Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

136 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

wedded is the mother. But the purest fault is that committed by the ethical
consciousness, which knew in advance what law and power it was disobey-
ing—that is to say, necessarily, the fault committed by femininity. For if the
ethical essence in its divine, unconscious, female side, remains obscure, its
prescriptions on the human, masculine, communal side are exposed to full
light. And nothing here can excuse the crime or minimize the punishment.
And in its burial, in its decline to ineffectiveness and pure pathos, the
feminine must recognize the full measure of its guilt.33

But as Irigaray goes on to exclaim: ‘What an amazing vicious circle
in a single syllogistic system. Whereby the unconscious, while
remaining unconscious, is yet supposed to know the laws of a
consciousness—which is permitted to remain ignorant of it—and
will become even more repressed as a result of failing to respect
those laws.’34 In the Hegelian version, the female is both on the side
of the unconscious and on the side of the guilty. Determined by
biology to passivity, woman is at the same time identified with
subversive activity by her society. As Hegel puts it:

Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the
happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness
into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at
the same time essential to it an internal enemy—womankind in general.
Womankind—the everlasting irony of the community—changes by intrigue
the universal end of government into the private end, transforms the univer-
sal act into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal
property of the State into a possession and ornament for the Family.35

It is in violating the laws of the community that Antigone is pushed
to its margins, and yet, her very action of rebellion is supposed to be
unconscious, and therefore, one would assume, beyond responsibil-
ity to the law. Antigone’s action is, thus, doubly marginalized by the
polis—its other, both as an a-political and as an anti-political ac-
tion. For Hegel, woman combines within her this double and utterly
inconsistent threat. Irigaray, on the other hand, wants to repoliticize
Antigone’s choice by bringing it precisely back into the realm of the
conscious, of the civic. In Chanter’s words, in her analysis of

33 Irigaray, Speculum, 276–7.
34 Ibid.
35 Hegal, Phenomenology, 288.

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 137

the Antigone Irigaray shows us ‘how it is necessary to create a
symbolic order for women that will not only subtend their civil
rights, but will also call for a new conception of the civic realm,
one that takes account of sexual identity’.36 In Irigaray’s analysis,
Hegel removes Antigone from the symbolic order and thus denies
her the possibility of significance in the political world. Irigaray’s
reading shows us the necessity of ‘question[ing] again the founda-
tions of our symbolic order in mythology and in tragedy, because
they deal with a landscape which installs itself in the imagination
and then, all of a sudden becomes law’.37

Irigaray’s challenge to Hegel, then, is in an important way also a
direct challenge to Lacan. Although Lacan wants to place his read-
ing under the sign of a radical anti-Hegelianism, Irigaray’s analysis
shows how complicit it remains with the premises of a Hegelian
vision of sexual difference. By making Antigone the spokeswoman
of the unconscious ethics of psychoanalysis Lacan ends up by con-
firming the Hegelian dialectic he wishes to subvert—as Lacan puts it
himself elsewhere, ‘Everybody is Hegelian without knowing it’.38
As the representative of an a/anti-political ethics, Antigone ends up
by adopting the same antithetical position to Creon that she does in
the Hegelian version. So the anti-political agenda of Lacan’s ethical
programme is just one more way of removing Antigone from the
political scene. Lacan’s anti-humanism remains utterly steeped in a
humanist conception of political man.

As Lacan’s rebellious disciple, Irigaray wants to make a Creon out
of Lacan. Although Lacan repeatedly identifies himself with Anti-
gone, for Irigaray he is the ultimate representative of male authority.
For all its desire to appropriate the ‘feminine’, Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis remains on the side of Creon, on the side of patriarchy. Irigaray’s
analysis shows us how psychoanalytic discussion of the ‘unconscious’
will always be profoundly caught up in this political debate. Lacan’s
desire to make an ethical heroine out of Antigone merely succeeds in

36 Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 125.
37 E. Baruch and L. Serrano (eds.), Women Analzye Women (New York,
1988), 159.
38 Jacques Lacan, Le Se´minaire II: Le Moi dans la the´orie de Freud et
dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1978), 93.

138 m i r i a m l e o n a r d

corroborating Hegel’s attempts to keep Antigone outside the realm
of the political. The ethical unconscious of the Lacanian reading
becomes yet another harbour for male political hegemony.

If Griselda Pollock has argued that Antigone’s relationship
with her brother could be used as a model for moving beyond sexual
difference, Irigaray, I believe, ultimately shows up the political
danger of imagining such a beyond. ‘The move beyond Oedipus’,
Pollock writes, ‘here as elsewhere, is a move beyond phallically
defined sexual difference, that, despite its own hopes, becomes
only the ever more occluded reinstatement precisely of the universal
normalization of the phallus as the only arbiter of subjectivity
and meaning’. For Pollock the concept of ‘sexual difference’ can
only be ‘phallically defined’. As she argues: ‘you either get sexual
difference by Oedipus, or no sexual difference at all, which adds up
to the same monistic logic of One or None.’ While Irigaray’s project
is to expose that double-bind, Pollock’s/Ettinger’s is to move beyond
it. So Pollock follows Ettinger as she imagines Antigone as a
post-Kristeviean creation of the maternal semiotic. Lacan elects
his Antigone as a representative of the Real.39 But what ultimately
ensues from this valorization of Antigone as a figure who escapes
the Oedipal economy is the reincarnation of the not fully conscious
female of the old Hegelian reading. The move away from sexual
difference so often results in the ‘ever more occluded’ reinscription
of the same pernicious dichotomies. The move beyond Oedipus
can all too easily become a step backwards to further political
marginalization. Sexual difference, even and especially because it
is ‘phallically defined’, still has a crucial strategic role to play in
feminist politics.

As Antigone wages her battle with Creon over the body of Poly-
neices, so psychoanalysis has waged its own battle about the polit-
ical over the body of Antigone. Antigone’s myth appropriated and
reappropriated has become the locus classicus of a debate about the

39 On which see Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Bath,
1988) and Enjoy your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
(New York and London, 1992).

lacan, irigaray, and beyond 139

interrelationship between political action and sexual difference.
Irigaray systemically exposes the bad faith of the male canon’s
attempts to annex the fate of Antigone. To paraphrase Lacan’s
famous dictum on the place of woman in the symbolic order, for
the patrichal tradition from Hegel to Lacan, ‘Antigone n’existe pas’,
‘Antigone does not exist’. The question for a feminist reading of the
Antigone remains—what might it mean for Antigone to exist?

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5

Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood

S imon Goldhill

for Teresa Brennan: in memoriam

Since Hegel . . .

Antigone’s history, as an icon for feminist thinking about the
family and the state, is long, ongoing and passionate; but I want
to stall this history at the very first line of Sophocles’ foundational
play. To go back to the beginning, in order to trace how this verse’s
extraordinary act of address has paradoxically resulted in a mis-
recognition, a silencing that in turn poses a troubling question for
the myths of kinship. There is no metaphor more potent in modern
feminism than sisterhood. It is the problematic invention of that
bond which Antigone encourages us to explore.

o¯ koinon autadelphon Isme¯ne¯s kara
Of common kin, my very sister, dear Ismene.

Antigone calls Ismene forth; and will dismiss her. And she remains a
silenced, despised figure in the critical tradition. ‘Ismene is set aside’,

Thanks to Miriam Leonard and Helen Morales for comments on this
chapter as it developed. It is dedicated in fondest memory to Teresa Brennan
for whom feminist theory was always political activity.

142 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

as Irigaray states—and herself performs.1 For in the grand clash of
ruler and resistance, male and female, blood and State, what place is
there for poor Ismene? ‘Ismene seems indisputably a ‘‘woman’’ in
her weakness, her fear, her submissive obedience, her tears, mad-
ness, hysteria—all of which are met with condescending scorn on
the part of the king. Ismene is subsequently shut up . . . with the
other women.’2 As merely a ‘woman’, Ismene is indeed scorned
not merely by Creon, but also by Antigone and by critics. She
becomes at best a foil for her sister, who ‘does not yield to the law
of the city, of its sovereign, of the man of the family’.3 There is no
doubt who the heroine is here, who provides feminist inspiration,
who transcends being a ‘woman’: the woman, with whom Irigaray
identifies in her resistance to Lacan, her maıˆtre.4 For Irigaray,
reading Antigone is paradigmatic of a necessary engagement with
antiquity in contemporary politics. Myth matters hugely to her
feminist agenda: her project is to dismantle the symbolic furniture
of the mind, the struts of patriarchy. That is where myth does its
work, especially the intellectual myths of Plato’s heirs.5 It is this
alone that could justify her intellectual hooliganism when she
declares Antigone to ‘mark the historical bridge between matriarchy
and patriarchy’.6 If this sentence is not a crass recapitulation of the
myth of matriarchy, articulated by Bachofen and Engels (and more
weakly echoed in modern myths of the Goddess),7 it must be an

1 L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans., G. Gill, (Ithaca, NY,
1985), 219.

2 Ibid. 217–18.
3 Ibid. 218.
4 See M. Leonard, Athens in Paris (Oxford, 2005).
5 See M. Leonard, ‘Irigaray’s Cave: Feminist Theory and the Politics of
French Classicism’, Ramus, 28 (1999), 152–68; T. Chanter, Ethics of Eros:
Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York and London, 1995);
M. Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosopher in the Feminine (London and
New York, 1991).
6 Irigaray, Speculum, 217.
7 A tradition I have discussed briefly in S. Goldhill, Reading Greek
Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), 51–4. See J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion and
Mother-Right., ed and trans. R. Mannheim (London, 1967); F. Engels,
Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. E. Leacock
(London, 1972); J. Bamberger, The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 143

ironic and provocative comment on how ‘history’, from Irigaray’s
perspective, is the self-authorizing narrative of patriarchal society.
Antigone is to become a weapon to set against that ‘history’. Yet
why, then, shut up Ismene with the other women? In a play which
makes so much of kinship, can a sister be just one of the other
women? A ‘woman’?

Since Hegel . . .

‘Kinship’ has been central to feminist responses to Hegel. Hegel’s
reading of Antigone depends on an opposition of family kinship and
state authority, and it is precisely on his valuation of kinship, and on his
construction of the family, that feminist criticism has focused.8 There
have been two main lines of engagement. First, it has been emphasized
that Hegel’s analysis denies to Antigone an ethical consciousness.
Because of her gender, she cannot achieve the full moral agency that
would allow her accession to the political. With considerable rhetorical
potency, Irigaray puts as an epigraph to her discussion a lengthy quota-
tion from Hegel on the physical, bodily difference between males and
females, whichconcludes: ‘Thus, the simple retention of the conception
in the uterus is differentiated in the male into productive cerebrality and
the external vital. On account of this difference therefore, the male is
the active principle; as the female remains in her undeveloped unity, she
constitutes the principle of conception.’ For Plato’s Socrates, real men

Primitive Society’, in M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture
and Society (Stanford, Calif., 1975); S. Pembroke, ‘The Last of the Matri-
archs: A Study in the Inscriptions of Lycia’, Journal of Economic and Social
History of the Orient, 8 (1965), 217–47 and ‘Women in Charge: The
Function of Alternatives in Early Greek Tradition and the Ancient Idea of
Matriarchy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967),
1–35. On Bachofen’s background, see the riveting L. Gossman, Basel in the
Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000).

8 See P. J. Mills (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (Uni-
versity Park, Pa. 1996), esp. S. Benhabib, ‘On Hegel, Women and Irony’;
P. J. Mills, Women, Nature and Psyche (New Haven, 1987); J. Elshtain,
‘Antigone’s Daughters’, Democracy, 2 (1982), 46–59; L. Zerilli, ‘Machia-
velli’s Sisters: Women and the ‘Conversation’ of Political Theory’, Political
Theory, 19 (1991), 252–75; Chanter, T. Ethics of Eros. I have a soft spot too
for C. Lonzi’s Sputiamo su Hegel (Milan, 1970).

144 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

have soul babies—thoughts—and only those most tied to the bodily
rather than the spiritual realm long for immortality through children
with women; for Aristotle, men provide the guiding spirit that forms
the (mere) matter provided by the mother. Hegel is in a long tradition
when he makes bodily difference the ground and proof of the moral and
political hierarchies of gender. The denial to Antigone of moral agency
because of her gender provides the first point of criticism of his analysis.

Secondly, however, the very construction of the family and of kin
by Hegel has been scrutinized. Antigone, as Judith Butler notes,
both for Hegel and for those who work with his analysis, ‘articu-
lates a prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the
sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever enter-
ing into it’.9 This is strikingly evidenced by Irigaray whose critique,
for Butler, thereby shows the deep influence of Hegel. ‘Woman is the
guardian of the blood,’ she writes. ‘But as both she and it have had
to use their substance to nourish the universal consciousness of self,
it is in the form of bloodless shadows—of unconscious fantasies—
that they maintain an underground subsistence.’10 This repressed
existence can, however, erupt: ‘But at times the forces of the world
below become hostile because they have been denied the right to live
in daylight. These forces rise up and threaten to lay waste the
community. To turn it upside down.’11 The hope is that ‘woman-
hood would then demand the right to pleasure, to jouissance, even
to effective action.’12 The aim is to find a place to think from, where
‘blood’s autonomous flow will never re-unite again’.13 Antigone, for
Irigaray, can help us revalue the place of blood in politics, to rethink
what blood means for patriarchal thought.

Butler’s response to the Hegelian opposition, however, is differ-
ently aligned. She sets out to question whether kinship can exist
‘without the support and mediation of the state, and whether there
can be the state without the family as its support and mediation.’14

9 J. Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New
York, 2000), 2.

10 Irigaray, Speculum, 225.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. 226.
13 Ibid.
14 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 5.

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 145

She analyses the impure, interwoven mutual interdependence of the
discourse of family and State, and she emphasizes both the impure
sexual origin of Antigone herself in the incestuous family, and the
familial origin of the legitimacy of Creon’s rule. Consequently, for
Butler, Antigone’s act of resistance produces ‘the social deformation
of both idealized kinship and political sovereignty’.15 Most tellingly,
the idealizing readings of critics reproduce the blindnesses of the
idealized rhetoric on stage. Butler aims to uncover the messy polit-
ical performativity of Antigone, in order to question the relation
between kinship and the reigning systems of cultural intelligibility:

Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and
deplacement, one that puts the reigning regimes of representation into crisis
and raises the question of what the conditions of intelligibility could have
been that would have made her life possible, indeed, what sustaining web of
relations makes our lives possible, those of us who confound kinship in the
re-articulation of its terms?16

Butler’s agenda—to see how a re-articulation of kinship terms can
become a politics which is acted out—takes her cue and inspiration
from Antigone. I want to follow the logic of Butler’s analysis, but to
take her enquiry back to the opening line of Sophocles’ play in order
to question not merely why Butler, like so many critics, avoids
discussing Ismene, but also to interrogate what Antigone’s address
calls into being—and why silencing Ismene is itself a revealing and
worrying political gesture.

o¯ koinon autadelphon Isme¯ne¯s kara
Of common kin, my very sister, dear Ismene.

George Steiner in Antigones is particularly eloquent about the ‘fer-
tile duplicity’ of these opening words.17 Koinon means ‘common’ or
‘shared’. It can mean ‘kin’, as ‘sharing common blood’, but it is also
a key political term: ‘commonwealth’, ‘the common good’ (though
Steiner does not pursue this semantic level).18 It can imply a

15 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 6. 16 Ibid. 24.

17 G. Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art

and Thought (Oxford, 1984), 208.

18 See e.g. 162, where the chorus describes itself as ‘summoned by this

common mandate’, koino¯ i ke¯rugmati—not only ‘shared’ but ‘of common

interest’, and ‘of importance to the State’.

146 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

normative bond both at the civic and at the familial level, and an
object or aim of the community. Democracy’s special commitment
to the collective makes it always a pointed term. But it is also a
charged and troubling word for members of an incestuous family,
where what is common marks the confusion of incest. What is it
that Antigone and Ismene share? Autadelphon ‘very sister’, a rare
word, insists that the mere appellation ‘sister’ is not enough. Juxta-
posed to koinon it renders the relation between the two sisters
‘concretely hyperbolic’.19 It gives and asks for a special form of
recognition. The periphrasis Isme¯ne¯s kara, literally (as it were)
‘head of Ismene’, normally implies respect, affection, or both.
Hence my translation ‘dear’. (Only Ho¨ lderlin tries to transfer this
idiom into a modern language: ‘O Ismenes Haupt’, he translates,
straining against the norms of language, almost to the point of
parody.)20 Every act of naming is an act of categorization, and the
persuasive definition of this recognition is a powerful pleading.
Ho¨ lderlin, again, strains to catch the pull of the address with his
single, craggy opening word ‘Gemeinsamschwesterliches’. Antigone
is calling a charged and normative relationship into being.

Antigone’s claim of sisterhood is, of course, fundamental to her
action of burying her brother. It motivates her behaviour. She acts
‘as a sister’, and there has been much critical commentary on how
she relates to her brother (a relationship made doubly difficult by
her Oedipal inheritance).21 Yet the relationship of sisterhood is not
simply or necessarily symmetrical, nor can it be taken for granted.
In Homer, the foundational text of Greek culture, there is no rela-
tionship of sisterhood that demands such recognition. Brothers are a
privileged connection, for sure. When Odysseus returns in disguise,

19 Steiner, Antigones, 209.
20 On Ho¨ lderlin’s Antigone see Steiner, Antigones, 66–106 (with further
bibliography). My reference to parody should cue Houseman’s famous
parody of tragic diction: ‘O suitably attired in leather boots head of a
traveller’.
21 Since Hegel . . . See J. Derrida, Glas (Paris 1974); Irigaray, Speculum
(both originally published in 1974); C. P. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization:
An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 184–90;
M. Whitlock Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in
Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1989), 106–48.

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 147

he questions his son about the difficult state of the household. ‘Is it
that the people hate you?’, he asks, ‘Or do you find fault with your
brothers, on whom a man trusts in a fight, even when the quarrel is
huge’ (Od. 16. 95–8). Telemachus rejects these ideas: not only do
the people not hate him, but also he has no brothers to find fault
with. For ‘Zeus has made my race single. Arkesias had a single son,
Laertes; Laertes was father to Odysseus, single son; Odysseus gave
birth to me, single son’ (Od. 117–20). Brotherhood has two con-
flicting drives within it, which go to the heart of the patriarchal,
patrilineal household. On the one hand, brothers indicate strength.
A set of men to work the land and protect the property. To rely on
one son to continue the family line is extremely risky in a society
where family continuity is dangerously precarious at the best of
times. But on the other hand, inheritance also makes plural brothers
a source of dissension. How can the paternal property be split and
remain viable? So Hesiod’s Works and Days, no less a foundational
text for the Greek family than the Odyssey, is predicated on the
dramatic situation of two brothers, Hesiod and Perses, in conflict
over the patrimony. Indeed, a string of brothers, from Eteocles and
Polyneices to Atreus and Thyestes, find brotherhood to be the
source of dissent, violence, and intrafamilial conflict. Brotherhood
is a relationship that most fully articulates the tensions within the
hierarchies of the family in the patriarchal, patrilineal household.
To call on a brother is to open the normative, power-laden ties of
such a relationship.

But in Homer, Hesiod, and indeed all our extant texts before the
fifth century, sisterhood is not so charged. Even on the rare occa-
sions when sisters are named as such, the act of naming brings none
of the associations of power, precedence, and threat from within or
without. None of the rhetoric of family loyalty. It is not possible to
call on a sister—either for a male or for a female. Even when sisters
are made parallel because of their similar traits—Helen and Cly-
temnestra, say (Od. 11. 436–9)—it is a (rhetorical) example of ‘the
plots of the race of women’, not a family sign. Groups of sisters
normally appear as ‘daughters of so-and-so’ with no mention of
their ties as sisters. Since a daughter/sister has such a different
relationship to the household from the son/brother—there is no
issue of precedence or, most importantly, of inheritance—the

148 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

rhetoric of kinship is quite different. ‘Sister’ is not a normative term
of address: it is not an appeal. The system of power determines the
scene of naming.

Yet in the fifth century and in Athens in particular there immedi-
ately seems to be a telling difference in the rhetoric of affiliation.
The general frame of the city-state, on the one hand, and the specific
frame of Athenian democracy, on the other, change the structuring
of the politics of the personal. The city-state redefines the nature of
collective activity. Democracy, the constitution of Athens, restruc-
tures the commitments of the individual to the collective in a par-
ticularly heightened manner. While the household depends on
hierarchy, precedence, and the authority of the kurios [the master],
democracy privileges horizontal relationships of citizenship: equal-
ity before the law. The rhetoric of family terms shifts in a funda-
mental way, as the political system changes. In democracy key
institutions of the family, like burial, and key terms of family
affiliation are taken over by the State (‘the laws are my father and
mother. . . ’). What is more, brothers can become a civic, political
symbol, rather than a token of family strength, as, for example,
Aristogeiton and Harmodius, the brothers who killed the tyrant of
Athens, were honoured in cult and drinking songs and their statues
were erected in the market-place of the city. ‘Fraternity’, as Derrida
has discussed at length, has remained central to the ideology of
modern Western politics and its relation to ancient political theory.
‘All men are brothers under one universal father who wills
the happiness of all’ is a banner of Enlightenment revolutionary
politics—its phallocracy, as Derrida puts it—which always puts
fraternity next to liberty.22 In this all-embracing shift in political
rhetoric, and against the claim of fraternity, sisterhood also changes
as a normative term. Sisterhood learns to speak.

In Homer, Agamemnon has three daughters (Il. 9.144–5/286–7):
Iphianassa, Laodike, and Chrysothemis. Iphianassa is often taken to
be the same name as Iphigeneia, though in the Cypria (fr. 13) both
Iphianassa and Iphigeneia appear (giving Agamemnon four daugh-
ters). In Hesiod (fr. 23a16–17 [West]), however, Agamemnon has
two daughters, Iphimede and Electra. Iphimede is sacrificed for the

22 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (New York, 1997).

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 149

fleet, but saved miraculously by Artemis (as is Iphigeneia in most
later tellings of this family history). But Electra has no story in
Hesiod or Homer. Iphigeneia’s (or Iphimede’s) sacrifice is a terrible
act of a father to a daughter, which leads to no narrative possibilities
for Orestes, let alone Electra. Orestes—his story is told more than a
dozen times by Homer—returns and takes revenge for his father’s
death as a sole agent, a man with a mission. There is no mention of
any sister in this tale. But in Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 bce) there is a
pivotal shift of expressability. Now Electra is a character, a figure
who speaks and who has a narrative.

In Aeschylus’ Choephoroi, unlike Sophocles’ Electra or Euripi-
des’ Electra, Electra is a conventionally proper girl. She speaks in
the play primarily during acts of religious observance, such as the
opening scene of pouring offerings, and the great mourning song:
religious ritual is the privileged scene of public female utterance. She
is sent inside by her brother as the moment of revenge approaches in
order to wait in silence for marriage, which is the archetypal role of
a woman in the patriarchal family. Paradigmatically, she prays to be
more pious than her mother (Cho. 140–1). Yet when Electra and
Orestes meet in the most extraordinary recognition scene of all
Greek tragedy, sisterhood becomes bizarrely highlighted. Electra
approaches the tomb of her father, and finds on it a lock of hair.
She holds the lock to her own head, and sees a similarity to her own.
She finds a footprint by the tomb, places her own foot in it, and from
these two signs of likeness recognizes that her brother has returned.
This leap of faith was brilliantly mocked already by Euripides in his
Electra, but its very strangeness raises a set of highly pertinent
questions. What is it for a brother and sister to recognize each
other? And like this? What is at stake in this act, which is a gesture
not just of perception but also of authorization?

This recognition scene needs to be viewed within two frames.
First, the Oresteia retells a Homeric story for the new political
world of democratic Athens. The play finds closure, its answers, in
the justice of the city. It provides a charter myth for the city’s
lawcourts, and celebrates the city as the condition of possibility
for social order. It moves away from the hierarchical family towards
the ties of citizens within the State. Secondly, the Oresteia is a play
which redefines kinship. It sets matricide centre stage, and has the

150 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

god of truth, Apollo, defend Orestes’ act of kin-killing on the
grounds that a mother is not a true parent of a child, but a mere
guest-house for sperm: ‘the parent is he who mounts’ (Eum. 660).
This is a response precisely to a question of blood. ‘Am I of my
mother in blood?’, asks Orestes (Eum. 606). ‘Is not the blood of a
mother most dear?’, demands the chorus of Furies, asserting the
integral, intimate, and necessary tie of child to mother’s womb
(Eum. 607–8). ‘Judge this blood’, begs Orestes of Apollo, his de-
fender in the courtroom (Eum. 613). Apollo’s judgement is that the
mother’s blood means nothing to the son. The Oresteia works to
devalue the role of the mother. Hence, before Clytemnestra bares
her breast and demands respect for the place where he was nour-
ished, Orestes’ nurse has been brought on stage to lament his loss, as
the woman who actually did suckle him. The mother’s plea has
already been dramatically undermined. Neither mother’s milk nor
mother’s blood tie her to her child. These two frames of the demo-
cratic city and the re-evaluation of kinship are intimately intercon-
nected (as gender and politics inevitably are). They provide the
matrix in which the Oresteia articulates its sense of the subject of
tragedy.

In the recognition scene, the tie between Electra and Orestes is
asserted both as a physical link—same hair, same feet—and as a
shared project of revenge. This recognition is also a way of reject-
ing—refusing to recognize—Clytemnestra. Both daughter and son
have to undo the tie to the mother. Electra declares her mother ‘in no
way lives up to the name mother’ (Cho. 190–1), is ‘hated with all
justice’—and declares that any affection she owed her mother now
belongs to Orestes (Cho. 240–1). The recognition constructs a hori-
zontal bond between brother and sister, which, in rejecting the
mother, is part of the trilogy’s move away from family blood to the
ties of citizenship in the city. But the city is still patriarchal (and made
up also of households), and the daughter must be returned to the
house, her proper place. Electra can be like her brother, but by virtue
of her gender must also remain quite different. In the way that
brother and sister do and do not make a pair, this strange recognition
of Electra and Orestes is formed within the tensions of this trilogy’s
dynamic movement between the power of the household and the
power of the State. The shifting articulation of kinship and gender

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 151

roles takes place within the shifting systems of power. The sheer
strangeness of the recognition demands reflection on what is being
recognized: how alike, how linked are brother and sister? The rec-
ognition scene constructs—performs—a new, non-Homeric tie be-
tween brother and sister. It is within the new democratic ideological
frame of the city and citizenship that Electra and Orestes recognize
the (family) tie which links them.

Antigone’s relation to her brother is no less tied up with politics,
as she establishes the ties of blood and kinship as a motivation
above and beyond the edict of the State; and the problematic nature
of Antigone’s claim to be her brother’s sister above all else has been
extensively discussed.23 But Antigone also has a sister. It is not just
with sisterhood that the play opens, but with sisterhood articulated
as sister to sister. And Antigone’s relationship to her sister poses a
particular difficulty for her paraded relationship to her brother, a
difficulty that questions both Hegel’s construction of family values
and Butler’s critique of them.

Let us look first at how Antigone rejects Ismene. Ismene’s re-
sponse to Antigone’s initial declaration that she will bury her
brother is shock and despair at her sister’s willingness to ignore
the ruler’s edict. She reminds Antigone of her family’s terrible his-
tory (Ant. 49–57):

Ah! Reflect how our father, sister,
Died, hated and infamous:
He himself with his own murdering hand
Destroyed his double eyes because of his self-detected crimes.
Then the mother wife, double word,
Destroyed her life in a twisted noose.
Third, two brothers on one single day
In self-slaughter, wretches both, wrought
Shared doom by each other’s hands.

Her language strains to capture her family’s incestuous and violent
history. The address, ‘sister’ (o kasignete) is strikingly juxtaposed to
the bare noun, ‘father’, who, she asserts, died as an ‘object of hate’
(apechthes), rather than as the object of love (philos), which is how
Antigone has described her brother as an expression of her passionate

23 See n.20 above.

152 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

sense of family duty. Oedipus struck out his ‘double’ eyes (and all
words of doubling are inevitably significant in this family history, and
much played with by Sophocles24), an act which led Jocasta, the
mother/wife, ‘double’ word, to hang herself. In turn, the two brothers
killed each other. Here too the language of slaughter is uncannily
mixed with the language of suicide and incest, their parents’ sins.
Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all in the dual form, an archaic
linguistic usage used only for pairs of objects: it makes the brothers
a natural pair, like hands or eyes. The participle I have translated ‘in
self-slaughter’ is autoktonounte: in Greek, ‘suicide’, and ‘kin-murder’
are both expressed by the term autoktonein and its cognates (the
etymology of which is ‘self’ (auto) and ‘killing’ (ktenein)). It is not as
easy a term as such lexical diagnosis suggests, and when two brothers
willingly fight each other to the death, the confusion of ‘self’ and
‘slaughter’, ‘suicide’ and ‘kin-murder’ is apparent and significant.
But Ismene summarizes this fratricidal act tellingly as ‘shared
doom’, koinon moron (a term immediately reinforced by the chorus
in their opening lyric, who also echo her enumerations of two and one
(145–6): ‘born both of one mother and one father. . . they are sharers
in a common (koinou) death’.) As with the first word of the play, so
here too koinon is a freighted term.25 It implies a death that is shared,
for sure, and a death that is of common kin, too. But the question it
raises is whether this doom will be shared by the next pair in the family
line. As Ismene goes on: ‘But now we two, left all alone—think how
we will perish miserably if . . . ’. Ismene’s recognition that she and her
sister are a pair—the dual again—is part of an ominous narrative of
paired destruction. What is koinon? Does the recognition of their
familial tie, their sisterhood, bind them both together in a self-destruc-
tive descent into tragedy?

Antigone, however, hears nothing persuasive in Ismene’s speech,
and promises that she will complete the act on her own if necessary.
Ismene tries at least to get Antigone to tell no one of her plan and
promises silence on her part. Antigone, however, wants her acts to
be broadcast (Ant. 86–7):

24 On incestuous word play in Sophocles, see S. Goldhill, ‘Exegeisis:
Oedipus (R)ex’, Arethusa, 17 (1984), 177–220.

25 See the sensible comments in R. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An
Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), 134–6.

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 153

Oh, denounce it! You will be much more hated
For your silence if you do not announce it to the world.

Antigone’s demand of loving duty (philia) for her brother is matched
now by her willingness to see her sister as hated (echthros). So when
Ismene warns her not to attempt the impossible, Antigone hisses
(93–4), ‘If you say that, you will be hated (echthare¯i) by me, and you
will always be hated (echthra) by the dead man, and rightly so.’
Antigone’s sense of philia is as polarized as Creon’s and as impos-
sible: if you disagree with her you are hated, even if you are a sister. If
you are a brother you are loved, even when you attack the State.

When Ismene is brought in after the arrest of Antigone, crying, as
the chorus comments, ‘tears of sisterly love (philadelpha)’ (527), she
willingly accepts responsibility for the burial. But Antigone denies
her (538–9):

Justice will not allow you this, since
You did not will the act, nor did I share it with you.

Koino¯ same¯n: ‘I did not make common [koin-]’, ‘did not share’ . . .
Antigone rejects the pairing of sisters: they, unlike the brothers, will
not have a koinon moron, ‘a common fate’. So when Ismene begs
(544–5), ‘Do not reject me, sister, let me die with you and honour
the dead’, Antigone replies (546): ‘Do not die a common death
(koina).’ The first line of the play asserted a common bond (koinon)
between sisters. Now it is clear that this commonality is rejected in
the same terms by Antigone. The two sisters will not then be parallel
to the two brothers, and the implications of the series of duals in
Ismene’s telling of the family history will not be lived out. Ismene
will not be destroyed, but, like Electra in the Oresteia, will go back
inside the house to silence.

Could two sisters be like two brothers? Could symmetry be
maintained? Sophocles’ Electra asks that question in a different
but pointed way. Like Antigone, Electra has a sister, Chrysothemis,
who does not wish to continue her family’s line into self-destructive
violence. Electra, like Antigone, is unmarried, is wholly committed
to her family (‘Do not teach me to be bad to my philoi’, she says
(El. 395), in words Antigone would care to echo): she mourns her
dead father incessantly, as Antigone dies to honour her dead
brother. Electra, too, tries to persuade her sister to join her in a

154 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

bold act against the authorities. When she hears the false tale of her
brother’s death, Electra decides that now she and Chrysothemis
themselves must take on the act of revenge. She tries to bring
Chrysothemis round to this idea by imagining their reception if
they succeed in killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (El. 973–85):

Do you not see what great glory you will win
For yourself and for me, if you follow what I say.
What citizen or stranger when he sees us
Will not receive us with praise like this:
‘See these two sisters, friends,
Who saved their paternal home,
Who when their enemies were firmly established
Risked their lives to be ministers of bloodshed!
We must love these twain; we must all revere them.
In festivals for the whole assembled city
We must all honour them because of their manly virtue.’
Thus will everyone speak of us,
So that in life and death our glory will not fail.

Electra imagines winning glory (eukleian 973; kleos 985), the stand-
ard aim of a Homeric hero or Athenian warrior. While Odysseus
can praise his wife, Penelope, for having ‘kleos like a king’ (Od. 19.
108–9), it is rare indeed for any woman even to be said to have won
kleos let alone to act in order to win it. As Pericles famously states in
Thucydides (2. 45), ‘a woman’s kleos is not to be talked of for praise
or blame by men’. Electra, however, imagines Chrysothemis and
herself fully celebrated in the public arena by citizens and foreigners
alike. They will be lauded as saviours, and honoured in festivals by
the city as a collective. The civic language here is strongly marked.
They are revered by ‘citizen or stranger’, ‘revered by the whole
assembled city’. Indeed, they are honoured (tima¯ n) in festivals as if
they were heroes of the state, greeted or received (dexio¯ setai, 976)
with cultic honour (heortais, 981). In an Athenian context, there
can be no doubt which cult is the model for Electra’s remarks here.
She is depicting herself and Chrysothemis as if they were the tyran-
nicides.26 Aristogeiton and Harmodius were two brothers who were
honoured with cult because they killed the tyrant of Athens and thus

26 On the tyrannicides, see M. W. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic
Image in Fifth Century b.c. Athenian Art and Politics (New York, 1981).

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 155

freed the people. They are heroes of democracy, who were cele-
brated in the most popular drinking songs of the day as well as by
state cult. Their statues were prominently displayed in the agora,
the main public space of Athens. They are the archetypal pair of
brothers as political role models. The phrase I have translated
‘Behold these two sisters’ is in Greek idesthe to¯ de to¯ kasigne¯to¯ .
These words are in the dual (hence ‘two’), and the whole passage
of praise stays in this rare form. She is imagining the sisters as
naturally paired. But the term kasigne¯to¯ can mean ‘brothers’ as
well as ‘sisters’: it is ungendered. It certainly helps the slide between
the two sisters and the model of the tyrannicides. This may seem like
noble rhetoric in the pursuit of a noble act (and for many Victorian
scholars, led by Jebb, so it is has been standardly read). But the final
word of praise should give us pause. Electra imagines the sisters
being celebrated because of their andreia. Although andreia is often
translated ‘bravery’, or ‘prowess’, it is a noun formed from the word
ane¯r, ‘male adult’, ‘man’, and indicates the quality of manliness
(hence my translation ‘manly virtue’). Can a woman be praised
for andreia? Not without pause.27 The problem of evaluating Elec-
tra as a figure and especially as an agent is no less heatedly debated
than the problem of evaluating Antigone’s action. Since Hof-
mannsthal and Strauss, and their reading of Electra through
Rohde, Freud, and Nietzsche, modern criticism has emphasized
Electra’s violence, her psychological disturbance, her diseased pur-
suit of glorious revenge.28 She will not finally be able to act out the
murder she imagines in this speech to Chrysothemis, as her brother
returns to complete the killing. But her self-image as the object of
praise for ‘manly virtue’ not only draws the sisters closer still to
the tyrannicides but also raises a question. Can the sisters be like the
tryannicides? Can they live out the role of the two brothers?
Can they lift a sword and commit an act of political revolution to
free the paternal property? The image of the armed woman is not a

27 See S. Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the
History of Sexuality (Cambridge, 1995), 137–42; and in general R. Rosen
and I. Sluiter (eds.), Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical
Antiquity (Leiden, 2003).

28 See S. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History
of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002), 108–77.

156 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

comfortable one for the Athenian imagination, nor is the female
political revolutionary. Chrysothemis’s response to Electra’s speech
in its dismissiveness mirrors this ideological frame. She rejects the
plan as foolishly incautious and destined to fail miserably. But the
terms she uses are telling (995–7):

Where on earth have you turned your gaze that you have armed
Yourself with such rashness and call me to help?
Do you not see? You are a woman not a man.

Electra called on Chrysothemis to ‘see’ her future glory, and to
imagine the citizens and strangers declaring ‘See!’. Now Chysothe-
mis turns this language against her: where was she turning her gaze
when she came up with such a plan? Can she not see the basic fact of
her gender? Electra’s vision looks like a willed blindness to Chry-
sothemis. She rejects Electra’s call to arms as ‘armed with rashness’.
Electra’s appeal to andreia is marked as impossible because she is
not an ane¯r, but a woman. For Chrysothemis, the two sisters can
never live out the role of the two brothers. Women cannot be men.
Sisters cannot be symmetrical with brothers. Indeed, when Orestes
returns, he comes with Pylades, a comrade, an older man, a philos.
It will be these two men, linked by philia but not by blood, who will
kill the tyrants, under the instruction of a Tutor. Electra, outside the
house still, is separated from the male work of killing. ‘Women’, she
tells the chorus, ‘the men (handres) are on the point of fulfilling their
task’ (El. 1398). Electra and Chrysothemis cannot make a duo for
heroic action.

Antigone’s relationship to Ismene is not, then, in direct parallel to
her relationship with Polyneices; nor is the relationship of the two
sisters parallel to the relationship of the two brothers. Essential to
the story of Eteocles and Polyneices (in whatever form the tale takes)
is that Eteocles has control of Thebes and Polyneices attacks his own
homeland in order to wrest it away from him. Theirs is a story of
precedence and power, and the failure of to koinon. From Jacob and
Joseph in the Bible to Shakespeare and beyond, the younger brother
plays a particular role in narratives of family succession. It is unclear
if such ideas have any purchase on Ismene and Antigone. Can one
ask if Antigone is older than Ismene? In normal Greek terms, from
the fact that Antigone in the play is certainly and emphatically on the

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 157

point of marriage to Haimon (a man whose name echoes with
‘blood’ (haima) in this play of blood), and from the fact that there
is no mention of any such prospects for Ismene, one could assume
that Antigone is the older sister. Not everyone has so read the
dynamics, however. Kierkegaard, for example, in his ironic and
very personal rewriting of the Antigone story does not include
Ismene (yet another silencing), but when he imagines putting his
Antigone on stage, he gives his heroine a bit more of a context: ‘She
has a sister living, who is, I assume, older than herself and mar-
ried.’29 (Few modern writers like to consider the implications that if
Antigone is imagined as the average age for a parthenos, say, 14 or
15, then Ismene cannot be older than 13 or 14: and thereby not easily
to be ‘shut up with the other women’.) Sophocles’ play has no
indication that I can see to encourage us to think that comparative
age or precedence has any significant role in sisterly interactions
(where, again, modern readings are likely to make much of a
dynamic of older and younger with sisters). Being first is everything
to Polyneices and Eteocles; it does not enter the rhetoric of the
sisters. Power relations determine the expressivity of kinship terms.

What happens to Ismene, then? The play follows Antigone’s
dismissiveness. On the one hand, she does not reappear after she
is taken inside by the attendants at the end of the second scene (577–
81). She is not allowed even to be a spectator of the unfolding
events, and no word is made of her as the tragedy progresses to its
horrible conclusion. On the other hand, the discourse of the play
through Antigone’s language seems to kill her off. As Antigone
processes to her death, she sings, ‘Behold me, princes of Thebes,
the last remnant of the house of your kings’ (940–1)30. Ismene is
treated as if she were indeed no longer alive or no longer kin, no
longer of common blood. Ismene is written—spoken—out of the
family line. This silencing is all too often repeated, rather than
analysed, by the critics.

Antigone’s treatment of Ismene, then, moves from a passionate
appeal to the normativity of sisterhood to an equally total rejection

29 S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. D. Swenson (Princeton, 1971), 160.
30 The text has been thought difficult here. I have translated with Jebb.
There is no reason to delete it, as Dindorf does.

158 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

of her sister. From intense recognition to no recognition at all, from
common blood to refusing the claim of the common. This may shed
some light, finally, on the play’s most notorious crux. As she is led to
her death, Antigone explains that she would not have undertaken
the forbidden burial for a husband or a child, since a husband or a
child could be replaced, but since her mother and father are dead,
her brother is irreplaceable (904–20). Goethe found her argument
here ‘quite awful’ (‘ganz schlecht’) and it prompted him to hope that
scholars would find reasons to declare it spurious, and many
scholars have been duly encouraged to give reasons for deletion.
Here is not the place to review centuries of debate. I have one simple
point to make. Critics who want to delete these lines rely primarily
on the assertion that these lines are incomprehensible and especially
so in the mouth of Antigone. Those who defend the lines claim that
they are comprehensible (and usually quote Herodotus 3. 119,
where a similar argument appears), and thereby try to domesticate
their oddness. But it is not clear to me that the lines must be either
simply comprehensible or simply incomprehensible. Rather, they
provide a moment of what Richard Buxton would call ‘bafflement’,
a node of opacity in the text.31 And this opacity is significant. It
provokes a question to the audience’s comprehension: what kinship
ties do count and under what circumstances? What kinship ties are
worth fighting for or dying for? How does a woman calibrate the
potentially competing roles of sister, daughter, wife? Or, perhaps
most pertinently, can Antigone’s rhetoric of sisterhood make sense?

There is a double conclusion to this argument. First, while femi-
nist readings of Antigone have been hugely and rightly influential in
exploring the difficulties of Hegel’s dominant model of approaching
the play, within the ongoing work of critical exchange between
feminist writers, it is fascinating to see how Ismene can be written
out of the story. Hegel’s obsession with the brother–sister relation-
ship ignores the sister–sister bond ‘in his search for the ideal rela-
tionship as a male–female relationship of identity-in-difference’.32
‘Pourquoi fre`re/sœur et non pas fre`res ou sœurs?’, as Derrida asks,

31 R. Buxton, ‘Bafflement in Greek Tragedy’, Me´tis, 3 (1988), 41–51.
32 P. J. Mills, ‘Hegel’s Antigone’, in Mills, (ed.), Feminist Interpretations
of G. W. F. Hegel, 76.

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 159

and explores at length.33 Yet the same strategy is followed by the
feminist writers who work expressly in this Hegelian tradition. For
Irigaray it means denying Ismene the name of woman, and ‘shutting
her up’. Irigaray finds it easy to associate herself with the revolu-
tionary resistance of Antigone, and thus repeats the gesture of
making Ismene the ‘other woman’, the ‘woman’ who must be
excluded. Perhaps any political movement needs to invent and
make an anathema of its other, but excluding one of the sisters
might need particularly special theoretical care, which Irigaray
does not seem to offer here. For Butler it involves ignoring her (as
do so many critics, of all political colours). The attraction of Anti-
gone’s resistance leads, it seems, to a re-enactment of Antigone’s
dismissive attitude towards her sister, rather than an analysis of it.
This is particularly odd for Butler, who wishes to interrogate how
normative heterosexuality might be threatened by Antigone’s ver-
sion of kinship:

Although not quite a queer heroine, Antigone does emblematize a certain
heterosexual fatality that remains to the end . . . Her example, as it were,
gives rise to a contrary form of critical intervention: What in her act is fatal
for heterosexuality in its normative sense? And to what other ways of
organizing sexuality might a consideration of that fatality give rise?’34

Butler (who has herself been hailed as quite the queer heroine)
wants to use Antigone to challenge the common sense of cultural
intelligibility. Yet the asymmetries between brother and sister in
Antigone’s rhetoric of kinship are central to the problematic and
fissured construction of to koinon, ‘the common’, in this play, and
understanding to koinon is the most pressing imperative of its
interrogation of family and politics. How much does Butler’s story
of the ‘not quite queer’ Antigone rely on repressing her relation to
her sister? On not wondering why Antigone is made to reject her
sister in order to bury her brother? For Butler, as for Hegel, Anti-
gone has a relationship solely with the male, and not with the

33 Derrida, Glas, 169. Derrida analyses in great detail how Hegel’s
privileging of the brother/sister relationship causes immense difficulties
for Hegel’s own construction of the idea(l) of the family.

34 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 72.

160 s i m o n g o l d h i l l

female, Ismene. If blood and irreplacabilty motivate Antigone’s
resistance to Creon, should not her claim to be the only sister left,
when Ismene ‘remains to the end’, be more worrying for the feminist
myth of Antigone? The figuring of Ismene is integral to articulating
the distortions of Antigone’s self-positioning. In short, both Irigar-
ay’s and Butler’s readings of Antigone show how the myth of the
heroine is constructed with all the inspirational force and selective
blindness of hero worship. Is that not both the value and the danger
of myth for feminism?

The second strand of conclusion concerns not Sophocles’ play
and its role in the construction of an image of Antigone in one
particular strand of post-Hegelian feminist theory, but the meta-
phor of sisterhood itself, which has been so important to a much
broader feminist political activity. (It is perhaps not without irony
that the feminist theorists whose very level of theorizing has led it to
be rejected by American feminist activists in particular, should be
the figures who sideline Ismene. Feminism v. feminisms, feminism
for women v. feminism for feminists are unresolved debates cued by
this discussion in the current political context.) The hazard of this
chapter is that it is worth our while to look carefully at how
sisterhood learns to speak. And to see how a sister’s relation to a
brother is not the same as a sister’s relation to a sister, and how two
sisters cannot be the same as two brothers. What it means to call on
a sister, or to speak as a sister, are normative ideals that develop
within specific systems of social authority, and in the case of ancient
Greece the shifting systems between the Homeric household and the
(democratic) city-state change the condition of possibility for such
rhetoric of kinship. The political construction of citizenship as
fraternity frames the counter-construction of sisterhood. Sisterhood
has proved a grounding metaphor of modern feminism, but its
necessary implication with the broadest power structures of society
is less commonly questioned. While black feminists or feminists
from the Third World have questioned whether they are or want
to be included in appeals to a universal sisterhood, the political and
psychological conceptualizations of sisterhood itself remain largely
uncontested: and hence replete with all the danger and value of
myth. From the beginning, Sophocles’ staging of the sisters Anti-
gone and Ismene demands that we listen with great attention and

a n t i g o n e a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f s i s t e r h o o d 161

self-consciousness to the normative and persuasive claim that ‘this is
what we have in common; you are a very sister; you are dear’. It
recognizes that in the personal conflicts of the tragic narrative to
come there is a difficult and unresolved claim of sisterhood. The
tragic myth of Antigone also offers a profound way of thinking
about myth and feminism productively through a critical gaze at
the politics of sisterhood.

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6

Fascism on Stage:
Jean Anouilh’s Antigone

K atie Fleming

the afterlives of antigone

The story of Antigone has long been a dominant script in European
thought and culture. ‘Sophocles’ Antigone . . . held pride of place in
poetic and philosophic judgement for over a century’—so George
Steiner, of the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, in his
account of this play’s extraordinary Nachleben.1 And although it
can be argued that, owing to the revolutionary theories of Freud, the
last century was that of Oedipus, none the less Antigone has con-
tinually asserted her relevance to the modern world.

Not least in feminism. From the early feminists of the French
Revolution to George Eliot, and beyond, Antigone has been recalled
to vocalize the most powerful of personal and social politics.2 In
1938 Virginia Woolf evoked the spirit of Antigone in her polemic
Three Guineas.3 In this radical text, Woolf locates the seeds of

1 G. Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art
and Thought (Oxford, 1984), 6.

2 Ibid. Passim.
3 V. Woolf, Three Guineas (London, 1938).

164 k a t i e fl e m i n g

fascism not in the regimes of Italy and Germany, but in the very
fabric of patriarchal society, where men, from an early age,
are educated and socialized in militarism, nationalism, and domin-
ance (particularly over women). Excluded from this history, women
are free from such aggressive motivations, and therefore present the
possibility of an alternative point of view, one which respects
difference and defends the marginalized. She thus offers Antigone,
the archetypal outsider, as the paradigmatic feminist, pacifist, anti-
fascist, and anti-imperialist. This combined list of attributes con-
tinues to inform modern feminisms, which remain firmly committed
to anti-militarism.4 More recently, but no less urgently, Luce
Irigaray and Judith Butler—as Miriam Leonard and Simon Goldhill
have shown in this volume—have returned to the Antigone to
develop sophisticated, radical, and controversial feminist theories
which challenge and redefine the socio-political status quo.5 Syn-
onymous with confrontation, resistance to tyranny, and defiance of
patriarchy, Antigone is the feminist heroine par excellence.

Antigone matters. Indeed, any cursory glance at the manifold
interpretations and modern versions of this famous story demon-
strates how determining whether Antigone or Creon ‘wins’, and
why, (consequently stating what Sophocles’ play ‘means’), was
and remains a classic move for political self-fashioning and self-
assertion.6 From Bertolt Brecht’s anti-fascist Antigone of 1948, and
Athol Fugard’s 1973 critique of South African apartheid in The
Island, a ‘satyr play to all preceding Antigones’,7 to, most recently,
Seamus Heaney’s 2004 translation of Sophocles’ text, Antigone
continues to play a central role in the politics of the twentieth, and

4 See e.g. J. Liddington, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism
and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (New York, 1991).

5 See L. Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY, 1985), ‘The Universal as Mediation’, in Sexes and Geneal-
ogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York, 1993), ‘The Female Gender’, in Sexes
and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York, 1993); J. Butler, Antigone’s
Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000).

6 This concern has dominated scholarship on the Antigone. See e.g. C.W.
Oudemans and A. P. M. H. Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology,
Philosophy, and Sophocles’ Antigone (Leiden, 1987), 107–17 for a sche-
matic account of the differing interpretations.

7 Steiner, Antigones, 144.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 165

now the twenty-first, centuries.8 In fact, it is arguable that (re)reading
and rewriting this play are always already political actions.

However, these politics are not always what one might expect.
Alongside Antigone’s noble and famous history of valiant confron-
tation runs another, decidedly less salubrious, narrative. Antigone’s
symbolic value has also been hijacked by those with more disturb-
ing political intentions. She has been used to justify the most perni-
cious element of Nazism, the ideology of racial purity and
superiority;9 she has stood for an anti-democratic and autocratic
monarchism;10 and, as I shall discuss in this essay, she has been
depicted as the epitome of the fascist heroine. Such readings may
seem surprising, given her totemic association with the historical
and political anti-militarism of feminism and other forms of polit-
ical and social resistance.

However, why should this particular history of the reception of
the Antigone make a difference to each succeeding (feminist) ap-
propriation? Should it concern Butler, for example, that the figure
she employs to subvert the State was once used as a prop for
racialized totalitarianism? Perhaps. Charles Martindale has argued
of ancient texts that ‘our current interpretations . . . whether or not
we are aware of it, are in complex ways constructed by the chain of
receptions through which their continued readability has been
effected. As a result we cannot get back to any originary meaning

8 Ibid.; S. Heaney, Burial at Thebes (London, 2004).
9 See K. Glaser, ‘Blutsbande und Staatsgewalt in der ‘‘Antigone’’ des
Sophokles’, Die Alten Sprachen, 3 (1938), 105–12; F. Joachim, ‘Der nor-
dische Blutgedanke in der ‘‘Antigone’’ des Sophokles’, Die Alten Sprachen,
6 (1941), 51–5. For the performance history of Sophocles’ Antigone in
Germany between 1929 and 1944, see H. Rischbieter (ed.), Theater im
‘Dritten Reich’. Theaterpolitik, Spielplanstruktur, NS-Dramatik (Leipzig,
2000), 293–5. The bibliography on the National Socialist and Fascist
engagement with antiquity is vast. For a recent collection of articles see
B. Na¨ f (ed.), Antike und Altertumswissenschaft in der Zeit von Faschismus
und Nationalsozialismus. Kolloquium Universita¨t Zu¨ rich 14.–17. Oktober
1998 (Mandelbachtal and Cambridge, 2001), which includes a comprehen-
sive bibliography on this topic.
10 C. Maurras, ‘Et si l’anarchiste e´tait Cre´on?’, Action Franc¸aise, 25
May 1944.

166 k a t i e fl e m i n g

wholly free of subsequent accretions.’11 This seems a compelling
analysis of the dynamics of reception. If it is true, then Antigone’s
(reception) history does indeed, in some way, matter. How then does
this history affect our understanding of—the ‘continued readability’
of—Antigone, qua acceptable (feminist) icon? I shall address this
question by tracing and examining the text and reception of another
notorious twentieth-century Antigone. The (perhaps) unexpected
history of this play might in the end cast light on the nature of
feminism’s appropriation of classical mythological figures in gen-
eral, and Antigone in particular.12

antigone in 1944

On 4 February 1944 the long-awaited Antigone of Jean Anouilh
opened at the Atelier theatre in Paris, under the direction of the
playwright’s long-time theatrical colleague Andre´ Barsacq. It was
an instant success. Well-attended, it ran unbroken from the winter to
the summer, until the Liberation of France. Further performances
were also staged the following year to popular and critical acclaim.13

This was not, however, merely another successful production on
the stage of occupied Paris. Almost immediately, the play created a
storm of controversy unlike any other. During the time of its first
run it provoked an unprecedented number of reviews and responses
in many papers and journals. These articles came from all sides of
the Parisian press, from collaborationist to Resistance. They all
addressed the play from different angles, but all with some degree

11 C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermen-
eutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), 7.

12 See e.g. L. E. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical
Myth (London, 2001).

13 For an exhaustive and authoritative account of the historical circum-
stances of Anouilh’s Antigone see M. Flu¨ gge, Verweigerung oder Neue
Ordnung: Jean Anouilhs ‘Antigone’ im politischen und ideologischen Kon-
text der Besatzungszeit 1940–1944 (Berlin, 1982). My thanks to Herr Dr
Flu¨ gge for discussing his work on the Antigone with me. While his research
is compelling and ultimately convincing, I am reluctant to reject, as he does,
the significance of the (non-French) post-war reception history of the play.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 167

of fervour. Both politically and culturally, this Antigone, inevitably,
was seen to matter.

Of the numerous Antigones of the twentieth century, Anouilh’s
remains, if not one of the most popular, then surely one of the most
famous. Certainly the status of the play in European consciousness
is enforced by its regular use in the teaching of French in school-
rooms across the continent.14 In the years following the Second
World War this Antigone undoubtedly became canonical. It has
passed into the literary canon, however, precisely because of the
place it is seen to fill within the narrative of twentieth-century
literature: the reception history of Anouilh’s Antigone is crucially
linked to its role as literature of war. As such, this play remains
enshrined in occupied Paris, 1944. Most readings of this play do not
fail to take into account the very specific temporal and geographical
position of its first production.

Moreover, importantly and essentially linked to this continual
historicizing of the play is the fact that Anouilh’s Antigone is con-
sistently interpreted, by its Anglophone readers and audiences, both
popular and scholarly, as a clear and damning allegory of the
contemporary circumstances of occupied Paris in 1944.15 It is
understood and performed as a depiction of the heroic resistance
of the French, represented by Antigone, to the German Occupation
(and/or to the Vichy government), embodied in the figure of Creon.
This reception tradition began early: ‘The ethic of Antigone is
opposed to the logic of Creon as all the sentiment and patriotism
of the French underground fought against the cold and ruthless
despotism of the Nazis.’16 It remains the most accepted interpret-
ation of the play. As one journalist has asserted recently, ‘To
Jean Anouilh . . . Antigone, battling Creon for the right to give

14 See ibid. 8; H. Footitt and J. Simmonds, ‘The Resistance Experience:
Teaching and Resources’, in R. Kedward and R. Austin (eds.), Vichy France
and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology (London, 1985), 193–205.

15 See e.g. A. della Fazia, Jean Anouilh (New York, 1969). Such a
reading is particularly common in Anglophone countries, but not exclu-
sively so. See Flu¨ gge, Verweigerung, 233 ff; D. Bradby, Modern French
Drama 1940–1980 (Cambridge, 1984).

16 E. Berry, ‘Antigone and French Resistance’, Classical Journal, 42
(1946), 17.

168 k a t i e fl e m i n g

her brother Polyneices a decent burial, is a martyr of the French
Resistance.’17

What must be realized is that, contrary perhaps to our expect-
ations, the play and, in particular, Antigone herself, were in fact
rejected by important sections of the Resistance.18 By contrast, the
collaborationist press (arms of which, more often than not, if they
did not actively support fascism, were at least sympathetic to it)
embraced the play almost uniformly.19 Importantly, for our pur-
poses here, the meaning, or perhaps rather the intent of the play,
regardless of whether one supported Antigone or Creon (although
this was still a crucial and hotly debated distinction, as in the long
tradition of Sophoclean interpretation), was frequently understood
to be complicit with fascist ideals and politics. This troubling an-
alysis of Anouilh’s play has never dropped out entirely of the
Francophone debate, where ‘la petite Antigone fasciste’,20 as well
as Creon, remain controversial figures.21 This can surely, among

17 B. Morrison, ‘Femme Fatale’, in ‘Review’, 16–17, Guardian, 4 Oct.
2003.

18 C. Roy, ‘Notre Antigone et la leur’, Lettres Franc¸aises, 14 (March
1944); P. Gaillard, ‘Pie`ces noires. L’Antigone du de´sespoir’, La Pense´e
(Oct.–Dec. 1944). Here a distinction perhaps ought to be made between
what could be termed the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘popular’ resistance. Several
contemporary commentators recall that members of the audience who were
sympathetic to the Resistance understood Antigone as a Resistance figure.
See e.g. B. Dussane Notes de the´aˆ tre. 1940–1950 (Paris, 1951); H. Amour-
oux, La Vie des Franc¸ais sous l’Occupation (Paris, 1971); H. Le Boterf,
La Vie parisienne sous l’Occupation (Paris, 1974). See M.-A.Witt, ‘Fascist
Ideology and Theatre under the Occupation: The Case of Anouilh’, Journal
of European Studies, 23 (1993), 49–69, for the contradictory receptions of
Anouilh’s Antigone.

19 An illuminating contrast can be made with Sartre’s Les Mouches. This
play, which its author suggested was written overtly as a statement of
political resistance, was uniformly criticized and attacked by the collabora-
tionist press. See T. Malachy, ‘Le Mythe grec en France avant et pendant
l’Occupation (Giraudoux, Sartre, Anouilh)’, Revue d’histoire du the´aˆ tre,
51 (1999), 53–60; P. Marsh, ‘Le The´aˆ tre a` Paris sous l’occupation
allemande’, Revue d’histoire du the´aˆ tre, 33 (1981), 197–369.

20 J. Lacan, Le se´minaire VII: L’E´ thique de la psychanalyse (Paris,
1986), 293.

21 See M. Leonard, Athens in Paris (Oxford, 2005) and in this volume
for discussion of the French post-war appropriation of Antigone. See also

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 169

other issues, be connected to the tortuous and contested post-war
legacy of the Occupation, the E´ puration (the post-Liberation purge
of French collaborators), and (French) fascism, and the ways in
which the Second World War and its effects continue to influence
French intellectual and political life.22

In what follows, I shall demonstrate how Anouilh’s Antigone can
be shown to contradict the dominant post-war Anglophone inter-
pretation of the play in two key ways. It is evident, first, in the play’s
fascinating engagement with the Sophoclean text, through its cru-
cial deviations from it, as well as important fidelities to it. These,
I believe, intentionally reduce the heroine to the barest character-
ization of meaningless refusal. This is not to imply that Anouilh was
not a sensitive reader of Sophocles. If anything, the changes he
makes indicate precisely the opposite. The departures from the
Sophoclean text are as revealing as the concurrences with it. The
second important aspect of the play to be considered here is its
employment of a vocabulary and register which can be identified
as being complicit with fascism.23

24

anouilh’s antigone refusante

Sophocles’ Antigone begins with the fraught discussion between the
eponymous heroine and her sister, Ismene. It is Antigone herself
who opens the play (ll. 1–10). Within these few lines Sophocles
signals both her complicated past and her tortured present. Her

Steiner, Antigones; R.-M. Albe´re`s, La Re´volte des e´crivains d’aujourd’hui
(Paris, 1949); J.-P. Lassalle, Jean Anouilh, ou La Vaine Re´volte (Paris,
1958); P. Vandromme, Un auteur et ses personnages (Paris, 1965); C.
Borgal, Anouilh: la peine de vivre (Paris, 1966); B. Beugnot (ed.), Les
Critiques de notre temps et Anouilh (Paris, 1977).

22 See e.g. H. R. Lottmann, The People’s Anger: Justice and Revenge in
Post-Liberation France (London, 1986); H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy:
de 1944 a` nos jours (Paris, 1987); P. Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How
Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in
France (Stanford, Calif., 1998).

23 See Flu¨ gge Verweigerung; Witt, ‘Fascist Ideology and Theatre’.
24 See Dussane, Notes . . . 1940–1950, 125.

170 k a t i e fl e m i n g

over-determined bonds of philia, which will be crucial to her tra-
gedy (and Creon’s), are made clear in the play’s very first line
(ƒ Ù ŒïØíeí ÆPôÜäåºöïí š ÉóìÞíçò ŒÜæÆ—‘My own sister Ismene, linked
to myself’).25 Her history, her inheritance from Oedipus, is asserted.
Furthermore, we are given news of the events which will prompt her
action and so lead her to initiate her tragedy.

Anouilh chooses a different beginning. In place of Antigone, we
have the Prologue:

The people gathered here are about to act the story of Antigone. The one
who’s going to play the lead is the thin girl sitting there silent. Staring in
front of her. Thinking. She’s thinking that soon she’s going to be Antigone.
That she’ll suddenly stop being the thin dark girl whose family didn’t take
her seriously, and rise up alone against everyone. Against Creon, her
uncle . . . the king. She’s thinking she’s going to die . . . though she’s still
young, and like everyone else would have preferred to live.

But there’s nothing to be done. Her name is Antigone, and she’s going to
have to play her part right to the end.26

The Prologue then proceeds to relate the events we will see unfold-
ing before us on stage.

Immediately, Anouilh’s concerns with the tragedy are made clear.
Like many of his other plays, here we see the playwright’s fascin-
ation with predestination and the exposure of the essentially artifi-
cial nature of the whole dramatic and tragic process.27 The logical
philosophical and ethical consequence of such revelations, which
Anouilh seems to posit, then, is fatalism, indeed even pessimism.

In order dramatize this central message Anouilh must extract the
typical elements from the Antigone, which he does in two particular
ways. In the first place, he removes or subtly adjusts the tragic
motivations of the Sophoclean characters. Anouilh’s dramatis per-
sonae act as they do because they have to fulfil their roles, and for no
other reason. Secondly, he revises considerably the powerful gen-
dered narrative of the Greek text, and adds to it certain other

25 Greek quotations and translation taken from Sophocles.II, H. Lloyd
Jones. (ed. and trans). See e.g. M. W. Blundell, Helping Friends and Harm-
ing Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1989).

26 J. Anouilh, Antigone, trans. B. Bray, in Plays: One (London, 1991),
79. All further citations of Anouilh’s Antigone are from this edition.

27 See e.g. H. G. McIntyre, The Theatre of Jean Anouilh (London, 1981).

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 171

elements which alter its perspective utterly. These are not unsophis-
ticated decisions. Indeed, they suggest that, far from ignoring the
Sophoclean Antigone, Anouilh was seemingly in close dramatic
dialogue with it. Each of these factors can be read as a deliberate
engagement with particular tensions within the ancient play.

As we have seen above, by setting out the play in the opening lines
as he does, although Antigone is put centre stage, necessarily a
striking inactivity is stressed, almost a passivity in the face of dra-
matic forces. The Sophoclean struggle between fate and the individ-
ual hero is crystallized into role-playing and self-dramatizing.28

In this version, before the action of the play begins, Antigone has
already made her first attempt at burying Polyneices. Thus the
portrayal in Sophocles’ play of her decision to act, followed by her
departure at line 97, is radically altered. Already presented as a fait
accompli, Antigone’s gesture at burying her brother (although, in
order to provide the necessary moment of her capture, Anouilh
follows Sophocles in depicting Antigone as visiting her brother’s
corpse on a second occasion) is sidelined. What is important to
Anouilh is the revelation of the essential meaninglessness of her
act. In order to make central his own interest in undoing and
divulging the things of theatre (particularly tragedy) and dramatiz-
ing the absurdity of existence in the face of fate, Anouilh must
remove the critical Sophoclean concerns and motivations of philia,
nomos, oikos, and polis.29 He adjusts the initial debate with
Ismene—in which Sophocles’ Antigone sets out her principles of
behaviour, to which she will remain faithful even as she confronts
Creon (for example, lines 73–7: öߺç ìåôš ÆPôïF ŒåßóïìÆØ, öߺïı ìÝôÆ,
j ‹óØÆ ðÆíïıæªÞóÆóš Á Kðåd ðºåßøí ÷æüíïò j ní äåE ìš IæÝóŒåØí ôïEò
ŒÜôø ôHí KíŁÜäå: j ÝŒåE ªaæ ÆNåd ŒåßóïìÆØÁ óı äš åN äïŒåE j ôa ôHí ŁåHí
ŠíôØìš IôØìÜóÆóš Š÷å.—‘I am his own and I shall lie with him who is
my own, having committed a crime that is holy, for there will be a
longer span of time for me to please those below than there will be
to please those here. As for you, if it is your pleasure, dishonour

28 See e.g. J. Harvey, Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics (New Haven, 1964);
C. Smith, Jean Anouilh: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, New
Brunswick, 1985).

29 See e.g. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,
1988), 88–106.

172 k a t i e fl e m i n g

what the gods honour!’)—and reduces the scene between the sib-
lings to one which revolves around the topos of inevitability. Anti-
gone herself states that ‘everyone has his part to play. Creon has to
have us put to death, and we have to go and bury our brother. That’s
how the cast-list was drawn up. What can we do about it?’ (p. 87)
(although, perhaps this is the ultimate distillation of the Sophoclean
Antigone’s relentless pursuit of a glorious death, for instance at lines
71–2: ŒåEíïí äš Kªg= ŁÜłø: ŒÆºüí ìïØ ôïFôï ðïØïýófi ç ŁÆíåEí.—‘[b]ut
I shall bury him! It is honourable for me to do this and die’).

Rather than being an issue of complicated or even contradictory
familial and religious obligation, Antigone’s decision to attend to
Polyneices’ body is predicated simply on her fatalistic refusal to
accept the ways of the world. When Ismene tries to reason with
her (not realizing that Antigone has already scattered soil over their
brother’s body), Anouilh’s heroine’s response is markedly dissimilar
from her Sophoclean counterpart. She provides no motivation other
than irrationalism:

i s m e n e . Listen, I’m older than you, and not so impulsive. You do the first
thing that comes into your head, never mind whether it’s sensible or
stupid. But I’m more level-headed. I think.

antigone. Sometimes it’s best not to think too much.
i s m e n e . I disagree. It’s a horrible business, of course, and I feel sorry for

Polyneices too. But I do see Creon’s point of view.
a n t i g o n e . I don’t want to see it.
i s m e n e . He’s the king. He has to set an example.
a n t i g o n e . But I’m not the king, and I don’t! . . .
i s m e n e 1. That’s right! Scowl! Glare! . . . But listen to what I say. I’m right

more often than you are.
a n t i g o n e . I don’t want to be right!
i s m e n e . At least try to understand!
a n t i g o n e . . . . Understand, understand, always understand! I don’t want

to understand! (pp. 87–8)

Compare this exchange with the equivalent passage in Sophocles
(ll. 41–97). Several crucial differences emerge. Initially, Anouilh
modifies Ismene’s motivations. Rather than feeling inhibited by her
position as a woman (as the Sophoclean Ismene is at lines 61–2: ܺºš
KííïåEí ÷æc ôïFôï ìbí ªıíÆE÷š ‹ôØ= Šöıìåí, ‰ò ðæeò ¼íäæÆò ïP

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 173

ìÆ÷ïıìÝíÆ:—‘Why, we must remember that we are women, who
cannot fight against men’), here she sees Creon’s side of the argu-
ment and urges Antigone to be sensible, like her. Creon only acts as
he does because he must.30

However, as this suggests, somewhat like Sophocles’ Ismene,
Anouilh does paint his character as the political realist. When Anti-
gone responds negatively, then Ismene begins to conjure up the
power of the king and his supporters. It is interesting to note that
at this point Anouilh insists on a number of important allusions to
the Sophoclean text. For example, at lines 79–80, Ismene reasserts
her commitment to her family, but underscores her inability to act
on account of the power of the politai of Thebes (ݪg ìbí ïPŒ
¼ôØìÆ ðïØïFìÆØ, ôe äb= âßfi Æ ðïºØôHí äæAí Šöıí IìÞ÷Æíïò.—‘I am not
dishonouring them, but I do not have it in me to act against the
will of the people of the city’). As we can see from the dialogue
above, Anouilh’s Ismene too feels ‘sorry for Polyneices’. Further-
more, for her part, she similarly takes into account the reaction of
the general populace. However, instead of being citizens of the polis,
Anouilh’s crowd are feared, and imagined wildly as a bloodthirsty
lynch mob, who will ‘hiss and boo. They’ll seize us in their thousand
arms, surround us with their thousand faces and their one expres-
sion, spit at us. And we’ll have to ride in the tumbrel through their
hatred, through their smell and their laughter to our execution.’
(p. 88). Critically, this crowd all agree with the king (p. 88). There is
no indication of dissent, as conveyed in the Sophoclean text by
Haemon in his argument with his father (ll. 691 ff.). The change
in dramatic and political register is striking.

In response to Ismene’s imaginings, Antigone, in Anouilh’s text,
admits that she does feel fear, and would prefer to live. However,
nothing is resolved. The conversation fades out quietly, as she tricks
Ismene into believing that she will not go ahead with her reckless task.

Consistent too with Anouilh’s dramatic agenda is his description
of Antigone. As I suggested above, he replaces the Sophoclean
heroic temper, the personality which drives the tragedy,31 with

30 See Goldhill in this volume for Antigone’s relationship to Ismene and
its consequences for feminist politics.

31 B. Knox., The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berke-
ley, 1964).

174 k a t i e fl e m i n g

irrational fatalism. However, in addition to this, and at work with
it, there are also strong visual cues for Antigone’s appearance. She is
pictured as a ‘thin dark girl’ (p. 79) and as something of a tomboy
(pp. 86–9). She is also compared unfavourably with Ismene, whom
she briefly tries to imitate (by wearing make-up, perfume, and a
pretty dress) in an attempt to be more womanly in order to attract
Haemon (pp. 93–6). Anouilh’s markedly physical depiction of his
protagonist may well be an imaginative extrapolation from the
Sophoclean Antigones, from the transgressively un-feminine or
even anti-feminine Antigone of the Antigone or the unkempt,
wandering Antigone of the Oedipus at Colonus.

However, it is clear that Anouilh is not interested in making this a
gendered drama per se, or, at least, certainly not along the trad-
itional lines. Antigone’s actions here are not determined by her
status as a woman, which provides one (albeit, ultimately unsatis-
factory) explanation for her to attempt to bury Polyneices in the
Greek text.32 Nor is the clash between Creon and Antigone figured
in gender terms, as in the Greek text (see, for example, lines 484–5,
578–9, 738 ff.). The complicated gender-identity of the Sophoclean
Antigone is here distilled to paint a rather different picture.33 Here
Antigone is instead strangely but deliberately masculinized.34 It
would seem, however, that this is not to emphasize the transgressive
nature of her act, but rather functions with another aspect of her
portrayal to produce a characterization which has both dramatic
and political implications.

This is Anouilh’s decision, possibly in dialogue with Antigone the
parthenos, to portray her as barely a child. In the early scenes of the
play, he introduces the character of the Nurse to facilitate and
emphasize this (pp. 82–93). In their conversations, Antigone’s vul-
nerability is made clear, as she asks the old Nurse to protect her as
she once did, ‘cuddle me and keep me warm just the same, like you
used to when I was ill . . . I’m still a bit small for it all.’ (p. 91). This
infantilization is sustained throughout the action of the play.

32 See e.g. R. C. Jebb, Sophocles. The Plays and Fragments, Part III. The
Antigone, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1891), p. xxv.

33 See e.g. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, 102, 107–37.
34 See D. Grossvogel, The Self-Conscious State in Modern French Drama
(New York, 1958), 158–9.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 175

Antigone uses an old toy spade to bury her brother (p. 99) and even
the girdle with which she hangs herself is described as looking like a
child’s necklace (p. 134).

The combined effect of these two aspects of Antigone here oper-
ate to keep her in a pre-sexualized, naive limbo, nostalgic for the
idyllic realm of innocent youth. She must die, not only to play out
her role, but also to preserve her ideal state. As I shall suggest below,
such a narrative, when read within the wider concerns of the play,
suggest much broader political implications for Anouilh’s work.

Anouilh’s decision to remain faithful to two further important
aspects of the Greek text is also in harmony with this, although this
may initially seem paradoxical. The first appears to be an illusion to
one of the most contentious elements of the Sophoclean Antigone,
namely the over-determined philia which Antigone shares with her
brother. This philia, with its controversial assertion, or perhaps
encapsulation, at lines 905–12, has troubled scholars for gener-
ations.35 Anouilh, in his turn, appears to entertain the possible
sexual overtones of this relationship. When, at the beginning of
the play, the Nurse discovers Antigone out of bed in the early
hours of the morning, her assumptions as to her charge’s intentions
are clear:

n u r s e . You had a rendezvous, I suppose—don’t tell me you hadn’t!
a n t i g o n e (quietly). Yes, I had a rendezvous.
n u r s e . You mean you’ve got a sweetheart?
[Pause]
a n t i g o n e [strangely]. Yes . . . Poor thing. (p. 83)

Antigone’s ‘strange’ response is tellingly ambiguous, potentially
referring to both Polyneices and Haemon. Anouilh, however, does
not pursue this ambiguity, and instead uses it to introduce a motif
which is not evident in the ancient tragedy: the love story.36
Antigone swiftly reassures the Nurse that she has not been acting

35 See M. Leonard, ‘Antigone, the Political and the Ethics of Psycho-
analysis’, PCPS, 49 (2003), 130–54, for a brief account of the early 19th-c.
debate over these controversial lines of the Antigone.

36 ‘It is no blame to later dramatists that they found it necessary to make
more of the love-motive; but, if our standard is to be the noblest tragic art, it
is a confession of their inferiority to Sophocles.’ Jebb, The Antigone, p. xxx.

176 k a t i e fl e m i n g

indiscreetly, and that her reasons for leaving her room will soon
become clear. Then, following immediately the scenes between
Antigone, the Nurse, and Ismene (pp. 82–93), comes an exchange
between Antigone and her fiance´, Haemon, in which they declare
their love for one another and imagine their future happiness
together (pp. 93–6). Despite the apparent contradiction with the
characterization of Antigone as child, this romantic theme in fact
fits seamlessly with it. We hear that Antigone’s and Haemon’s
relationship has not been consummated, and so the idealized love
that Antigone feels for him is as much a utopian fantasy as her
perfect childhood. Anouilh, throughout his career, regularly drama-
tized thwarted romances (for example, in Eurydice [1941] and
Rome´o et Jeanette [1945] ) as a means of expressing the sordid
effects of the world on what was true and beautiful, but essentially
ephemeral and impossible.

It is from this perspective, then, that I believe we are to under-
stand the second, even more distinct echo of the Sophoclean text.
On hearing that she is to be walled up outside the city, Antigone
exclaims, ‘Hail, then, my grave, my marriage bed, my underground
home! [She looks very small in the middle of that big base room. She
looks cold. She wraps her arms around her. Then, as if to herself ]
But all on my own . . . !’ (p. 131). This (‘O tombeau! O lit nuptial!
O ma demeure souterraine!’) corresponds closely with lines
891–2 (t ôýìâïò, t íıìöåEïí, t ŒÆôÆóŒÆöcò= ïYŒçóØò ÆNåßöæïıæïò—
‘O tomb, O bridal chamber, O deep-dug home, to be guarded
forever’).37 Here Anouilh employs this line to remind the audience
of perhaps the tragedy, the heroism of his Antigone—that she will
die despite her unfulfilled love for Haemon.

The king too is not a typical Sophoclean tragic hero (although,
this is consistent with many interpretations of the play which, as

37 I have been unable to ascertain the extent of Anouilh’s familiarity with
the Greek text. It is most probable that his understanding of the play was
based on French translations. It is very possible that this line, with its
archaizing tone, is inspired by, and alluding to, Robert Garnier’s version
of 1580. If this were the case, it would be an interesting historical coinci-
dence. Garnier’s play, which was very popular, none the less received its first
staged performance only in 1944, the same year as the first production of
Anouilh’s Antigone. See Steiner, Antigones, 143.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 177

I suggested above, see Antigone as the sole heroine of the Antigone).
Far from being the reciprocally resolute figure of the Sophoclean
text (cf. e.g. ll. 473–96), his first inclination in Anouilh’s version is
to forget the whole affair. He offers Antigone several chances to
escape her fate (pp. 107, 112, 113). However, Antigone, who knows
as well as anyone that she must play her part, refuses such clemency.
Creon, in response to Antigone’s flaunting of her royal parentage,
even describes himself proudly in almost anti-heroic terms: ‘What
Thebes needs now is an ordinary king with no fuss. My name’s only
Creon, thank God. I’ve got both feet on the ground and both hands
in my pockets’ (p. 109).

However, this portrayal of Creon as the ordinary man is nuanced
in his transition to a policy of aggressive Realpolitik. He upholds his
decree (although he is not even sure that it is Polyneices’ body he is
withholding from burial—when he ordered his men to retrieve the
dead, he found that ‘the Argive cavalry had ridden over the bodies
and made mincemeat of them. They were both unrecognizable’
[p.120] ), not because it fulfils the laws of the State (for which he
has little regard), but because it is a demonstration of his power,
critical to his ability to maintain order (p. 114). The two clear
allusions to the Sophoclean text in the portrayal of Creon, namely
the repetition of the ship-of-state metaphor (pp. 115–16, ll. 162 ff.),
and his immediate suspicion of conspiracy when he hears of the
burying of Polyneices (p. 100, ll. 280 ff.) reinforce this despotic
portrayal of the king.

These characterizations serve the playwright’s purpose well, and
do, to a certain extent, evoke real pity for Antigone (and even for
Creon). However, they also ultimately undermine her. While Creon
is perhaps given his most sympathetic portrayal in Anouilh’s play
(a fact which did not go unnoticed by the play’s original reviewers,
both collaborationist and Resistance), Antigone is stripped of any
significance other than as the child-like character that simply
refuses. Her important claims, at lines 454–5, to the observance of
¼ªæÆðôÆ ŒIóöƺB ŁåHí= íüìØìÆ—‘the unwritten and unfailing
ordinances of the gods’ (and even Creon’s own assertion of adher-
ence to the laws of the polis [ll. 661–80] ) are absent. Anouilh’s play
gives us a very different conception of dikeˆ. Antigone and Creon
have no claim to represent any kind of justice, human or divine.

178 k a t i e fl e m i n g

Instead it is the guards who ‘are the agents . . . of justice’ (p. 81). The
king and the princess are merely playing out their roles. Even Creon
admits this, to himself as much as to Antigone, ‘All right—I’ve got
the villain’s part and you’re cast as the heroine’ (p. 112).

All of this, it could be argued, is (relatively) harmless. However,
set within the historical framework of the Occupation (and com-
bined with the accusation of the employment of a fascist register, as
I shall argue below), the climax of Antigone’s meaningless refusal
becomes almost irresponsible:

c r e o n . Why are you acting like this, then? To impress other people, those
who do believe in it? To set them against me?

a n t i g o n e . No.
c r e o n . Not for other people? And not for your brother himself? For

whom, then?
a n t i g o n e . No one. Myself. (p. 111)

Her rejection of her Sophoclean forebear is clear. In case we should
doubt the decisiveness of this scene, its message is confirmed to-
wards the close of the play, when Antigone, dictating to the guard a
letter for Haemon, confesses, ‘Creon was right: it’s awful,
but . . . I don’t know any more what I’m dying for’ (p. 133).

It is this pointlessness—evidence, it was said, of Antigone’s ‘evil
character’—which so distressed and enraged its Resistance audi-
ence.38 Far from inspiring resistance, this play was serving the
Nazi occupiers and Vichy regime.39 Unlike her Sophoclean prede-
cessor, this Antigone commits treason. We should not be deceived
by her superficial appearance:

The Antigone which [the play] offers us is not our Antigone, the only
Antigone, the true Antigone. . . . It is . . . the 1944 Antigone of Jean
Anouilh. . . . When Creon asks why she insists upon dying she replies, ‘For
myself’. This answer echoes morbidly, uttered at the same time as over all of
Europe, indeed over the entire world, men and women are dying who could,
to Creon’s question, reply, ‘For ourselves . . . For mankind’.40

38 R. Gaillard, ‘Revue de the´aˆ tre’, Cassandre, May 1944.
39 Ibid.
40 Roy, ‘Notre Antigone et la leur’.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 179

For this reader, Antigone’s politics are clear. She is not merely a
pessimist, but more than that, she is a dangerous anti-humanist.41

antigone and the language of fascism

This was not simply a coincidence between interpretation and
historical urgency. For well over a decade before the production of
Antigone, Anouilh had been concerned with dramatizing the refusal
of his protagonists to accept the adult world of compromise and
their rejection of its corrupting mediocrity.42 Crucially, however,
this negation was not merely an aesthetic judgement, but also a
political one. It is clear that in plays such as L’Hermine (1931), La
Sauvage (1934), and Le Rendez-vous de Senlis (1937), Anouilh’s
characters are refusing not simply life and contentment, but the
bourgeois life and contentment. It is not difficult to place Antigone
within this dramatic genealogy, particularly if one also maps a
narrative of age onto this framework, so that the denigrated bour-
geois life becomes equivalent to maturity, even senescence, and the
life which rejects it, the ideal life, is equated with youth and
innocence (a structure which Anouilh implied both in the plays
mentioned above, and elsewhere).

Combined with Anouilh’s polyvalent meditations on ‘happiness’
(bonheur), this attack on the bourgeois succeeds in making his
political affinities complicit with the rhetoric of fascism. For fascist
writers and intellectuals, the bourgeois life was synonymous with
democracy.43 Bonheur signified the political (and cultural) status
quo, the acceptance of bourgeois corruption and immorality, a
condition to be utterly rejected in favour of the ‘new order’.44

41 See Lassalle, Vaine Re´volte (see n. 21), for a post-war protest against
Anouilh’s anti-humanism.

42 See e.g. H. Gignoux, Jean Anouilh (Paris, 1946); B. A. Lenski, Jean
Anouilh: Stages in Rebellion (Atlantic Highlands: NJ, 1975).

43 See e.g. Z. Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural
Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. D. Maisel (Princeton, 1994).

44 See D. Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism,
and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, 1995).

180 k a t i e fl e m i n g

In the following scene, having revealed the emptiness of Anti-
gone’s motivations (p. 111), Creon attempts to ease her towards
reconciliation:

c r e o n . . . . Life’s a book you enjoy, a child playing round your feet, a tool
that fits into your hand, a bench outside your house to rest on in the
evening. [Pause] You’ll despise me more than ever for saying this, but
finding it out, as you’ll see, is some sort of consolation for growing old:
life is probably nothing other than happiness.

a n t i g o n e [a murmur, staring into space]. Happiness . . .
c r e o n (suddenly rather ashamed). Just a word, eh? (pp. 121–2)

He is nearly successful. However, this mention of bonheur merely
serves to remind Antigone of her role, her obligation to say no:

And what will my happiness be like? What kind of a happy woman will
Antigone grow into? What base things will she have to do, day after day, in
order to snatch her own little scrap of happiness? Tell me—who will she
have to lie to? Smile at? Sell herself to? Who will she have to avert her eyes
from, and leave to die? . . . You disgust me, all of you, you and your happi-
ness! And your life, that has to be loved at any price. You’re like dogs
fawning on everyone they come across. With just a little hope left every
day—if you don’t expect too much. But I want everything, now! . . . I don’t
want to be sensible . . . I want to be sure of having everything, now, this very
day. . . Otherwise I prefer to die. (pp. 122–3)

At this, Creon finally succumbs to his rage, and Antigone’s fate is
sealed. Antigone’s previous assertion that she no longer knew what
she was dying for now seems false. Here it is clear that she is dying
so that she can truly enact her refusal of life, so that she will not
grow old.45

It was these scenes, the dramatization of Antigone’s purete´ and
grandeur (both terms, which read within the framework both of the
racial doctrines of fascism, and its insistence on the theatricality of
politics and culture, are not innocent literary observations), which
so impressed her collaborationist and fascist audience. As Alain
Laubreaux, an influential journalist and enthusiastic collaborator,
observed, Antigone depicts, ‘the revolt of purity against the lies of

45 See Flu¨ gge, Verweigerung, 1–4 for the ‘problematische ‘‘Nein’’ ’.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 181

men, of the spirit against life, a mad and magnificent revolt’.46 For
such commentators literature and politics were inseparable.

Robert Brasillach, a renowned fascist, and also one of the leading
writers and critics of his day, who was later executed under the
E´ puration for collaboration, in the most important and definitive
post-Liberation trial, also understood Anouilh’s Antigone explicitly
as a political work.47 He was amazed at the ‘profound importance
of the modern politics of this play, full of our sicknesses, but without
any partisan spirit . . . In our deceitful age, ‘‘Antigone’’ is the most
distinct protest which makes itself heard against all the efforts of
trickery.’48 For Brasillach, identifying heavily with Antigone herself,
Anouilh’s work was a political act, a call to arms.

Anouilh himself, notoriously reclusive throughout his life, always
asserted that he was not a political man, and that in writing plays he
was simply performing his me´tier.49 Despite this, throughout the
Occupation, Anouilh wrote over a dozen articles for collaboration-
ist journals, which, on several occasions, focused on the evil of
money in the theatre (an opinion consistent with his antipathy for
the bourgeois existence), and the need for a revival of a national
sense of drama.50 Anouilh may have claimed to be apolitical, but
such articles, whether consciously or not, precisely reflect a lan-
guage both of anti-Semitism and of fascism.51

Thus, Anouilh’s dramatic agenda coalesces powerfully with
two sinister doctrines. On the one hand, Antigone is the model

46 A. Laubreaux,‘Du the´aˆ tre!’, Je suis partout, 18 Feb. 1944.
47 See e.g. A. Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of
Robert Brasillach (Chicago, 2000).
48 R. Brasillach, ‘Revue de the´aˆ tre’, Chronique de Paris, March 1944.
49 See Gignoux, Jean Anouilh. However, see Dussane, Notes . . . 1940–
1950, 125. She perceives a certain disingenuousness in Anouilh’s stance.
50 See e.g. J. Anouilh, ‘Plaie d’argent’ Aujourd’hui, 22 September 1940,
‘Soliloque au fond de la salle obscure’, La Gerbe, 23 Jan. 1941.
51 This language was prevalent in France long before the outbreak of war
and the Occupation. At least since the Dreyfus affaire, anti-Semitism had
been a powerful and flexible political vocabulary, which had been variously
fused with ideas of the bourgeois, the democratic, and the socialist, etc. See
e.g. Z. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans.
D. Maisel (Berkeley, 1986); Carroll, French Literary Fascism, see n. 44.

182 k a t i e fl e m i n g

fascist—youthful, vigorous, and rebelliously uncompromising; on
the other, Creon is le dictateur roi, the authoritarian ruler who gets
on with the difficult job of stabilizing the country, and governs with
despotic hand. The play, Witt notes, ‘reverberates with a number of
themes dear to both the traditional European right and to fascism’.52

Of course, this, in itself, cannot be held as evidence for the
intended spectre of fascism within the play. It could be argued that
such a reading is little more than speculation. Does it even matter
that such politics are perceptible?

Pol Gaillard, another Resistance critic, thought so: ‘ ‘‘Antigone’’
will remain the example not only of a false masterpiece, but also of a
bad deed.’53 This remark reflects an important development in
wartime and post-war French thought. Throughout the war the
intellectual Resistance, in line with the Resistance credo that to
speak was to act, had insisted that to write, or to think, was to do,
and to act.54 Such a fusion of the literary, the political, and the
philosophical made clear that a writer or an intellectual must be
held entirely accountable for his work and its consequences. This
philosophy, triumphantly represented by such figures are Sartre,
was to be crucial to the meaning and outcome of the post-war trials
of intellectuals and collaborators.55

Therefore, on this level at least, Anouilh’s political responsibil-
ities are clear.

the politics of reception

But what, you might ask, has all this to do with the feminist Anti-
gone? Admittedly, I am not attempting to rebuff any feminist ap-
propriations of Anouilh’s Antigone (of which, as far as I have been
able to ascertain, there are none). Rather, in revealing the context
concealed by the course of this play’s post-war reception, I hope to
have cast light indirectly on feminism’s claiming of Antigone.

52 Witt, ‘Fascist Ideology and Theatre’ (see n. 18), 65.
53 P. Gaillard, ‘Pie`ces noires’ (see n. 18).
54 See e.g. Watts, Allegories of the Purge (see n. 22).
55 See e.g. J.-P. Sartre, La Responsabilite´ de l’e´crivain (Paris, 1946),
Qu’est-ce que la litte´rature? (Paris, 1948).

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 183

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in a recent pamphlet, has also returned to
the Antigone:

Nothing, however, can match the incredible fate of Antigone. It doesn’t
matter that I read this play in an age in which the laws of Creon were those
of the occupying Nazi. It matters more that, concerning more or less faithful
translations in more or less free adaptations, it is possible to construct the
history of European consciousness through the Antigone.

The freedom in this field is and must be complete. The Antigone of
Anouilh, for example, was staged in February 1944, therefore under the
German Occupation, like Sartre’s Les Mouches. I personally saw the play in
the autumn of 1944, after the Liberation. Two opposing readings can be
given, both of which are legitimate if one places them in Anouilh’s oeuvre
and in the behaviour of this playwright. The ‘resistance’ interpretation
makes Antigone a variation of the Jeune Fille sauvage theme, to quote the
title of one of Anouilh’s first plays. The pro-German interpretation makes
Creon into a kind of Pierre Laval figure, who at the end of the play, reunites
the Council of ministers. These two interpretations are possible because
Jean Anouilh is an authentic man of the theatre.56

Vidal-Naquet is right to stress similarities between La Sauvage and
Antigone. They even share a significant line—‘You disgust me with
your happiness!’.57 However, he is right in more ways than this. For,
while his account both acknowledges the flexibility and the potency
of Antigone’s story, and even goes so far as to recognize the legit-
imacy of the two opposing interpretations, nevertheless implicit in
his reading is also his judgement.58 He refers the ‘resistance’ theme
of the play to before the war, thus before the Resistance, locating it
within the genealogy of Anouilh’s plays which can be shown to be
politically ambiguous at best, complicit at worst.

In the case of Anouilh’s Antigone (at least) it is also critical to
recognize, as Vidal-Naquet suggests, the powerful effect that not
only historical circumstances, but also historicized mythologies can

56 P. Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brise´: Trage´die athe´nienne et politique
(Paris, 2002), 47–8.

57 J. Anouilh, Pie`ces noires (Paris, 1942), 194; Anouilh, Plays: One,
trans. B. Bray (London, 1991), 94.

58 It is interesting to note that ‘resistance’ lies within quotation marks,
and ‘pro-German’ does not. Admittedly, this could be a typographical
coincidence.

184 k a t i e fl e m i n g

have on our (re)readings. In fact, as the example of this play has
shown, it is through the combined efficacy of myth and the urgency
of the historical situation that meaning itself is generated.

Most importantly, though, in returning to Sophocles’ Antigone he
notes the incompatibility of sensibility in the ending of Anouilh’s
play with that of the Athenian tragedian’s. In his reading and renew-
ing of the heroine and the language of the play, Vidal-Naquet
implies, Anouilh has revealed his true politics. It is thus by coming
clean about what must be done to and over the ancient text in order
to claim its heroine, that the politics of reading can be acknow-
ledged and understood.

However, despite the apparent and stated prominence of the
(Sophoclean) text in many politicized readings, on closer inspection
it is apparent that in (re)turning to the Antigone, many commenta-
tors allow Antigone herself repeatedly to escape from its strict
confines. Like many of her Greco-Roman mythological counter-
parts, she has transcended the restrictions of any particular incar-
nation and become truly, if not simply, iconic. This state of
ambiguity, hovering between her role in text and her role as symbol,
governs many appropriations. Indeed, in perhaps her most influen-
tial modern incarnation, the rapturous reception of the Antigone
within the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (who famously dubbed it
‘one of the most sublime and in every respect most magnificent
works of art of all time’59), the Sophoclean text is referred to only
very sporadically. Her exemplary nature—‘the heavenly Antigone,
the most magnificent figure ever to have appeared on earth’60—far
outstrips her textual role.61

This complicated relationship to the text is crucial to the history
of Antigone. Consider the scholarly controversy over her notorious
declaration at lines 905–12:

59 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. E. Moldenhauer
and K. Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), xiv. 60.

60 Ibid., xviii. 509.
61 There is obviously not room in this essay to discuss adequately Hegel’s
influential reading of Antigone. See Leonard in this volume for a bibliog-
raphy on Hegel, tragedy, and Antigone.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s a n t i g o n e 185

ïP ªÜæ ðïôš ïhôš ií åN ôÝŒíš zí ìÞôçæ Šıí

ïhôš åN ðüóØò ìïØ ŒÆôŁÆígí KôÞŒåôï,
âßfi Æ ðïºØôHí ôüíäš iífi Mæüìçí ðüíïí:
ôßíïò íüìïı äc ôÆFôÆ ðæeò ÷ÜæØí ºÝªø;
ðüóØò ìbí ¼í ìïØ ŒÆôŁÆíüíôïò ¼ººïò qí,
ŒÆd ðÆEò I𚠼ººïı øôüò, åN ôïFäš XìðºÆŒïí;
ìçôæeò äš Kí °Øäïı ŒÆd ðÆôæeò ŒåŒåıŁüôïØí

ïPŒ Šóôš Iä庐eò ‹óôØò ií âºÜóôïØ ðïôÝ.

For never, had children of whom I was the mother or had my husband
perished and been mouldering there, would I have taken on myself this task,
in defiance of the citizens. In virtue of what law do I say this? If my husband
had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost
the first, but with my mother and my father in Hades below, I could never
have another brother.62

Both Goethe and Jebb, among others, rejected these lines, deeming
them inappropriate for the noble Antigone who, until this moment,
has stood for the eternal, unwritten laws of heaven. Jebb writes,
rather sorrowfully, ‘I confess that, after long thought, I cannot bring
myself to believe that Sophocles wrote 905–12 . . . The composition
of vv. 909–12 is unworthy of Sophocles.’63 Such anguish over the
text arises precisely because of the emblematic value of this most
unique of heroines. This, sometimes uneasy, imposition of Anti-
gone’s symbolic, ethical, and political importance onto, and over
and above, the text (which does not always oblige, as in Jebb’s case)
is one of the most important, and often overlooked, factors in the
reception of the Antigone, and one which can be brought to bear
(not least) on any feminist account of it.

The history of Anouilh’s Antigone throws into (admittedly un-
usually) stark relief the potentially complicated or dual nature of
‘reception studies’ and their relationship to feminism and classical
mythology. On the one hand, an analysis of the text within its
immediate historical context provides a very specific narrative; on
the other, its dominant post-war reception has dictated a very
different trajectory. Both are arguably equally legitimate readings.
Ultimately, its reception history has prevailed. Few now, if any, are
concerned with Antigone’s lapse into fascism.

62 Sophocles. II., 86–7, see n. 25.
63 Ibid. 164. For Goethe and Antigone, see e.g. Steiner, Antigones.