Emasculation in Sophocles’ Antigone
The tragedy Antigone, written by Sophocles c. 441 BC, is universally regarded as one of the most important pieces of drama that we have. Hegel describes it as “one of the most sublime, and in every respect most consummate, work[s] of art human effort ever produced”, saying that “[n]ot a detail in this tragedy but is of consequence” (Hegel, 1962, p. 178). The play has provided us with ample opportunity for exploring universal conflicts, such as the tensions “between the old and the new, family and state, conviction and obedience, sentiment and reason, women and men” (Holland, 2010, p. 28). Following the indefatigable titular character Antigone, the fruit of the incestuous union between Oidipous and his mother Jocasta, “is a challenge to one’s stamina” (Fradinger, 2010, p. 15), and, because of the extreme sacrifice she makes for her convictions, she is even compared to Socrates and Christ (Söderbäck, 2010, p. 1). The tragedy in this play ensues from the perpetual tensions between the family and the state, the former embodying the divine law and the latter the human such; or in other words, the tension is generated by the clash between the “feminine-ontological” (the home) and the “masculine-political” (the public world) (Steiner, 1984, p. 34-35).
This essay will explore the major ways in which Antigone assumes a masculine role and, as a consequence, “emasculates” her maternal uncle Kreon, the latest ruler of Thebes, bringing his downfall. The translation of Antigone used here is the 2003 one by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal. The dramatis personae are referred to by the names as spelled in that translation, which in some cases differ with the spelling in some of the other cited materials: e.g. Oidipous and Oedipus, Kreon and Creon.
Compared to other ancient tragedies, the plot of this play is relatively simple. It begins just after a battle between Oidipous’ sons, Eteokles and Polyneikes, the former defending the city of Thebes and the latter, wanting to become its sole ruler, attacking it. Both brothers slay each other in battle. The new ruler is their maternal uncle Kreon, who decrees that Eteokles be given a proper burial, whilst Polyneikes must be left to rot outside the city gates, unburied and unlamented. Anyone who defies this order shall be stoned to death (Sophocles, 2003, lines 44-46). In the opening scene of the play Antigone proclaims to her younger sister Ismene that she will bury the body of their brother, even if this results in her untimely death. After Kreon finds out that the body has been tended to, he orders its renewed exposure to the elements. Antigone tries to perform the funerary rites a second time and is caught. Niece and uncle clash, and Antigone is sentenced to being buried alive in a tomb outside the city. Haimon, Kreon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, tries to change his father’s mind but the tyrant is unbending. The ancient blind seer Teiresias arrives and tells Kreon that his house will be cursed if he fails to honour to the body and release the girl. The ruler finally gives in, but it is too late. Antigone has hanged herself in her tomb, on seeing it Haimon falls on his sword and Eurydike, Haimon’s mother and Kreon’s wife, kills herself after hearing of her son’s end.
Kreon is too proud and acts too late. But why? What are his weaknesses and what are his fears? The political structures in ancient Greece are “founded on a series of exclusions that are at once drastic and destined to endure in history” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 60) and Kreon’s motive to forbid the honourable burial of Polyneikes stems from the desire to strengthen this political order by “dishonouring one’s enemy – or … the city’s enemy – after death” (Rosivach, 1983, p. 209). This is his first major decree and exposes him as a weak and ineffectual ruler. He is utterly intolerant to dissent and is given to vast generalizations, whilst being completely unable to deal “with the particulars of the situation at hand” (Holt, 1999, p. 681-682). It can be argued that this is so because he was never meant to rule Thebes in the first place. The rightful heirs of the House of Laius were Polyneikes and Eteokles. After their death, Kreon takes the throne, but this occurs because his “kinship to the House of Laius is … affinal rather than ancestral” (Holland, 2010, p. 36) through his sister Jocasta. This allows him to “regard women as passive conduits of kinship” and enables his “formal exclusion of women from both political and familial authority” (Holland, 2010, p. 36).
The uncertainty of his position makes him afraid of appearing weak and paranoid about a possible uprising: “Yet for a long time in this city, men | Who barely can put up with me have raised | A secret uproar” (Sophocles, 2003, lines 333-335). New to authority, he is determined to make himself seem in control of the shaky political situation in Thebes; he “cannot afford failure in this first challenge to his command” and “[t]o be faced down by a woman, and in public, is particularly humiliating” (Segal, 2003, p. 12). Kreon is the tyrant of the city, but he is not necessarily a tyrant in the contemporary meaning of the word, since he has gained his position lawfully, through ties of blood. However, his inability to see nuances, obsession with conspiracy and demand of absolute obedience turn him gradually into a tyrant in the contemporary definition (Segal, 2003, p. 17). “Whoever is put into power by | The city must be obeyed in everything – | In small things, and what’s just, and the opposite” (Sophocles, 2003, lines 721-724) he maintains.
This fear of disobedience is crystalized in his clash with Antigone. He translates the “conflict with her into a conflict of genders, male versus female” (Segal, 2003, p. 32), embodying “the union between male identity and political identity against the apolitical nature of the other sex” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 55). His speech is replete with misogynist notes (Cavarero, 2010, p. 55), saying that “we must never be defeated by | A woman” and “A filthy way to think – submitting to a woman” (Sophocles, 2003, lines 731-732 and 806). With his fixation on male identity, any “transgression of his orders is [regarded as] possible only by a male” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 56). It is his conviction that “a man who submits to a woman is ignoble … because he abandons the human dignity of his superior, and thus political, male sex” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 56). Later in the play, when his son Haimon tries to convince his father to spare Antigone’s life, their debate “takes as its rhetorical figure the reciprocal accusation of behaving like a woman”, betraying Kreon’s “male fear of becoming female, the anguish of doubtful virility” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 56). “[W]hile I am alive, a woman will not rule!” (Sophocles, 2003, line 576) he shouts, exposing his fear of appearing weak and effeminate.
Yet Antigone succeeds in emasculating him, even though it is not her intention, but an epiphenomenon of her goal to honour her dead brother. She does it on multiple levels, the first and most obvious one being her blatant disobedience of his edict. Antigone is sometimes described as “the eternal heroine of natural law, which the ancients called the unwritten law” (Maritain, 1942, p. 78) and it can be argued that the distinction between nature and convention forms “the defence of the rebel [i.e. Antigone], in the name of a higher law, against the standing conventions and the existing laws of society” (Sabine, 1973, pp. 42-43). This play is regarded as an example of the usage of the idea of natural law in legal argument and political debate (Burns, 2002, p. 545), in particular Antigone’s lines when she says that she did not think Kreon’s “proclamation so strong | That you, a mortal, could overrule the laws | Of the gods, that are unwritten and unfailing”, adding that “these laws live not now or yesterday | But always, and no one knows how long ago | They appeared” (Sophocles, 2003, lines 499-505). This passage is often seen as proof that the concept of natural law – the idea of absolute justice that stands above the legalities of a particular society – originates in Periclean Athens (Burns, 2002, p. 545). Of course, it is important not to credit Sophocles with too humanistic beliefs: he was a classist, who approved of a rigid caste system that dictated people’s station and responsibilities (Burns, 2002, p. 549-550). In fact, one of Antigone’s arguments for burying her brother is that he was not a slave (Sophocles, 2003, line 568). In other words, it can be said that Antigone “is primarily the champion not of the individual against the State but of the ties of blood and birth that rest on the solidarity of the family” (Segal, 2003, p. 4)
Either way, however, she defies Kreon’s law, and the play is structured in such a way that it encourages “sympathy for Antigone, undercutting the condemnation that her action would likely arouse in real life” (Holt, 1999, p. 670), even though for the male audience in fifth-century Athens her behaviour as “a woman defying due male authority” (Holt, 1999, p. 668) would be regarded as shocking and unacceptable. Her acting outside “the preestablished representation of a womanhood” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 56) subvert Kreon’s ossified and gendered ideas of home and state (Holland, 2010, p. 37), so much so that Kreon exclaims that “I must be | No man at all, in fact, and she must be | The man, if power like this can rest in her | And go unpunished” (Sophocles, 2003, lines 532-535).
Another way in which Antigone reverses the gender roles is through her speech. This is not surprising, since conflict embodied in debate is the backbone of the play, “which is so structured that each protagonist can act only by [verbally] attacking and destroying the central values of the other” (Segal, 2003, p. 6). Antigone and Kreon debate the superiority of kinship and citizenship, of the family and the city, that way offering different versions of the future of Thebes (Holland, 2010, p. 35). Extraordinarily, the girl “absorbs the very language of the state against which she rebels” (Butler, 2000, p. 5). This oral insubordination, in which she appropriates the vernacular of the law in defying it, is one of the reasons for her to be described as “manly” (Butler, 2000, p. 11). Paradoxically, the way she speaks resembles Kreon’s manner of expression, and through this “he becomes … unmanned by Antigone” (Butler, 2000, p. 6). In other words, through adopting the voice of her antagonist, she “appears to assume the form of a certain masculine sovereignty” (Butler, 2000, p. 9). Moreover, in the first scene of the play she says to her sister “Oh—denounce me! I’ll hate you even more if you | Keep quiet and don’t proclaim all this to everyone” (Sophocles, 2003, lines 103-104), craving – and later achieving – a radically public exposure of her speech, “as public as [Kreon’s] edict itself” (Butler, 2000, p. 28).
The next way, in which she emasculates Kreon through appropriating not only a male but his male role in particular, is by assuming the funerary rites of her dead brother’s body. There is an erroneous belief amongst many unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of ancient Greek custom that women had significant role to play in funerary arrangements. This exaggeration of female contribution to death rituals is most likely the result of scholar’s desire to find “something to say about women” (Hame, 2008, p. 2) in this male-dominated society. As it turns out, women’s role in burial rites in ancient Greece and specifically Athens were “controlled and checked by the authority of the state, as evidenced by extant funerary legislation” (Hame, 2008, p. 12). The responsibility for the arrangement of a funeral fell to male relatives of the deceased, not to the women of the family, and assuming them – as do figures such as Antigone, Clytemnestra and Medea – would have been regarded as “a corruption of normal social, cultural, and religious roles for women” (Hame, 2008, p. 3). However, women did perform some aspects of the preparatory funerary rites, but Antigone and Ismene, who want to do their duty, are put in a complicated position: first, women were not supposed to retrieve the body; and second, “the nearest male relative who is customarily responsible for Polyneikes’ funeral rites … is Kreon, the author of the edict that prevents Polyneikes’ funeral” (Hame, 2008, p. 8), which pressures Antigone to assume his responsibility. “It’s not for him to keep me from my own” (Sophocles, 2003, line 60) says she to her sister, and, in an act of “extraordinary heroism” (Hame, 2008, p. 12), appropriates Kreon’s male role.
The last and truly terminal way in which she emasculates her uncle is by ending his line. Again, this was not her intention but is the result of her actions. She “is commonly … seen as a character married to death”, whose “desire is a desire to die” (Söderbäck, 2010, p. 76), and it is no surprise that she drags others with her into Hades. Kreon attempts to arrange her end in such a way that would leave him and Thebes unpolluted, however, Antigone, as in most things, assumes control, takes her own life and that way pollutes Kreon’s house (Segal, 2003, p. 10). This curse manifests itself in Haimon’s attempt to kill his father and then in the young man’s suicide, followed by the suicide of his mother, the silent Eurydike. The death of Kreon’s son ends his line, i.e. his future and legacy, and that of his wife “demonstrates the power of everything that Kreon had disvalued in his single-minded exaltation of civic values: women’s emotions and their intense involvement in the bonds of family and in pollution, lament, and death itself” (Segal, 2003, p. 15). He “is condemned to live out his days bereft of kin … reproached by the dead for crimes from which there can be no expiation” (Holland, 2010, p. 37). The manly, misogynist and arrogant ruler of Thebes “is in fact nothing in the end” (Cavarero, 2010, p. 60).
Antigone is “one of the most important texts of western literary tradition” (Koulouris, 2018, p. 1) because of its condensed form and the extremity of its themes. It can be argued that the character of Kreon is – from contemporary dramaturgical perspective – the most interesting one, because he goes through a significant change from power to misery, whilst Antigone remains hard as marble. “His world is being turned upside down” with “women getting the better of men” (Holt, 1999, p. 683). Stripped of authority, his speech and heir, he is left completely emasculated and – as a consequence of his misogynist mindset – weak, even though Antigone proves that femininity is not necessarily synonymous with weakness.
Bibliography:
Burns, T. (2002) ‘Sophocles’ Antogone and the History of the Concept of Natural Law’, Political Studies, 50(3), pp. 545-557.
Butler, J. (2000) Antigone’s Claim, New York: Columbia University Press.
Cavarero, A. (2010) ‘On the Body of Antigone’, in Feminist Readings of Antigone, ed. Fanny Söderbäck, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 45-63.
Fradinger, M. (2010) ‘Nomadic Antigone’, Moira, in Feminist Readings of Antigone, ed. Fanny Söderbäck, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 15-23.
Hame, K. (2008) ‘Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone’, Classical Philology, 103(1), pp. 1-15.
Hegel, G.W.H. (1962) Hegel on Tragedy, eds. Paolucci, A. and Paolucci, H., New York: Garden City.
Holland, C. (2010) ‘After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought’, in Feminist Readings of Antigone, ed. Fanny Söderbäck, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 27-43.
Holt, P. (1999) ‘Polis and Tragedy in the Antigone’, Mnemosyne, 52(6), pp. 658-690.
Koulouris, T. (2018) ‘Neither Sensible, Nor Moderate: Revisiting the Antigone’, Humanities, 7(2), pp. 1-17.
Maritain, J. (1942) The Rights of Man and the Natural Law. London: Methuen.
Sabine, G. H. (1973) A History of Political Theory, 4th edition Hinsdale IL: Holt Saunders.
Segal, C. in Sophocles (2003) Antigone, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Söderbäck, F. (2010) ‘Why Antigone Today?’, in Feminist Readings of Antigone, ed. Fanny Söderbäck, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 1-13.
Sophocles (2003) Antigone, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steiner, G. (1984) Antigones, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vincent J. Rosivach (1983) ‘On Creon, Antigone and Not Burying the Dead’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 126(3), pp. 193-211.