Jocasta's Masculine Rationality
Jocasta, the primary female character of Oedipus Tyrannus, comes across as more “masculine” than Oedipus himself in occasional moments of the play. Although Oedipus’s desire to know more fits into masculinist ideals, i.e., rationality above all else, Coming across as more rational and modern than her husband, Jocasta shrewdly discerns Oedipus’s reliance on the ravings of Delphic oracles and the exaggeration of a normal Oedipal desire. Jocasta fits into post-Enlightenment-era secularism when she notes that “instead of thinking you leave everything to Fate and oracles” (Theodoridis), criticizing Oedipus for his almost foregone desire to believe that he has aligned himself with what an oracle predestined him to do; furthermore, Jocasta says something that fits into Freud’s modern (in comparison to the play) conception of the Oedipus complex when she says, “for your mother, many have gone to bed with their mothers in their dreams! Give no further thought to such things and live an easier life” (Theodoridis). Jocasta’s easier life also seems as if it is a somewhat less suspicious and more rational one, too.
Normalizing the incestual feelings, Freud’s popularization of the Oedipal complex as a psychological element to every person’s psyche, along with his belief that many mothers have an implicit desire to sleep with their sons (see Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis), rejects the "need" of Jocasta’s suicide (Freud 170-171).