The English Concentration 
in the Liberal Studies Degree 

Cox, Michael W. “Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.” Explicator 57 (Winter 1999): 67-71. 

As Michael Cox notes in the conclusion of his article, recognition and reversal generally occur in the primary character of Greek tragedies, and most criticism reflects this focus.  Yet, according to Cox, a close analysis of Jocasta’s character also demonstrates the occurrence of recognition and reversal.  Cox notes in his Explicator article “Sophocles’ Oedipus the King” that “The reversal [Jocasta] experiences is displayed in the grief she shows toward her dead husband and abandoned son: Once she realizes the truth about Oedipus, she no longer grieves for the infant son, who did not die, but she wails in lamentation for Laius” (68). Essentially, Cox demonstrates that Jocasta alters the direction of her grief from her son to her husband at the same time that she comes to learn that her son has not, indeed, been killed but has, rather, survived to fulfill the prophecy of his birth. 

Cox’s analysis centers on the three occasions that Jocasta expresses her grief.  Cox suggests that, on the first two occasions that the audience witnesses her grief, Jocasta reserves her emotions for he abandoned son. He notes, especially, the way in which Jocasta turns from discussing the prophecy of Oedipus’s birth—that he would live to kill his father and marry his mother—to a digression where she laments the death of her son.  Cox notes that in both instances, Jocasta puts the blame for the death on others, perhaps because of her own guilt. Cox suggests that the third instance, which occurs at the very end of the play when Oedipus’s identity has been revealed and Jocasta has come to recognize the truth of the prophecy, demonstrates a sudden reversal of her grief away from her son, who never died, and towards her husband who has indeed been slain by his own son’s hand.