Was the greatest play of the classical era about a disabled person?

“Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet …” - Sir Francis Bacon, referring to Oedipous (“Swollen Foot”) and the Sphinx.

Oidipous Tyrannos (Oedipus Rex) can reasonably be translated, from Bacon’s perspective, as Clubfoot the Ruler. It then joins such dramas as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Beauty and the Beast, in which a titular character may be expected to wrestle with their disability in the plot.

Disabled people, as we know, are often treated badly. Oidipous’ parents arranged to have him “exposed,” to die.

A disabled Prince so mistreated might, in royal wrath, take gruesome retribution on those who wronged him. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oidipous kills his father and entangles his mother in incest.

Aristotle’s pioneering work of literary criticism, The Poetics, treats Oidipous as Everyman, arguing that we undergo his extreme experiences vicariously, as “fear and pity.” We return to our everyday lives purged, a “catharsis” in which our spirits are temporarily uplifted out of their dreary banality.

In this disability tale, things are made better; that which was lost is found.

Sadly, two millennia of mainstream lit crit fail to deal with the great moral fact of the play: Oidipous’ parents tried to kill him when he was a helpless baby.

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A dramatization of this theme, This is the Son of Kings, was published in this blog in 2013.

Two boys with the same disability tried to get help. The rich student got it quickly. The poor student did not.

For many people having disabilities, inaccessibility to necessary services is denial of service. The 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides for placement at a private school at public expense if public schools can’t address a learning disability. But obstacles often limit this to wealthy families having above-average resources.

Mike Elsen-Rooney, The Teacher Project: “Two boys with learning disabilities grew up just blocks apart in New York City. Public schools couldn't teach them. So their parents battled to place them in private schools, on the taxpayers' dime.”

For the two dyslexic students below, receiving the revised education they need would enable them to make the contribution to society they were capable of.

For both boys, the struggles at school started in the first grade.
Isaac Rosenthal was a fast talker with a big vocabulary. But when it came time to read, he couldn’t keep up with his classmates. He didn’t pick up on the rhyme scheme in Dr. Seuss books, and often mispronounced words whose meaning he knew (like “Pacific,” for which he’d substitute “the other ocean”).
Landon Rodriguez, four years younger than Isaac, was energetic and talkative at home but quiet and withdrawn at school. When he brought home reading assignments, Landon often confused Bs and Ds, and he labored through even short passages.
By the end of that seminal school year, both of their parents knew that something was wrong. In  second grade, each boy was diagnosed with an unspecified learning disability and started receiving special education services at their public schools. “The teachers had no clue how to teach him,” said Debbie Meyer, Isaac’s mother.
Both families ultimately realized their sons needed support the public schools could not provide, particularly when it came to the all-important task of teaching them to read.

“Who gets private placement? White, wealthy families.”

When Congress passed the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, guaranteeing children with learning disabilities a “free and appropriate education” for the first time, it built in the private placement safety net for parents. In some cases, public school officials acknowledge they can’t accommodate a student and agree to pay tuition at a private school. But sometimes families must sue the school district in order to get the tuition covered.

The situation in New York: “Thirty percent of the almost 3,000 students the city recommended for state-approved private schools last year were white, even though white students make up less than 15% of the city’s special education enrollment, state data show.”