FA7031 - Reading Notes on Laura Mulvey's Visual and Other Pleasures

According to Greek mythology, Oedipus was a king who killed his father and married a woman whom he never knew was his mother at the time. This was also mentioned in Walt Disney’s Hercules (1997) when the titular character says, “That Oedipus thing? Man, I thought I had problems!” when leaving the theatre with Megara after having watched a play based upon the legend (Newton, 2014).

While Mulvey considers the Oedipus story a myth, Vladimir Propp perceived it as a folk tale. He identified the part of Oedipus leaving “the security of his home in Corinth as an exceptional but untried young man,” as the absentation stage

of his morphology (Russian folk tale narrative stages) for example (179).

Propp compares the stages of Oedipus killing his father, solving the riddle of the Sphinx and marrying his mother to three stages in his morphology (181). The riddle of the Sphinx is as follows: “What walks on four legs at sunrise, two at midday and three at sunset?” The answer is a human being since they crawl as babies, walk on two legs for the majority of their lives and walk with a cane when they are elderly. Oedipus solving the riddle causes the Sphinx’s death (Kristen, 1997).

Oedipus killing his father “before the difficult task is performed” (182) is an example of how the stages of Propp’s morphology can change order.

Claude Lévi-Strauss observed the following: “Not only Sophocles but Freud himself should be included among the recorded versions of the Oedipus myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more authentic versions.” (194) This illustrates the story has been retold several times. In his version, Lévi-Strauss omits the ‘rebirth’ of Oedipus “in the wilderness”

Harvard reference for book.

Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

Film reference

Hercules (1997). DIrected by Ron Clements and John Musker.

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