Classical Backgrounds to English Literature

Sophocles’s Antigone

Please read the following opinions about Sophocles’s play and decide whether or not you agree with the claim made. Be prepared to support your position.

• “An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we [moderns] should feel a deep interest.” Matthew Arnold, 1853

• “It is very superficial criticism which interprets the character of Creon as that of a hypocritical tyrant, and regards Antigone as a blameless victim. … The exquisite art of Sophocles is shown in the touches by which he makes us feel that Creon, as well as Antigone, is contending for what he believes to be the right…. The best critics have [recognized] this balance of principles, this antagonism between valid claims; they generally regard it, however, as dependent entirely on the Greek point of view, as springing simply from the polytheistic conception, according to which the requirements of the Gods often clashed with the duties of man to man. But, is it the fact that this antagonism of valid principles is peculiar to polytheism? Is it not rather that the struggle between Antigone and Creon represents that struggle between elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully being brought into harmony with its inward needs? … Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed the conflict between Antigone and Creon; such a man must not only dare to be right, he must also dare to be wrong – to shake faith, to wound friendship, perhaps, to hem in his own powers. Like Antigone, he may fall a victim to the struggle, and yet he can never earn the name of a blameless martyr any more than the society – the Creon he has defied, can be branded as a hypocritical tyrant.” George Eliot, 1856

• “In Antigone the dialectic of intimacy and of exposure, of the ‘housed’ and of the most public is made explicit. The play turns on the enforced politics of the private spirit, on the necessary violence which political-social change visits on the unspeaking inwardness of being. … If Antigone were to triumph, if the private dimension of human needs were to demolish the public, there could be no progress. There could, quite simply, be no locale for meaningful, that is to say tragic, collision. … If Creon was only or essentially a tyrant, he would not be worthy of Antigone’s challenge…. If he did not incarnate an ethical principle, his defeat would possess neither tragic quality nor constructive sense.” George Steiner, 1984

• “The conflict between Antigone and Creon … is not an opposition between pure religion, represented by the girl, and total irreligion, represented by Creon, or between a religious spirit and a political one. Rather, it is between two different types of religious feeling: One is family religion, purely private and confined to the small circle of close relatives, the philoi, centered around the domestic hearth and the cult of the dead; the other is a public religion in which the tutelary gods of the city eventually become confused with the supreme values of the State. … As the leader of the chorus points out, it is pious to honor the gods in all piety but the supreme magistrate at the head of the city is duty-bound to enforce respect for his kratos and the law he has promulgated. After all, as Socrates in the Crito was to assert, piety, like justice, commands that you obey the laws of your country, even if they are unjust, and even if this injustice recoils against you, condemning you to death. … Neither of the two religious attitudes set in conflict in the Antigone can by itself be the right one unless it grants to the other the place that is its due, unless it recognizes the very thing limits and competes with it.” Jean-Pierre Vernant, 1990

• “… as the play unfolds … Antigone’s femininity is deepened and affirmed. … Made victim, Antigone grows into essential womanhood. The delicate gravity of the paradox is this: Antigone dies a virgin and, therefore, unfulfilled in respect of her sexual identity, of the implicit teleology of her being. Over and over, in her torment and lamentations, Antigone lays stress on this cruel unripeness, on that which shall prevent her from being bride and mother, the crowning conditions of a woman’s existence. … [It] is not only the extinction of her young life which Antigone laments, it is the extinction inside herself of those other lives to come which only a woman can engender. If there is, in the symmetries of mortality, any counterpoise to a tomb, it is the bridal bed and the bed of childbearing (so often united in image and metaphor). There is, in the fourth stasimon, a strange, subversive hint of consolation. The chorus cites crimes committed by mothers on their children or stepchildren. Motherhood may, by itself, be no guarantee of living felicity.” George Steiner

Compare Steiner’s words (#5) with Vernant’s (#6)…

• “… entirely absorbed in philia and death, [Antigone] refuses to recognize anything in the world that is not encompassed by these two, in particular anything to do with life and love. The two deities invoked by the chorus, Dionysus and Eros, do not just condemn Creon. Although they are on Antigone’s side as nocturnal, mysterious gods, close to women and alien to politics, they turn against the girl because, even in their links with death, they express the powers of life and renewal. Antigone would not heed their appeal to detach herself from her ‘own’ and from philia and to become accessible to ‘an other,’ that is to recognize Eros and, by entering into union with a ‘stranger,’ herself to transmit life in her turn. Thus the opposition between philia and eros, family attachment and sexual desire, holds a place of major importance in the structure of the drama.” Jean-Pierre Vernant