OK. This post is rather long. 'The Kick Inside' made me think of Jocasta and Sophocles'
Oedipus The King, which maybe you're not familiar with?
Anyway, I re-read the play and put together these notes, which may or may not relate to TKI. But I thought I'd post them anyway!
I will research 'Lilith as the mythological predecessor to Eve' and get back to you at a later date.
The House Of Labdacus: "I am not my father's son."[/b][/color]
The most famous and tragic "kick inside" was felt by Jocasta, wife (and mother) of Oedipus.
Jocasta was married to King Laius, son of Labdacus.
"An oracle came to Laius one fine day (I won't say from Apollo himself but his underlings, his priests) and it declared that doom would strike him down at the hands of a son, our son, to be born of our own flesh and blood..." So when his wife Jocasta bears him a son, Laius "fastened his ankles" and ordered that a henchman "fling him away on a barren, trackless mountain". Jocasta gives the child to Laius' servant shepherd with the instruction to kill it: "She was afraid-- frightening prophecies."
Jocasta and Laius, Oedipus's natural parents (if we need reminding of what the word "natural" can encompass, then we need only look to the Greeks), execute the original atrocity to avert the greater tragedy they believe their son's birth will cause the House of Labdacus. And they do so because of a pronouncement by the Delphic oracle, mouthpiece of the god Apollo. The tragedy has already been fulfilled long before the play opens. Heroism, irony, and tragic coincidence give the play its tragic momentum.
Laius' servant pities the little baby and gives the child to a Corinthian shepherd to rear as his very own in his own country. The Corinthian shepherd releases the child from its ankle shackles ("I set you free!"; Oedipus gets his name from the ankle injury), but gifts the child to King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth, who are childless. Unaware that they have a foundling prince on their hands, they raise him as their own son and prince of Corinth. However, one day:
"Some man at a banquet who had drunk too much shouted out that I am not my father's son." Oedipus questions his parents about the babbling accusation, but they satisfy him that they are indeed his parents. Nevertheless, slander and fear lead Oedipus to secretly seek advice from Apollo's Delphic Oracle. The Oracle refuses to confirm who his parents are, but cries: "You are fated to couple with your mother, you will bring a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see - you will kill you father, the one who gave you life!" Lost in fear, Oedipus abandons Corinth, never to see Polybus and Merope again. On his wanderings, he attacks and kills King Laius and his entourage at a place where three roads meet...
"Now is the place where the crossroads meet."...but one servant escapes back to Thebes (this lone survivor is the servant who gave the infant Oedipus to the Corinthian shepherd; and when Oedipus ascends to the Throne of Thebes, this knowing servant moves to the hinterlands, out of sight of Thebes). Of course, Oedipus has no idea who he has single-handedly killed; and false witness reaches the Queen that
thieves killed her husband. (Queen Jocasta, satisfied that the infant Oedipus had died of exposure, will declare: "My baby no more murdered his father than Laius suffered - his wildest fear - death at his own son's hands.")
Thebes, meanwhile, is now oppressed by "that harsh, brutal singer," the Sphinx. And "the singing, riddling Sphinx" persuades Thebes to let the mystery surrounding Laius go. Now, when Oedipus comes by Thebes, he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, so freeing the city from "that chanting Fury". Thebes gives Oedipus the crown of the city. He marries Jocasta, and goes on to beget four children (Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone and Ismene).
THE SPHINX (or Phix) was a female monster with the body of a lion, the breast and head of a woman, eagle's wings and, according to some, a serpent-headed tail. Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks remembered the Sphinx foreign origin) to Thebes where, in Sophocles
Oedipus Tyrannus, she asks all passersby history's most famous riddle: "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" She strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer. Kreon, the then regent of Thebes, offered the kingship to any man who could destroy her. Oedipus solved the riddle: man — he crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Bested at last, the Sphinx cast herself off a mountainside in despair and in accordance with an oracle declaring the terms of her demise. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the story and was not standardized as the one given above until much later in Greek history. Thus Oedipus can be recognized as a liminal or "threshold" figure, helping effect the transition between the old religious practices, represented by the Sphinx, and new, Olympian ones.
Aristotle held Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as the perfect tragedy. The play plunges us into the middle of the story, with Oedipus and Jocasta seemingly innocent of a history that the contemporary audience would have been fully wise to. Sophocles's drama unfolds in a manner very similar to the process of psychoanalysis. At the start of the play, Oedipus is cock of the roost - successful ruler, faithful husband and father, and wholly unconscious of his own antecedents and the threat to his sense of identity that lies hidden in his own history. Most of us organise our lives on the basis of not knowing who or what we are, and what makes Oedipus unusual is that he sets about disrupting this state of affairs, although quite unwittingly at first.
Famine and plague have visited the city and once again the oracle is applied to for an explanation. The pronouncements of Apollo arrive only by indirection. In practice, they would have come first through the utterings of a priestess, the Pythia, the medium of the god's judgment, which were then interpreted and put into words by a priest. So the "divine" message reached the questioner already third-hand. But in Sophocles's play, all the oracular sayings involve yet further indirection. Jocasta, rather late in the day, describes the original oracle to Oedipus - unaware that the man she is confiding in is one and the same as the child she and her late husband tried to murder as a consequence of these apparently "divine" words. Oedipus, for his part, tells Jocasta of his own encounter with Apollo's priestess and the fearful words that have led him to Thebes. And Creon, Jocasta's brother, reports back the oracle's cure for the plague, which is the rooting out of the unknown assassin of the former king. Everything said to come from the gods is in fact filtered through human consciousness and reflected through the clouded prism of human apprehension. The story is not a pious account of a world ruled by supernatural forces, against which humankind has no recourse, as is often claimed; but rather a shifting set of Chinese whispers, where fear and self-preservation are presented as the real governors of mortal choice and action.
The play is about the human relationship with knowing: what we know but don't know we know; what we don't wish to know; and what we suppose, erroneously, we do know. Oedipus begins by trying to avoid knowledge of who he is, even to the extent of misreading his own name. Oidi-pous means swollen foot and refers to the scars he bears on his feet from his early injury. But the Greek for "swollen" is pronounced the same as "know", and he takes his name to mean know-foot and forges a false identity out of this pseudo knowledge. It is this over-swift knowingness that facilitates his ability to answer the notorious riddle of the Sphinx, which he doesn't really solve at all, for with the answer he gives, man, he fails to apprehend the sinister relevance the riddle has to his own biography. It is his very knowingness that is the stumbling block to real knowledge. What gives Oedipus heroic stature is his hope and moral courage to pursue the deeper riddle of his own birth and history.
At various stages during Oedipus' unravelling, Jocasta seeks to reassure him, only to bring about the opposite effect and make them both anxious. When a messenger reports that Polybus has died a natural death, Jocasta and Oedipus rejoice at the triumph of chance. But Oedipus continues to unravel: "But mother lives, so for all your reassurances I live in fear. I must." The Corinthian messenger reassures Oedipus... Polybus and Merope were not his parents... He came from a servant of...
of Laius......JOCASTA turns sharply... "Old shepherd, talk, empty nonsense, don't give it another thought, don't even think--
Stop- in the name of god, if you love your own life, call off this search! My suffering is enough...
Oh no, listen to me, I beg you, don't do this..."Jocasta's appeal to Oedipus to call off his search kinda reminds me of NIGHT OF THE SWALLOW, which KB said is "almost on a parallel with the mother and son relationship".
gaffa.org/reaching/i82_mm.htmlBut Oedipus the ignorant must know it all, must see the truth at last.
JOCASTA:
"Aieeeeee--
man of agony-- that is the only name I have for you, that, no other-- ever, ever, ever!"
(exit).MESSENGER: The queen is dead...
By her own hand...
Once she'd broken in through the gates,
dashing past us, frantic, whipped to fury,
ripping her hair out with both hands -
straight to her rooms she rushed, flinging herself
across the bridal-bed,
doors slamming behind her -
once inside, she wailed for Laius, dead so song,
remembering how she bore his child long ago,
the life that rose up to destroy him, leaving
its mother to mother living creatures
with the very son she'd borne.
Oh how she wept, mourning the marriage-bed
where she let loose that double brood - monsters -
husband by her husband, children by her child.
And then-
but how she died is more than I can say...
You and me on the bobbing knee
Didn't we cry at that old mythology he'd read! ...
I'll send your love to Zeus
Oh, by the time you read this...On Sophocles' AntigoneAntigone's concern and affections could be said to focus not on her betrothed Haemon but on her brother Polyneices. Thematically, this notion continues the incest motif established in Oedipus. The excessive fission between Oedipus and his father, and between Eteocles and Polyneices is not only repeated in the fission between Antigone and Ismene. It is also repeated in an inverted way in the excessive fusion of Antigone and Polyneices. Antigone's love for Polyneices is not just the care of a loving sister for a deceased brother: it is a dangerous fusion of what should remain separate. The extreme loyalty to her brother even threatens to become a dangerous confusion of the ties of kinship and love. Her attitude to Polyneices verges on the incestuous (another repetition of her father's behaviour) when she remarks: "I shall lie, a loved one, with whom I have loved". In this context,
philos might mean lover, implying a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Antigone's burying of Polyneices' body represents an incestuous fantasy which has been defended against and displaced. During the 18th century, the Romantic tendency to exalt the uniqueness and intensity of the bond between brother and sister often led to readings of the relationship between Antigone and Polyneices as, implicitly or explicitly, incestuous (Oudemans & Lardinois, 1987).
Antigone's defiant persistence in burying Polyneices secures her death. She is led away to starve to death in a sealed tomb. When Haemon makes his way to save Antigone, she has already committed suicide in the cave, hanging herself as her mother Jocasta had done.
see SOPHOCLES: The Three Theban Plays: 'Antigone', 'Oedipus the King', 'Oedipus at Colonus' (Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics)Ref:
-
books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2227681,00.html
- Oudemans & Lardinois,
Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles' "Antigone", (1987)
;D 
With creativity, if used well, a person is able to transform mundane experience into something much closer to the divine.
Anyway, I re-read the play and put together these notes, which may or may not relate to TKI. But I thought I'd post them anyway! 
Aren't things getting interesting around here?