TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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moments after Antigone declares to Creon that it is her nature to love, not to hate (523)! 42 In pursuit of divine justice for her brother, Antigone undermines her own identification with the principle of devotion to the family by declaring her hatred for the sister whom, on her own account, she ought to love. Antigone’s action subverts not only her identification as a member of a family, but also her identification with conventional gender roles. As we have seen, by preparing Polyneices’ body for burial, scattering dust on the corpse to symbolize the burial that she herself does not perform, lamenting Polyneices’ death, and pouring a final libation, Antigone follows the norms governing female participation in funeral ritual. But Antigone acts amid circumstances that make it impossible for her to conform to this traditional role without also violating equally central norms of gender. Antigone’s impropriety with respect to conventional gender roles is most clearly evident in Creon’s hysterical response to her disobedience, which reminds us that the very appearance of women in civic space threatened the constitutive boundary between oikos and polis. Thus, for example, after pronouncing his initial sentence on Antigone and Ismene, Creon orders his slaves to take them back inside the walls of the palace, insisting: “They must be women now. No more free running” (578–79). 43 The form of punishment Creon finally chooses for Antigone is an even more radical enclosure of this improper woman: Antigone herself notices the analogy between the cave in which she is to be buried and the oikos in which women are confined, for she calls the cave her “marriage-chamber” and her “hollowed-out house” (891–92). 44 Indeed, although Creon himself never indicates such a motivation, it is noteworthy that his strategy of burying Antigone alive rather than having her stoned to death, as originally planned, conveniently sidesteps the issue of Antigone’s funeral rites: confined to the cave, she will die “with no friend’s mourning” 15
(844). Given the function of the lament and the epitaph in conferring worldly immortality, perhaps the punishment of an unwitnessed death was intended to prevent Antigone and her acts of resistance from being memorialized in the city; to keep even her name out of the public sphere—which would, again, restore a conventional order of gender in which only men were properly bearers of individual distinction, deserving of public remembrance. 45 Yet we do not need to assume the perspective of the anxiously masculine Creon in order to understand Antigone’s action as an impropriety with respect to gender identity. Antigone’s action frustrates her own identification as a woman even from her own perspective, by blocking the usual trajectory from girlhood to marriage and reproduction—and thereby also shattering her identification with her mother. In an important recent essay that touches on these themes, Matt Neuburg shows the importance of the distinction between blood-ties and marriage-ties in the Antigone. “Antigone will never get to have a marriage-family,” Neuburg observes, because “she is going to die for the sake of her blood-family: her two roles in the world, daughter and sister on the one hand, wife and mother on the other, have come into apparently irreconcilable conflict.” 46 And indeed, Antigone’s own lament upon her fate reflects this conflict: “My curse,” she mourns, “is to die unwed” (869). What Neuburg overlooks is that, because marriage-ties and blood-ties are not only distinct but interdependent, Antigone’s deed also undermines her identification with the principle of kinship through blood by depriving her of the opportunity to bear children: as Antigone herself says, “no marriage-bed, no marriage-song for me, and since no wedding, so no child to rear” (917–18, emphasis added). 47 Creon’s deeds, too, make him into an improper representative of the identities he initially claimed as his own. As we have seen, Antigone’s act takes on a political meaning to which she remains obstinately blind in her commitment to the family and its law. Likewise, Creon’s act 16
Page 1 and 2: TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDEN
Page 3 and 4: Of course, the tradition of dramati
Page 5 and 6: one with itself by virtue of its tr
Page 7 and 8: At first glance, the Antigone doesn
Page 9 and 10: Yet the Antigone’s struggle is no
Page 11 and 12: commanders but also to Polyneices,
Page 13 and 14: Creon’s first speech sharply cont
Page 15: What happens when Antigone and Creo
Page 19 and 20: Worse still, Creon’s acts, like A
Page 21 and 22: preceding events; she leaves the ro
Page 23 and 24: not in the agency-enhancing recogni
Page 25 and 26: those relating to thought or intell
Page 27 and 28: argument that is consistent with, t
Page 29 and 30: causal order of the world, the will
Page 31 and 32: This is not altogether wrong, but i
Page 33 and 34: the paradigmatic recognition scene
Page 35 and 36: 6. This ambivalence is registered i
Page 37 and 38: 19. See for instance Lysias 2.7-10
Page 39 and 40: thus either to love [philian] or ha
Page 41 and 42: etween (and therefore the inseparab
Page 43 and 44: 61. This use of Aristotle’s Poeti
Page 45 and 46: arbitrary, see Marion Smiley, Moral

TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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