Interpreting Greek Tragedy

Abstract

Cithaeron (symbol of the Bad Mother), is acceptance back into the womblike earth of that generous mother, the pious city of Athens.In moving fr om the Tyrannus to the Coloneus, Sophocles shifts fr om an infantile world of primary acceptance or rejection to a public realm of civic action.Through the symbolism of the Eumenides and their grove the civic fr ame of Athens in the Oedipus Coloneus seems able, finally, to reconcile the two fa ces of woman, the generosity and the destructiveness of the mother as perceived by the totally depen dent infant to whom her absence or presence means denial or fu lfillment.9From a structuralist perspective, the grove is the point of conjunc tion between the city and the wild, the place of shelter and the ex posed world of the polluted outcast.It is also the fo cus fo r a vertical spatial axis between upper and lower worlds, gods and men.It unites the two poles of Oedipus' status: below the human as the despised, impure, exiled parricide and incestuous criminal and above the human as a hero mysteriously called by divine voices that come fr om both above and below.Mother, womb, mother earth, and city are all parts of a single symbolic complex.Oedipus' acceptance by Athens in the Oedipus Coloneus is thus a shift fr om the unmediated swing of the polluted and exiled king between godhead and bestiality so dangerous in the Ty rannus to the king's restoration to a civic fr ame.He becomes the mediator between chthonic and Olympian powers and stands in a privileged relation to the goddesses who embody both the destructive and the creative fo rces of nature.His marginal status thus parallels that of the Eumenides themselves.Like them he is an ambiguous figure whose place is at the fr inges of the city, the liminal space at the borders of the land.Like them he dispenses both curses and blessings.Received back into the city, he has a place of honor as a hero, but he is still in a sense outside, fo r his tomb is unknown to all but Theseus.His end is hidden in mystery, associated with places of mysterious transition between worlds, the "brazen-footed road" with its "bronze steps" into the earth (OC 57, I 590ff.). 9.

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