A Woman In Love With Death and a Battle of Right vs. Right: Antigone (April 22)

• Today's Agenda
  • What are the gender issues in Antigone? Does Antigone, in fact, have to reject "being a good woman" to try to be a "masculine hero"?
  • Antigone's infatuation with death: pious or freaky?
  • What does the play suggest about what constitutes legitimate political authority?
  • How might we sort out, or even balance, the competing claims of family piety, citizenship, and love?
• Gender
  • Female protagonists of Greek tragedies are no different from their male counterparts in that they are generally broken/destroyed by their circumstances.
  • Creon's appeal to "gender warfare" is part of a tyrant's rhetoric; his claim that the state is threatened by insubordinate women is not a reliable guide to figuring out what the conflict is really about.
  • Consider the possibilities for how Sophocles and the audience of this play view Antigone as a woman:
    • dangerously transgressive?
    • somehow showing us what is noble about Antigone as a woman?
    • gender not so important to defining Antigone as a character?
  • The truth lies in between, but we can recognize that there is not a rigid higher vs. lower dichotomy of (heroic fighter) male vs. (submissive) female. Instead, Antigone's difference as a woman works together with the play's concern about multiple spheres of right. Particularly, her gender is part of the background for her heroic stand in defense of the household and the religious rites for mourning the dead.
• In Love With Death
  • Antigone's devotion to the dead is legitimate, but that doesn't mean that it isn't also pathological. She devotes life to death.
  • Antigone's hot, radiant passion for ice cold death: "You have a heart that is hot for things that are cold" (p. 757). This is a major image woven throughout the play. Particularly, Antigone seems to have an almost erotic fixation on death and impossibility; there is frequent talk of her marriage to death, of "living death" and death's living comandments (see pp. 760, 766, 768, 772, and compare the Hymn to Demeter).
    • Sophocles has taken the traditional mythological motif of marriage to death as a way of understanding the common and universal aspects of female experience, and he has turned it towards the understanding of Antigone's unique character and situation.
  • When Antigone talks about "the gods," it almost always turns out that she means the gods beneath the earth, the gods of death (e.g. p. 756).
• Right vs. Right in the Contest Between Creon and Haemon (pp. 773ff.)
  • The chorus's approval of each antagonist's speech indicates that we have a problem, fundamentally, of two conflicting right claims.
  • As we distinguish between the legitimacy of Antigone's claims and the pathological extremes of her character, we must distinguish between Creon's tyrannical and monomaniacal excess and his legitimate appeal to the values of political community. (Consider how his earlier speech, p. 759, was once quoted out of context by the Athenian orator Demosthenes in a political trial"as a model expression of the value of patriotism!)
  • Haemon's admonishment to Creon that he should bend instead of break (p. 773) is reformulated by Creon to Antigone (p. 766).
  • After the exchange of long speeches, Creon and Haemon proceed to an exchange of one-liners (p. 774) in which the conflict is sharply drawn over the definition of a city, the source of authority, and the proper way in which political leadership functions.
• A Balance of Powers: Several Legitimate and Necessary Spheres of Life that Must Be Respected
  • Antigone does not give us a conflict of religious vs. irreligious or patriotic vs. unpatriotic or appreciating-love vs. celibate. All of the important spheres of life are recognized by the characters as necessary, but they differ in how much weight to give to each. For example, even in his final verdict (p. 776), Creon dismisses Antigone's fixation on the lower gods of death alone: what is right in his attitude is his insistence that these are not the only gods.
  • The city's public gods are not the only heavenly (vs. chthonic) gods in Antigone. The choral ode, pp. 776-777, makes clear that Love is a powerful heavenly deity whom Creon has denied in addition to the gods of death.
  • The city gods to whom Creon appeals are very real and important: thus Creon's reply to Antigone's religious claims, that Polynices was an impious man who wanted to destroy the Theban temples.
  • As is usual, Greek mythology imagines the various realities of life and social values as divine powers.