Antigone
A Study in Tragedy or the
Tragic Drama
Who is Antigone?
Antigone (Pronunciation: /æn'tɪɡəni/ Greek:
Αντιγόνη) is the name of two different
women in Greek mythology. The name
means "unbending", for "anti-" (against)
and "gon" ("bend" as in "polygon"). It also
means "anti-generation", i.e., "the opposite
of her ancestors".
• Antigone is the daughter of the
accidentally incestuous marriage between
King Oedipus of Thebes, and his mother
Jocasta (thus, Antigone is also her father
Oedipus's half-sister and, through her
father, her mother Jocasta's
granddaughter). She is the subject of a
popular story in which she attempts to
secure a respectable burial for her brother
Polynices, even though he was a traitor to
Thebes.
• In the oldest version of the story, the funeral of
Polynices takes place during Oedipus's reign in
Thebes. However, in the best-known versions,
Sophocles's tragedies Oedipus at Colonus and
Antigone, it occurs in the years after Oedipus's
banishment and death, and Antigone has to
struggle against Creon. Sophocles's Antigone
ends in disaster as Antigone commits suicide,
not realizing that Creon has been persuaded to
allow Polynices a funeral, and Creon's son
Haemon (or Haimon), who loved Antigone, kills
himself.
The dramatist Euripides also wrote a play
called Antigone, which is lost, but some of
the text was preserved by later writers and
in passages in his Phoenissae. In
Euripides, the calamity is averted by the
intercession of Dionysus and is followed
by the marriage of Antigone and Haemon.
Themes in “Antigone”
The Nature of Tragedy
• Halfway through the play, the Chorus appears
on the scene to announce that the tragedy is on.
His speech offers a commentary on the nature of
tragedy. Here, in apparently a reference to Jean
Cocteau, tragedy appears as a machine in
perfect order, a machine that proceeds
automatically and has been ready since the
beginning of time.
Themes (continued…)
The Sisters' Rivalry
• As with Sophocles' sisters, Ismene and
Antigone appear as foils and rivals.
Ismene is "reasonable," timid, and
obedient, full-figured and beautiful in being
a good girl. In contrast, Antigone is
recalcitrant, impulsive, and moody,
shallow, thin, and decidedly resistant to
being a girl like the rest.
Motifs in “Antigone”
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. The Chorus represents an indeterminate
group, be it the inhabitants of Thebes or the
moved spectators. It also appears as narrator,
framing frames the tragedy with a prologue and
epilogue.
Motifs (continued…)
Tragic Beauty
• As noted above, Antigone's insistence on
her desire makes her monstrous, abject.
At the same time, her abjection is her
tragic beauty.
Symbolism in “Antigone”
The Gray World
• Upon sneaking in from her brother's burial,
Antigone tells the Nurse that she has come from
a "gray world." Like many of Anouilh's heroines,
Antigone wanders in this gray "nowhere," a
world beyond the "post card" universe of the
waking. This world is breathless with
anticipation: it doubles the stage, set apart from
the human world, upon which Antigone's tragedy
will ensue. At the same time, the world of the
living does not lie in wait for Antigone: she is
meant to pass onto another.
Symbolism (continued…)
Eurydice's Knitting
• As the Chorus remarks, Queen Eurydice's
function in the tragedy is to knit in her room until
she dies. She is Creon's final lesson, her death
leaving him utterly alone. In the report of her
suicide, Eurydice will stop her knitting and the
stab herself with her needle. The end of her
knitting is the end of her life, evoking the familiar
Greek myth of the life-thread spun, measured,
and cut by the Fates.
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