Lifting Veils From The Faces Of Marriage

Throughout the play, Sophocles presents two prestigious women to his audience, Queen Merope of Corinth and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. Queen Merope was the adopted mother of Oedipus and Queen Jocasta was his wife and mother. Both women shared a common link to Oedipus as they both played the maternal role in his life and showed him compassion. Although Jocasta was his biological mother, Merope was more of a mother to him than she was. This is evident at the beginning of the pay when Jocasta abandoned her child because she feared a prophecy but on the other hand, Merope who had no children was given the child, whom she loved. In contrast to Jocasta who saw Oedipus ' existence as a curse, Merope saw it as a blessing.

In the trilogy of Oedipus, Sophocles constructed an enthralling family dynamic that induces central themes throughout the play. In numerous works of literature, family relationships engage in the central message of a piece of work. In Sophocles three plays, specifically interconnection between siblings and parent relationships create, refines, and complicates themes of power, love family, pride, and extreme fate.

Many people love romantic comedies. Some of these stories are based around misunderstandings, which add humor to the plot. This, of course is similar to Rostand’s play Cyrano De Bergerac, but Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, is centered around a relationship full of deceit. It has a pleasant facade, but when the viewer digs deeper into it, they find out the dark reality of the relationship of the main couple. Communication is vital to any relationship. A group of friends need to communicate openly in order to remain friends. The same thing applies to spouses. For the purpose of this essay, Cyrano and Roxane from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and Nora and Torvald from Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” will be compared. The relationships of Nora and Torvald, and Roxane and Cyrano are different in many ways but they have one thing in common, a lack of communication. Thus, by this

In Oedipus the King by Sophocles the mother Jocasta spent years married to her biological son, and bore his children. The play was written as a Greek tragedy in which the characters have a fatal flaw, and this applies to Jocasta. Right after King Laius and Queen Jocasta have their son Oedipus they receive startling news from the Oracle in which it is predicted that one day their son will rise up to kill his father, then marry and sleep with his mother. In order to avoid this King Laius decided to kill their son, and Jocasta willingly agrees. After years pass by, King Laius gets killed by a passerby, Jocasta is to marry the riddle solver, and life continues as normal. Almost all at once Jocasta’s life shatters, she finds out that her husband was killed by her son, she married her

In the article “Taking Marriage Private,” Stephanie Coontz says that we should go back to original marriage traditions in the United States. With original marriage traditions, the church tells people what is respectful and lawful. It is up to the people after that to figure out whether they want their marriage legalized. If their marriages are legal with a license, then they are able to have stability and liability.

Jocasta and Penelope, as wives, are expected to calmly support their men and act obediently. In Oedipus Rex, Jocasta mediates a quarrel between her husband and brother: “Unhappy men, what was it made you raise this senseless broil of words?” (Oedipus Rex 23). Here duty is to prevent disagreements within her family, because unlike men, women are less prone to argument and violence. Jocasta keeps her household together by cooling tempers; Penelope upkeeps her house by following the orders of her son. When Penelope loses her composure in front of Telemachus he chides her: “So, mother go back to your quarters. Tend to your own tasks, the distaff and the loom” (Homer 1.409-10), she submits to her son and his better judgment as a man: “she took to heart the clear sense in what her son had said”(Homer 1.416-17). Penelope is expected to follow the orders of

When I was reading Oedipus the King and Antigone by Sophocles, it was challenging and unmanageable for me to not immediately relate and contrast Oedipus and Creon, the two primary characters. These two major characters experienced downfalls from their place of esteem. These two plays, both by Sophocles, provided a great opportunity to make comparisons of these two characters downfalls. These two kinds of catastrophic plays introduce a gloomier side of Oedipus and Creon’s human behavior, and take the reader through a complete variety of emotions as these two characters progress through their respective plays. At a first look while reading these plays, Oedipus and Creon are two very different people. But as I kept reading these plays, their personalities and even their

Jocasta, Oedipus’ mother and wife, met her demise when she learned that the man she wedded was the child she gave birth to and left to die. After learning that the messenger was given a child by the servant of Laius, Jocasta tries to deny everything and advises Oedipus not to investigate the mysteries surrounding his birth any longer. “My suffering is enough” (Sophocles, ln 1165), Jocasta realizes that she bore Oedipus and urges Oedipus to end the search for she knows he will not be able to bear the truth, but he ignores her and out of anger the queen storms through the palace doors (Sophocles, ln 1155-1179). Only when a messenger announces the death of Jocasta does the audience know that when the horrible truth was revealed, Jocasta was unable to bear it and killed herself (Sophocles, ln 1365-1400). Jocasta was dragged out of the cave so quickly that she was unable to bear the light of the truth and killed herself as a

Oedipus’ pride regardless of the class he is born into has led him to ignore Jocasta’s warning believing that she will be dismissive of him if he was born of low social standing. This pride has also fueled Oedipus’ determination to discover who he is and to learn the truth of his parentage which as modern audiences know will lead to his own fall from grace to ruin.

“Oedipus you must stop. I beg you- stop!... I pray to god you never see who you are!... These are the last words I will ever speak, ever Oedipus.” (Sophocles|| 1344-45, 50,56,57). It was too painful for Jocasta to watch the truth slowly yet quickly unfold right in front of Oedipus, so she ran off. Jocasta was afraid to face her fate, and she was probably also ashamed since Oedipus would soon catch up to the truth… There was no running from fate, or more so the truth

Families Destroyed by a Secret In Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll's House” (March 20, 1828 - May 23, 1906) and “Oedipus the King”, by Sophocles (which is a Athenian tragedy performed 495 B.C.E. - 405 B.C.E.) both have men who were destroyed by a secret which lead them to their horrible outcomes on life because of the conflicts in their relationships with their families although, both pieces of Literature were written many years apart from each other and in different areas of time. Two characters who share some of the same qualities are Oedipus from “Sophocles’” and Torvil from “A Doll’s House”. Oedipus and Torvils’s lives are somewhat similar because they both have happy families who have everything to lose, but have men in their family who carry

    The myth of Oedipus’s incest and parricide has been retold many different times. The basic story line has remained the same. Oedipus leaves Corinth to try to escape a fate of incest and parricide. After he leaving the city, he ends up saving Thebes from the Sphinx, becoming king of the city and in the process fulfilling the prophecy. The character of Oedipus changes in each play to help support a different meaning to the entire myth. Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine and Sophocles’s Oedipus the King are both centered on the myth, yet their themes are different. By changing Oedipus’s personality, motive, relationship with Jocasta, his mother and wife, and his character

In one of AMND’s most enduring passages, Lysander states (Act one scene one, line 134) ‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’ The conflict that is inevitably born out of love is a central theme at the heart of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and Hamlet, but is extended by Shakespeare not only to romantic relationships, but to familial bonds as well. The conflict is ultimately resolved in diametrically opposing ways in each play, according to the conventions of their respective genres. Hamlet is a tragedy, and therefore can result only in death, but AMND, as a comedy, uses the traditional method of marriage to resolve its conflict.

The setting comparison and deliberation in this essay is between Henric Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night". "A Doll's House" deals with the social life and duty, the woman's proper place and role within the family and the society. "Twelfth Night" is about illusion, deception, disguises, madness, and the extraordinary things that love will cause us to do and to see.

Today, the idea of marriage conjures images of bashful brides beautifully draped in all white, of grandiose flower arrangements climbing towards the ceiling, of romance personified. As an institution in this modern world, marriage represents the apex of romantic love, with an entire industry of magazines, movies, and television shows devoted to perpetuating marriage as an idealized symbol of the ultimate love between two people. Contrarily, as a sociological institution, marriage comes from much more clinical and impersonal origins, contrasting with the passion surrounding modern understandings of the institution. Notably, french anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss theorizes that the institution of marriage emerged from a need to form alliances between groups, with women functioning as the property exchanged so that such alliances could be solidified (Levi-Strauss).