TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

14. Polyneices’ grievance is discussed in Aesch. Septem 631–52 and Soph. Oed. Col.
1284–1307. On the death of the brothers see Aesch. Septem 808–14.
15. In Aeschylus’s version of the story, Eteocles and Polyneices died childless; see G. O.
Hutchinson’s discussion in his note to line 903 in Aeschylus, Septem contra Thebas (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985). In other accounts, Polyneices left a son, Thersander, who, together with
the other sons of the Seven (the “Epigoni”) later successfully conquered Thebes. For a summary
of sources see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 522–25.
16. Terence Cave has even suggested that the burst of interest in the Antigone that began in the
late eighteenth century, and which found its most influential expression in Hegel, helped bring
about “the eclipse of anagnorisis as a central tragic concept” in modern poetics. Recognitions,
154.
17. Indeed, the Antigone is not only full of claims to recognition; it is also surrounded by them.
Readers of the play commonly make claims to recognize Antigone and Creon—to know who
they are and what they stand for. In a classic essay, Jean Bethke Elshtain argues that Antigone is
a representative of “primordial family morality”—an identity that, in the form of “maternal
thinking,” is still available to be taken up in acts of resistance to modern Creons (“Antigone’s
Daughters,” democracy 2, no. 2 [April 1982]: 53, 58–59). In a response to Elshtain, Mary Dietz
claims instead that Antigone represents “the customs and traditions of a collective civil life, an
entire political ethos” (“Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal
Thinking,” Political Theory 13, no. 1 [February 1985]: 29). Rather than taking sides in this
debate about what Antigone, properly understood, represents, I suggest that we try to account
for the fact that Elshtain’s and Dietz’s seemingly incompatible accounts of Antigone’s identity
are both partly persuasive. We can do so by focusing less exclusively on who Antigone is and
attending instead to how who she is relates to what she does. This angle can help us understand
how Antigone’s deeds do not smoothly flow from and reinforce, but exceed and disturb our (and
her) conception of her identity.
18. See Larry J. Bennett and William Blake Tyrrell, “Sophocles’ Antigone and Funeral Oratory,”
American Journal of Philology 111, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 442. On the question of whether this
topos preceded Sophocles, see Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “Assumptions and the Creation of
Meaning: Reading Sophocles’ Antigone,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): 134–48, arguing
that Sophocles introduced the idea that “the total denial of burial offends against the gods” (143),
but also the response by Helene Foley, “Tragedy and Democratic Ideology: The Case of
Sophocles’ Antigone,” in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara
Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), arguing that the topos of the recovery of the
bodies “could well have been in place before the Antigone was composed” (140). For a summary
of versions of the story and textual evidence concerning norms of burial, see appendix C to D. A.
Hester, “Sophocles the Unphilosophical: A Study in the Antigone,” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 24
(1971): 54–55.
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