TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

practice; so beginning in par. 464, he moves from offering a general account of the structure of
Greek ethical life to personifying its constituent powers: here, Antigone and Creon, as individual
agents who commit “deeds,” come on the scene, and in so doing, they “disturb the peaceful
organization and movement of the ethical world”—that is, they reveal, precisely by their
improprieties, the contradictions and limitations that afflict Greek ethical life. So while Hegel
does indeed assign Antigone and Creon to different spheres, he also highlights the ways in which
they do break out of the spheres to which they are assigned; indeed, his reading depends on it.
41. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63–64.
42. On Antigone’s treatment of Ismene see Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies,
111–15.
43. On the gendered architecture of the oikos, see Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual
Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 93–97.
44. Emily Vermeule notes that in Sophocles’ description the cave has all the architectural
features of a Bronze age chamber tomb, which was itself called an “oikos for the dead”; see
Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979),
54. On the tomb as bedroom or “bridal-chamber” in the Antigone, see Rush Rehm, Marriage to
Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), chap. 4, and Richard Seaford, “The Imprisonment of Women in Greek
Tragedy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 110 (1990): 76–90.
45. Nicole Loraux shows a distinction between men’s epitaphs, which acknowledged and
recorded distinctiveness, with women’s epitaphs, which praised women (if at all) by assimilating
them to a generic type; the “orthodox form” of a woman’s epitaph, Loraux says, is indicated by
the example: “Supposing that feminine virtue still exists in the human race, she partook of it.”
Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 27. On the avoidance and suppression of living women’s names, see John Gould,
“Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980): 45.
46. Neuburg, “How Like a Woman,” 66–67. See also Sheila Murnaghan, “Antigone 904–20 and
the Institution of Marriage,” American Journal of Philology 107, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 192–207.
47. As Christina Elliot Sorum puts it, “in choosing to perpetuate her alliance with her origin,
Antigone rejects her own potential as an origin.” See “The Family in Sophocles’ Antigone and
Electra,” Classical World 75, no. 4 (March–April 1982): 206. Antigone’s grouping of children
with husbands as among the “replaceable” kin (909–10) might seem to undermine my association
of children with blood-ties, since the distinction between blood-ties and marriage-ties is taken by
both Neuburg (73) and Murnaghan (198) to correspond to the distinction between irreplaceable
and replaceable kin. The point, however, is that children represent the point of intersection
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