TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

(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
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