The generally held view, the one that psychoanalysis has recapitulated but not yet fully explored, is that the kernel of the Sophoclean script treats of a three-sided violation: Oedipus was doomed as much for his attempt at defying the Delphic oracle as he was for his parricide and incest. The latter were of a common quality to the classical Athenian mind, at least in the context of a mytho-theology that was replete with incidences of what we nowadays might consider as even more obscene and absurd passions and events. This did not make the king’s treatment of his parents any the less heinous, but it did render it in paler colours in comparison to his even more sinister and intolerable defiance as a mere mortal. His refusal to submit to the dictates of the higher deities, his though well intentioned but not any the less desperate and misguided wish for the fallibility of their oracles, which is to say his willed ignorance of these oracles’ influence and authority, and, in the process, his attempt to arrogate as his own their powers and privileges, his, in other words, refusal to recognise and abide by his station as a flawed and powerless human in an otherwise rigidly organized cast system is what ultimately cost him his royal privilege.
Two aspects of the example of Antigone are instructive on this point: the first is political the second psychological. Her father’s daughter, Antigone thought that she too could circumvent the laws of the state in favour of a heavenly commandment to which she declared herself subject. To her mind, she also became that commandment’s enforcer, protector, and agent. Initially its tool, she subtly but steadily transformed herself into its master; subject to it, she became its subject. Anarchist, resistance fighter, or proto-feminist she may have for her modern readers become, for most of her Athenian audiences she, like her father, would have probably remained the blasphemous pretender to a seat at the Olympian high table; her hubris would have been a trigger for her audience’s indignation, dismissal, and pity. Quite likely, her death would have been seen as the product of a misplaced and disgraceful sense of allegiance rather than a lofty sacrifice since, and to the mind of her contemporaries, suicide was cowardly self-indulgent and she was but a woman, irrational and unenviable. On the other hand, Creon’s final torment at his loss of honour and family may very well have been the play’s climactic moment and the worthiest of its audience’s compassion and sympathy. On this score, and while his restaging may have served specific political purposes at the time of the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh did not escape the trap of casting the intransigent and overly self-assured as resistor when she could have been equally cast as fascist.
The other aspect to Antigone’s scenario worth noting here is that, sadly, her psychological structure has completely eluded much of the current analysis of the Theban trilogy. Let us pause for a moment and consider the following: Antigone is the product of incest; her father was a murderer and her mother had committed suicide; her two brothers failed at containing their sibling rivalries and eventually killed one another; and much of her adult life was spent ministering to a man toward whom she must have felt some hint of revulsion. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that, as one might say these days, she had “baggage?!” Would it be even remotely possible that, as someone who had lived in the midst of and been shaped by so much unmitigated hostility and destruction, she could only come to act on her envy toward Creon as the one relative who was not manifestly implicated by the oracles and their damned and damning prophecies? She is carried away by her rage at her (grand-) uncle; she will trigger a chain of events that will leave him weak, sexless, and childless. She will effectively castrate him. True to her name, Antigone is portrayed as not only the one without progeny, but also as the woman who will arrogate for herself the manly power to bring an entire family’s lineage to its end. She will effectively embody that vision of femininity men have reviled and women have fought against.
Il seems to me that Antigone is more deserving of recognition than she is of either the ruthless dismissal she must have suffered at the hands of her Athenian audiences or the abstract elaborations on psyche and community she has come to endure from her modern readers. If these latter are on the right track then it would be quite the comic feat of justice if, two and a half millennia from now, their psychologies and politics were to be filtered through whatever traces will have survived of Beaches or Days of Our Lives.
