2005 Summer Reading
The Burial at Thebes
Women's Roles

by Prof. Mary Stange, Religion and Women's Studies

Women were never meant for this assembly.
From now on they’ll be kept in place again.
--Creon, passing judgment on Antigone (p. 38)

It is difficult to read the Antigone, especially in Seamus Heaney’s rendition, without getting the distinct impression that Creon has “issues” about women. He rails to the Chorus: “Who does she think/ She is? The man in charge?/Have I to be/The woman of the house and take her orders?” (p. 31) Debating her fate with his son, and Antigone’s betrothed, Haemon, he warns: “Don’t, Haemon, lose your wits over a woman” (p. 41); “Son, you’re pathetic. You give in to a woman” (p. 46); “The woman has you round her little finger” (p. 47); and in an aside to the Chorus, “Listen to him. He’s on the woman’s side” (p.45). As the Chorus finally persuades him to relent, Creon objects: “Set the girl free? You want me to renege?/. . .It goes against the grain. . .” (p. 63).

The “grain,” of course, was that of a rigorously patriarchal society, in which the woman “in place” was clearly subordinated and, mostly, out of sight. In Creon’s view, then—and virtually everyone in his audience would have agreed—it was Antigone herself who first went against the grain, when she defied his authority. Even the late King’s daughter cannot escape the drive to female conformity. And the fact that the King’s daughter was also his half-sister, and her brother’s aunt, makes Antigone divergent in some additionally disquieting ways for anyone who has an investment in the patriarchal structure of society. As she and others remark at several points in the play, her defiance of Creon’s law arises directly from the curse on her family. “This wildness in her comes from Oedipus,” the Chorus observes, “She gets it from her father. She won’t relent.” To which Creon, in good patriarchal fashion, replies:

Wild she may be
But even the wildest horses come to heel
When they’re reined and bitted right.
Subordinates
Are just not made for insubordination. (p. 30)

One way to read the play, in contemporary terms, is to see Creon as the figure who embodies the patriarchal order, to which Ismene conforms and against which Antigone rebels.

Ismene:
Women, defying Creon?
It’s not a woman’s place.
We’re weak where they are strong.
Whether it’s this or worse,
We must do as we’re told.
In the land of the living, sister,
The laws of the land obtain. . . .
Antigone:
You and the laws of the land! (p. 10)

Antigone’s affront is not simply against Creon, but against everything he stands for. Her passionate resistance to an unjust law appears to arise from what some feminists, most notably psychologist Carol Gilligan, have seen as a distinctly feminine trait that develops under patriarchy: an ethic of care, grounded in female emotional experience, over against the masculine ethic of justice, which appeals to rational (if nonetheless arbitrary) principles.

The sobering problem with reading Antigone as a proto-feminist heroine, of course, is that her defiance of the patriarchal order proves fatal for her. In this, she joins a long line of iconic figures of feminist rebellion for whom the only alternatives to patriarchal conformity are either madness or death (often by their own hands). When Kate Chopin’s heroine Edna Pontellier, in The Awakening, remarks that she would give her life for her children, but not her self, one can imagine Antigone nodding appreciatively. As radical feminist Mary Daly remarked a generation ago, revolting against patriarchy requires existential courage, the courage to see and to be. It is always a risky venture.

More recently, feminist philosopher Judith Butler has reread the Antigone story as a critique of conventional feminist approaches to political agency. She writes: "I began to think about Antigone a few years ago as I wondered what happened to those feminist efforts to confront and defy the state. It seemed to me that Antigone might work as a counterfigure to the trend championed by recent feminists to seek the backing and authority of the state to implement feminist policy aims. The legacy of Antigone’s defiance appeared to be lost in the contemporary efforts to recast political opposition as legal plaint and to seek the legitimacy of the state in the espousal of feminist claims." [1]

Arguing primarily against the position of so-called liberal feminism, that changes in women’s social status can best be effected through changes in the law, in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Butler agues that Antigone’s compelling power arises from the fact that while her “defiant speech has political implications” she presents a perspective, arising out of kinship, that precedes (although it does not necessarily preclude) politics.

Antigone cannot help but be who she is, a necessarily divergent figure:

Over and over again
Because I am who I am
I retrace that fatal line
And the ghastly love I sprang from. (p. 52)

Butler relates her inborn deviance from patriarchal norms to the contemporary situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons who are denied the legal rights to live their lives that patriarchal society grants to heterosexuals. She writes, "Consider that the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States." [2]

Remarking that Antigone’s suicide “fails to produce heterosexual closure” for the play—a marriage to Haemon in which Antigone would conform to patriarchal expectations that she become a wife and mother—Butler wonders what might have happened, had Freud taken Oedipus’s defiant daughter as his psychoanalytic touchstone. Might he have developed a theory that did not rely upon “compulsory heterosexuality” (a term coined by Adrienne Rich) to establish psychological norms? It is a provocative question.

One thing must be borne in mind when reading Antigone as feminist icon, and that is the deeply ironic fact that the play that bears her name is not in the end her tragedy: It is Creon’s. All of the action leads to his downfall, and Antigone is ultimately a player in that larger scheme. Sophocles’ contemporaries would have taken this fact for granted. Yet they, too, would have seen, or perhaps more accurately felt, the humanity of Antigone’s position. As Haemon tells his father, behind closed doors the people are saying that Antigone “should be honoured—a woman who rebelled” (p. 43). Butler might add that too many of the issues raised by the Antigone are still relegated to “behind closed doors” discussions in contemporary American society.

[1] Quoted in Georgette Fleischer, “Butler: Is It All Greek?”, The Nation, December 11, 2000, 42.
[2] Ibid.