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Literature Essay on Oedipus The King

In Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. Oedipus and his father meet and fight at a fork in the road where two paths converge into one, literally and metaphorically representing the entrance to Jocasta. They each travel up one of the bifurcated paths, and consequently fight in order to have access to the one path stemming from it. This over-determined triangular shape, “the place where three roads meet” [1], where two bifurcated paths converge into one road leading to Thebes where Jocasta, the mother, is, implies the topography of the female body. Father and son fight for entry to the path that leads to the mother. Read in this way, father and son fight for (sexual) entrance to the mother, to be the mother’s lover. In Jean de Florette, both Jean and Cesar symbolically fight for Florette; they both want to plant their seed in the maternal body of Florette, whom the land represents.

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