[In the following essay, Frank contends that during the climax of Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus reverses roles with Jocasta.]

… There, there, we saw his wife
hanging, the twisted rope around her neck.
When he saw her, he cried out fearfully
and cut the dangling noose. Then, as she lay,
poor woman, on the ground, what happened after
was terrible to see. He tore the brooches—
the gold chased brooches fastening her robe—
away from her and lifting them up high
dashed them on his own eyeballs, shrieking out
such things as: they will never see the crime
I have committed or had done upon me!
Dark eyes, now in the days to come look on
forbidden faces, do not recognize
those whom you long for—with such imprecations
he struck his eyes again and yet again
with the brooches. And the bleeding eyeballs gushed
and stained his beard—no sluggish oozing drops
but a black rain and bloody hail poured down.

lines 1263-80; David Grene, trans.

The self-blinding of Oedipus, a scene that Harold Bloom, in his introduction to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), singles out as “too terrible for acting out … [and] also too dreadful for representation in language,” has been read, time and again, as the manifestation of either Apollo's (and secondarily, Teiresias') prophecy, or of Oedipus' free will. Bloom interprets the act as Oedipus' “protest against Apollo, who brings both the light and the plague” (3). He dismisses the Freudian theory of the act as a form of castration as “less relevant here than the outcry against the god” (4).

Another, very different interpretation of the scene emerges, however, which ultimately serves to explain, or at least mitigate, the lame ending, in which the blind Oedipus enters the house to await Apollo's further instructions.

When Oedipus bursts through the double doors, which to Bloom suggest the female labia (3), he is already inured to the knowledge of being a parricide. He had known for many years that he had killed a man and suspected early on in the play that it was Laius. His total preoccupation, that of a man gone amok, now centers on the discovery of his incestuous relationship with Jocasta. He intends to thrust his sword into her offending womb, which ironically would emulate the sexual act one last time. When he finds the queen dead by her own hand, however, a strange reversal occurs. Jocasta becomes the newborn, the dead infant that Oedipus should have been, if the tragedy was to have been averted. And it is Oedipus who delivers the child and, severing the “twisted” umbilical cord, lowers it to the ground.

It is significant that the brooches (or, as sometimes translated, pins) with which he then blinds himself come from Jocasta's dress. Oedipus could have used any nearby object for the purpose—why Jocasta's brooches? The act appears as another stage of their role reversal. Far from seeking to castrate himself, Oedipus takes on Jocasta's persona and rapes his own eyes with her “phalluses.” The blood gushes down and stains his beard—the pubic region, as it were, of his pierced eyes. It is Jocasta's twofold revenge, reciprocating his oft-repeated coital act.

By their role reversal, Oedipus has avenged both the crime he committed and the one of which he was the victim. He has paid Jocasta back for sending him to his infant death and avenged the incest perpetrated on her. The climax of the play is here. The disposition of the Oedipus who survives the ordeal is really only of secondary importance. His exile, now, can wait.