us readers, though not the characters at this moment, would recognize in the passage the image of Oedipus driving Lajus back at the crossroads, not having recognized his "Livery"-that is, his status as king and father (positions analogous in the contemporary, though embattled, political theory of Dryden's time). It is not going too far to see in Oedipus's and Lajus's jostling for primacy to pass through the "narrowway" (1.1.472), the "verge"(3.1.526) (perhaps recalled in the famous line Lee gives Oedipus at his moment of discovery: "Gods meet Gods, andjustle in the dark! [4.1.626]), the contest for primacy in the passage to Jocasta's womb. As Jeffrey Rusten has detailed, "the juncture of three roads (double into single) figures the female genital region [. . .]"; the Greek word that designates "crossroads" is etymologically closely related to the word for "crack," defined as "the vulva" in Rufus of Ephesus On Medical Terminology, and Rüsten traces such associations in, for instance, Aristophanes's Wasps. Thus, usten concludes, "the crossroads may double as a designation for sexual territory, territory that is simultaneously the threshold of emergence into life and of accession to political power. That a woman's body may become the terrain of sexual and generational rivalry is especially overt in the case of Jocasta [. . .]" (108-11). This initial impression of how the lines mean, however, is complicated, in that the Oedipal figure is "Blind," a forecast, also easily recognizable, of Oedipus's literal blindness to come. Essentially, the figure overlays the image of Oedipus in the play's past (at the crossroads) with the image of Oedipus in the play's future (blinded). And this rhetorical palimpsest goes further in that Oedipus, the youthful son, would here be "Blind Winter" (my emphasis), while the older Lajus would be "Summer." A later image similarly conflates Oedipus with Lajus, particularly in the attribution of blindness, not to the young but to the old. Oedipus sees an omen:
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