Classic Note on Antigone
List of Themes
Pride: Pride and its effects are a central part of Antigone. It is a trait despised by the gods,
who bring suffering to the proud, but to the Greek mind pride is also an inextricable part of
greatness. Both Antigone and Creon are incredibly proud, making it impossible for either one
of them to back down once they have taken a stand. Pride is part of what makes Antigone
heroic. Pride is a complex and multifaceted concept in Greek tragedy; it is discussed in
greater depth in the detailed summaries.
Individual versus State; Conscience versus Law; Moral or Divine Law versus Human
Law: These three conflicts are very closely related, but this crude set of pairings helps to
untangle some of the central issues of the play. Antigone and her values line up with the first
entity in each pair, while Creon and his values line up with the second. Antigone continues to
be a subversive and powerful play, inspiration for generations of rebels and dissidents. In our
own century, a version of Antigone rewritten during the Second World War became one of
the most powerful texts of resistance against the Nazis. The conflict between the individual
and the power of the state was as pressing for Greek audiences as it is to modern one.
Antigone is a threat to the status quo; she invokes divine law as defense of her actions, but
implicit in her position is faith in the discerning powers of her individual conscience. She
sacrifices her life out of devotion to principles higher than human law. Creon makes a
mistake in sentencing her‹and his mistake is condemned, in turn, by the gods‹but his position
is an understandable one. In the wake of war, and with his reign so new, Creon has to
establish his authority as supreme. On the other hand, Creon's need to defeat Antigone seems
at times to be extremely personal. At stake is not only the order of the state, but his pride and
sense of himself as a king and, more fundamentally, a man.
Gender: the Position of Women: Antigone's gender has profound affects on the meaning of
her actions. Creon himself says that the need to defeat her is all the more pressing because
she is a woman. The freedom of Greek women was extremely limited; the rules and strictures
placed on them were great even for the ancient world. Antigone's rebellion is especially
threatening because it upsets gender roles and hierarchy. By refusing to be passive, she
overturns one the fundamental rules of her culture. The detailed summaries below have more
to say on this important theme.
Inaction/Lack of Agency versus Agency: Closely related to the above theme, this theme
plays itself out in the contrast between Antigone and Ismene. When faced with injustice, the
two women react in very different ways. Ismene chooses to do nothing, and Antigone
chooses to act; later, Antigone proves again and again that she is the character with the most
agency. She is arguably the only character in the play who walks into her fate with her eyes
open all along the way.
The Threat of Tyranny: Athenians were sensitive to the idea of tyranny and the fine line
between a strong leader and a brutal tyrant. Creon is in many ways a sympathetic character,
but he often abuses his power. His faults do not necessarily lie in a lust for power; often, he
has noble intentions. He is completely loyal to the state, but he is subject to human weakness
and poor judgment.
Study Questions and Essay Topics
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Study Questions and Essay
Topics
1. Halfway through the play, the Chorus
highlights the stillness at the heart of tragedy.
What is the significance of the stillness in the
play? [Answer]
2. Most of Antigone's commentators cast the
play as an anti-fascist allegory of events of the
French Resistance. How might one consider
the play in such terms? What are some of the
limits of this reading? [Answer]
3. What is the function of the Guardsmen?
Consider their dialogue, their interaction with
the "major" players, the Chorus' comments on
them, and so on. [Answer]
I.1 Suggested Essay Topics
4. Consider the contrast and rivalry Anouilh
establishes between Antigone and Ismene.
What are the terms of both? How do they
relate to Antigone's fate?
5. Consider Anouilh's use of humor. You may
want to isolate one or two scenes for
discussion. Examples include the dictation of
Antigone's letter and Creon's caricature of
Oedipus.
6. What is the function of the Chorus in
Anouilh's play? How, for example, does it
relate to the players? To the spectacle as a
whole? You may want to consider such
devices as address, stage positions, lighting,
entrances and exits, and so on.
7. Halfway through the play, the Chorus
declares that tragedy has "nothing to do with
melodrama." What does the Chorus mean?
Consider the influence of and departure from
melodrama in Antigone.
8. What is the significance of saying "no" in
this play? Who says "no" and to what?
Consider how saying "no" figures as both an
act and as an object of discussion.
9. Consider the trope of death in Antigone.
How does death figure in the play? You may
want to discuss the relations between death
and, for example, space, narrative, rhythm,
gesture, the body, the mask, the act, etc.
10. Consider the role of physical violence in
the play. Who assaults whom, both on- stage
and in anecdote? What is the significance of
pain? You may want to isolate one or two
scenes for close analysis.
Analysis of Major Characters
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Analysis of Major Characters
Antigone - Antigone is the play's tragic heroine. In the first moments of the
play, Antigone is opposed to her radiant sister Ismene. Unlike her beautiful and
docile sister, Antigone is scrawny, sallow, withdrawn, and recalcitrant brat.
Like Anouilh's Eurydice, the heroine of his play Eurydice, and Joan of Arc,
Antigone has a boyish physique and curses her girlhood. She is the antithesis of
the melodramatic heroine, the archetypal blond ingénue as embodied in
Ismene. Antigone has always been difficult, terrorizing Ismene as a child,
always insisting on the gratification of her desires, refusing to "understand" the
limits placed on her. Her envy of Ismene is clear. Ismene is entirely of this
world, the object of all men's desires. Thus she will at one point rob Ismene of
her feminine accoutrements to seduce her fiancé Haemon. She fails, however,
as such human pleasures are not meant for her.
Generally audiences have received Anouilh's Antigone as a figure for
French Resistance, Antigone appearing as the young girl who rises up alone
against state power. Anouilh's adaptation strips Antigone's act of its moral,
political, religious, and filial trappings, allowing it to emerge in all its
gratuitously. In the end, Antigone's tragedy rests in her refusal to cede on her
desire. Against all prohibitions and without any just cause, she will bury her
brother to the point of her own death. As we learn in her confrontation with
Creon, this insistence on her desire locates her in a line of tragic heroes,
specifically that of Oedipus. Like Oedipus, her insistence on her desire beyond
the limits of reason render her ugly, abject, tabooed. In refusing to cede it, she
moves outside the human community. As with Oedipus, it is precisely her
moment of abjection, when she has lost all hope, when her tragic beauty
emerges. Her beauty exerts a chilling fascination. As Ismene notes, Antigone is
not beautiful like the rest, but beautiful in a way that stops children in the street,
beautiful in a way that unsettles, frightens, and awes.
Creon - Antigone's uncle, the powerfully built King Creon is a weary, wrinkled
man suffering the burdens of rule. Before the deaths of Oedipus and his sons,
he dedicated himself to art patronage but has now surrendered himself entirely
to the throne. A practical man, he firmly distances himself from the tragic
aspirations of Oedipus and his line. As he tells Antigone, his only interest is in
political and social order. Creon is bound to ideas of good sense, simplicity,
and the banal happiness of everyday life. To Creon, life is but the happiness
one makes, the happiness that inheres in a grasped tool, a garden bench, a child
playing at one's feet. Uninterested in playing the villain in his niece's tragedy,
Creon has no desire to sentence Antigone to death. Antigone is far more useful
to Thebes as mother to its heir than as its martyr, and he orders her crime
covered-up. Though fond of Antigone, Creon will have no choice but to but to
execute her. As the recalcitrant Antigone makes clear, by saying "yes" to state
power, Creon has committed himself to acts he finds loathsome if the order of
the state demands it. Antigone's insistence on her desire in face of state power
brings ruin into Thebes and to Creon specifically. With the death of his family,
Creon is left utterly alone in the palace. His throne even robs him of his
mourning, the king and his pace sadly shuttling off to a cabinet meeting after
the announcement of the family's deaths.
The Chorus - In Greek tragedy, the Chorus consisted of a group of
approximately ten people, playing the role of death messenger, dancing,
singing, and commenting throughout from the margins of the action. Anouilh
reduces the Chorus to a single figure who retains his collective function
nevertheless. The Chorus represents an indeterminate group, be it the
inhabitants of Thebes or the moved spectators. It also appears as narrator. The
Chorus frames the play with a prologue and epilogue, introducing the action
and characters under the sign of fatality. We see this fatalism most clearly
perhaps its characteristic gesture of demonstration, prefacing many of its
remarks with "Et voilà" in the original script. In presenting the tragedy, the
Chorus would instruct the audience on proper spectatorship, reappearing at the
tragedy's pivotal moments to comment on the action or the nature of tragedy
itself. Along with playing narrator, the Chorus also attempts to intercede
throughout the play, whether on the behalf of the Theban people or the
horrified spectators.
The Guards - The three Guardsmen are interpolations into the Antigone
legend, doubles for the rank-and-file fascist collaborators or collabos of
Anouilh's day. The card-playing trio, made all the more mindless and
indistinguishable in being grouped in three, emerges from a long stage tradition
of the dull-witted police officer. As the Chorus notes, they smell of garlic and
beer, concern themselves with the mundane, and are in general not bad people.
Serving as a spokesman of sorts, the First Guard gives voice to their thoughts:
they follow orders, and they cover for themselves when things go wrong. They
are eternally indifferent, innocent, and ready to serve whatever powers that be.
In other words, they have no particular loyalty to Creon. As the Chorus
indicates, they would arrest him if need be. This indifference makes them
brutal and dangerous. Some critics have taken Anouilh's guards, which stand in
contrast to the royal heroes of tragedy, as the clearest manifestation of his
"aristocratic pessimism."
Importantly, the Guards also figure as inappropriate spectators: men left
entirely untouched by the tragedy that unfolds before them. The Chorus makes
this especially clear in the prologue and epilogue, where the trio appears idly
playing cards. As the Chorus notes, the tragedy is "no skin of their backs." In
this respect, the indifferent trio recalls the guardsmen from Anouilh's other
tragedies, such as the guard whose chatter about the harvest close his Medea.