| This dissertation explores the many allusions to and retellings of the Oedipus myth in twentieth-century writing and examines their relationship to what many have seen as the crisis in humanism as it has unfolded in the past hundred years. For modernists and many of their successors, Oedipus's triumph over the sphinx represents the formerly dominant ideal of human autonomy and self-consciousness, the same ideal that Sophocles saw arising in the Athens of his day, according to many classical scholars. Yet even as the humanistic ideal was arguably achieving its apotheosis in Victorian scientific humanism, it was beginning to dissolve, in part because of the rise of theories postulating that humanity was made up of heterogeneous and mutually incompatible races. These unfounded yet persistent theories affirmed that any person with parents of two different races was a “hybrid,” a sterile and often degenerate creature whose very humanity was in doubt.; Though modernists do not always accept this image of the hybrid, in their eyes Oedipus's hybrid identity (he is the product of two sets of parents and two cities, not to mention a mixture of quasi-divine hero and subhuman criminal) is the essential ingredient in his tragedy and the source of his ultimate disillusionment with his own human identity. I argue that modernists such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, and their successors (including the Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, as well as Samuel Beckett, Christine Brooke-Rose and Malcolm Lowry), are committed to dramatizing the conflict between humanism and ideas of racial and cultural hybridity by reappropriating the Oedipus myth from Freud (with whom most of them strenuously disagree) and making it a touchstone for some of their most ambitious, experimental and canonical work. |
