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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
Nay, she is beauteous too; yet, mighty Love!
I never offer'd to obey thy Laws,
But an unusual chillness came upon me;
An unknown hand still check'd my forward joy,
Dashed me with blushes, tho' no light was near:
That ev'n the Act became a violation. (290-95)
In the next scene, Oedipus is seen sleepwalking, dreaming that the Jocasta he approaches in bed is his supposed mother, Merope, and that he has killed his supposed father, Polybus, two acts whose criminality he clearly ranks:
Yet what most shocks the niceness of my temper,
Even far beyond the killing of my Father,
And my own death, is, that this horrid sleep
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Dashed my sick fancy with an act of Incest:
I dreamt, Jocasta, that thou were my Mother [. . . .] (384-88)
Jocasta's response is interesting. Essentially, she accuses Oedipus of loathing her ill-timed, distracting, and "vile" sexual appetite (392-404); and her effect is to determine Oedipus to "act [his] joys" (429).
In the next Act, Dryden elaborates a hint in Sophocles to damning affect. As in Sophocles, Jocasta attempts to counter mounting evidence by discounting prophecies, but the brevity, the peremptoriness of her responses to Oedipus's anguished questions is striking. To the rumor that Oedipus was not Polypus's son, she says only "T'was somewhat odd"; to the Delphic prophecy of parricide and incest, "Vain, vain oracles"; to Oedipus's determination to avoid these, only "Too nice a fear" (3.1.560-569). (Notably, Jocasta's later discounting of oracles has something of a feminist cast, when she says "If we must pray [. . .]/ Let Virgin hands adorn the Sacrifice; / And not a gray-beard forging Priest come near . . . [4.198.201, my emphasis].) It does not help that Jocasta has just emphasized to Oedipus his suspicious physical resemblance to Lajus:
JOCASTA: bate but his years, You are his picture
OEDIPUS aside: Pray Heaven he drew me not!-Am I his picture?
JOCASTA: So I have often told you.
OEDIPUS: True, you have [. . . .] (3.1.537-540)
We may add to this Jocasta's extreme reluctance to produce Forbes, the shepherd who was supposed to murder the infant Oedipus. Jocasta recognizes the truth about the murder and marriage even before Forbes is, finally, produced (4.1.377-82) and, having recognized it, seeks to dissuade Oedipus from questioning him-presumably she would continue in the incestuous relationship if her son remained ignorant of its true nature. Or is recognition not so much of the truth as it is a recognition of the imminence of exposure of a fact she has suspected or even known all long? The play maintains ambiguity, but the weight of evidence in Dryden and Lee's version allows, perhaps even impels spectators and readers to suspect the latter. In fact, looked at this way, the motto for Oedipus's and Jocasta's relationship may be found in his line to her, "O, thou wilt kill me with thy Love's excess!" (4.1.73).
"Thy Love's excess"-the lines return us from what Jocasta knew to what Jocasta is: a woman. I have already argued in relation to Eurydice that other characters' psychological/moral valence accrues to Jocasta as she is the play's primary study of female desire; now I would like to reverse the flow and suggest thatjocasta's psychological/moral valence accrues to other characters-to begin with, to Oedipus's supposed mother, Merope. When the news arrives that Polypus has died of natural causes, Oedipus's consideration of his supposed mother's widowhood undergoes an extreme shift:
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