New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes by AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS (Under the direction of Charles Platter) ABSTRACT As early as Homer s Iliad and Odyssey, women were either recognized as completed by the experience of marriage and motherhood or were perceived as incomplete if they failed to serve in either of these capacities. Thus women in literature were often one portrayed as one of two types, the parthenos ( unmarried woman, virgin ) or the gynē ( married woman ). In the plays of Sophokles, however, women are often amalgams of the two types, with the traditional characteristics of the virgin and the mother combining with and informing one another. It is my intention to examine Sophokles transformative technique by analyzing the central female characters of the Antigone and Trakhiniai a virgin and a mother to explore the changing representation of women in fifth-century Athenian literature. INDEX WORDS: Sophokles, Sophocles, Women, Motherhood, Telos, Antigone, Antigone, Trakhiniai, Trachiniae, Deianeira
New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes by AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS A.B., Baylor University, 2002 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2004
2004 Amanda G. Seamans-Mathis All Rights Reserved
New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes by AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS Major Professor: Committee: Charles Platter Nancy Felson Naomi Norman Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2004
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people deserve special thanks for helping and supporting me during the writing of this thesis. It was during Dr. Nancy Felson s Sophokles class in Spring 2003 that I began to formulate ideas for my thesis, and she has helped me greatly in fixing problems with my various writings. Dr. Naomi Norman has given me a fresh perspective on women in the ancient world from an archaeological standpoint, a topic with which I was not familiar before performing research for this thesis. Dr. Charles Platter, my head thesis adviser, has been very patient with my (only occasional!) procrastination, and has helped me to formulate my ideas and turn them into something more than random musings on Sophokles. Last but not least, my husband Sean has very patiently listened to each and every one of my ideas good and bad before I put them down on paper, and encouraged me throughout my process of writing. -iv-
TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION...1 2 SOPHOKLES ANTIGONE...12 3 SOPHOKLES TRAKHINIAI...37 4 CONCLUSION...75 WORKS CITED...86 -v-
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In the literature of archaic and classical Greece, there is a discernible pattern of defining women by their relationships to men. In epic poetry, for example, Homer s Penelope is variously identified as the daughter of Ikarios (κούρη Ἰκαρίοιο, Odyssey 1.328), wife of Odysseus (Ὀδυσῆα, φίλον πόσιν, Od. 1.363), and mother of Telemakhos (µῆτηρ ἐµή, Od. 1.344); in the dramatic tradition, Sophokles Deianeira is the daughter of Oineus (πατρὸς... Οἰνέως, Trakhiniai 6), wife of Herakles (λέχος... Ἡρακλεῖ κριτὸν, Trakh. 27), and mother of Hyllos (δίδαξον, µῆτηρ, Trakh. 64); and the female patients of the Hippocratic corpus are usually identified only by the names of their male relatives, such as the maiden daughter of Daitharses (τῆι αιθάρσεος θυγατρὶ παρθένωι, Epidemics 1.16) or the wife of Mnesistratos (Μνησιστράτου γυναικί, Epidemics 1.17). 1 Repeatedly, women are identified as the daughters and brides, wives and mothers of men, but even within these categories they are usually divided into one of two distinct groups: as Ken Dowden has stated, females may be parthenoi (maidens) or gynaikes (matrons), but rarely anything in between. 2 This distinction is particularly evident in the 1 On the general silencing of women s names in the Hippocratic corpus, see, e.g., Lesley Dean-Jones, Medicine: The Proof of Anatomy, in Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, ed. Elaine Fantham et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 183, on a deceased patient referred to as the niece of Temenes : even when the patient died (as in this case) the physician avoided using her name and referred to her by her relationship to a man. Indeed, throughout the Hippocratic corpus, there is only one female patient mentioned by name: Melidia, the subject of case study 14 in Epidemics 1. The other four women cited as case studies in Epidemics 1 are referred to as the wife of (cases 4, 5, 11) or just the woman (case 13). A similar phenomenon occurs in Athenian legal documents of the period. According to David Schaps The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women s Names (CQ 27 [1977]: 323-30), the orators practiced a deliberate avoidance of women s names (323), preferring instead to call [a woman] the relative of such-and-such man (326). Women left unnamed are generally ordinary women of the citizen class (326), but women who are named typically fall into three categories: women of shady reputation, women connected with the speaker s opponent, and dead women (328). 2 Ken Dowden, Approaching Women through Myth: Vital Tool or Self-Delusion? in Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, ed. Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 46. Dowden s analysis, like mine, concerns primarily women of the upper class, since there is a relatively small amount of literature from the archaic and classical periods concerning women of the lower classes. (The dichotomy given here could not, in any -1-
Homeric epics, in which the major female characters are typically either virgins (Nausikaä in the Odyssey, Kassandra and Iphianassa in the Iliad) or mothers (Penelope, Arete, and the reclaimed Helen in the Odyssey; Andromakhe and Hekabe in the Iliad), as if no transitional period between virginity and maternity exists. The telos gamou Categorizing women by the dichotomy of maiden/matron, is, of course, inadequate, for this sharp division of social roles allows no gap between marriageability and marriage, only an abrupt transition from parthenos to gynē. In literature, this transition usually requires a definitive break from maidenhood 3 that is often quite dangerous, for it is at the moment of marriage or, alternatively, defloration that a maiden is most susceptible to the effects of negative forces such as physical mutation (Kallisto, Daphne), imprisonment/enslavement (Danaë, Polyxena), rape (Kassandra by Aias, Helen by Theseus, Iole by Herakles), and even death (Iphigeneia, Antigone, Glauke). A nubile girl s increased susceptibility to destructive forces renders virginity a time of crisis, 4 and it is often portrayed as a dangerous liminal state to be passed through 5 and quickly resolved by marriage. Left unresolved, virginity can cause anxiety as well as injury: in Odyssey 6, Alkinoös, father of the untamed virgin Nausikaä (παρθένος ἀδµής, 6.109), understands his daughter s sudden desire to go and wash the family s laundry as case, be applied to women classed as slaves, prostitutes, etc., and reflects only a literary, not a demographic, scheme.) 3 Ibid., p. 55. 4 Matt Neuberg, How Like a Woman: Antigone s Inconsistency, CQ 40.1 (1990): 67. 5 Simon Goldhill, Character and Action, Representation and Reading: Greek Tragedy and its Critics, in Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, ed. Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 104. -2-
an indication of interest in and anxiety over a future marriage (6.66-67); Greek medical writers of the fifth century BCE believed that parthenoi who, despite being ripe for marriage, remain unmarried suffer from spells of choking and falling and an erotic fascination with death that can only be cured by an expedient marriage and pregnancy. 6 In addition to curing the ills of maidenhood, marriage also represents the normal goal of a girl s life, by which she may obtain access to full femininity. 7 Marriage first appears as a goal, the Greek telos, in Homer s Odyssey, when Penelope describes how the goddess Aphrodite raised the orphan daughters of Pandareos, and went to great Olympos, to Zeus who delights in thunder, to ask for the telos of blooming marriage for the maidens when they reached nubile age (εὖτ Ἀφροδίτη δῖα προσέστιχε µακρὸν Ὄλυµπον,/ κούρηις αἰτήσουσα τέλος θαλεροῖο γάµοιο,/ ἐς ία τερπικέραυνον, 20.73-75). The phrase telos gamoio in later Greek, telos gamou can be safely assumed to mean realization (solemnization) of marriage, 8 but it undoubtedly carries a weightier meaning as well. According to F.M.J. Waanders study of the primary meanings of telos in Greek literature, the word connotes both the realization, completion of the state of matrimony and the (physical) completeness, maturity of the bride. 9 Thus what Aphrodite requests for Pandareos daughters is not only the fulfillment of 6 Helen King, Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women, in Images of Women in Antiquity, ed. Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt, revised edn. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), p. 114. 7 J.-P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 99. 8 F.M.J. Waanders, The History of ΤΕΛΟΣ and ΤΕΛΕΩ in Ancient Greek (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner Publishing Co., 1983), p. 55. 9 Ibid., p. 233. Cf. the interpretation supplied by the Archbishop Eustathius in his twelfth-century commentary on the Odyssey: Τέλος δὲ γάµου ἢ ὁ γάµος περιφραστικῶς ἢ ἡ τεκνοπιΐα ( the telos of marriage [means], periphrastically, the wedding or the production of children ). See Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis, Commentarii ad Homeri Odysseam, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1960), ad loc. Od. 20.74. -3-
marriage, but also the fulfillment of femininity physical completeness ensured by the sexual aspect of the marital relationship and, ideally, the production of children. In this system of thought, a woman either becomes complete through the experience of marriage and motherhood or remains unfulfilled by failing to serve in either capacity. Thus a particular plotline can be applied to the proper, or normal course of a female s life in archaic literature: when a parthenos reaches nubile age, she marries and has children, becoming, in the process, a gynē, a complete woman. Deviations from this plotline signify a rupture in or frustration of the normal story pattern, and often confirm the precariousness of the maiden s position: the daughters of Pandareos themselves, at precisely the moment when they should achieve the telos gamou, are carried away by seizing stormwinds (ἅρπυιαι ἀνηρείψαντο, Od. 20.77) that g[ive] them over into the care of the hateful Furies (ἔδοσαν στυγερῆισιν ἐρίνυσιν ἀµφιπολεύειν, Od. 20.77-78) barren, sterile, and eternally virginal powers that create sterility in all of nature. 10 Whisked away by the winds, the maidens are prevented from making the normal transition from parthenoi to gynaikes; like the Furies themselves, they will remain incomplete, forever distinct from women like Penelope or Arete, who obtain completion through marriage and motherhood. Evaluating Women: Character Types In addition to the classification of women as complete or incomplete, the archaic system of representing the female contains certain subgroups that define the possible courses that a female s life may take. In literature, these courses attach themselves to certain character types with underlying positive or negative values; the distribution of these character types is, in turn, 10 Froma I. Zeitlin, The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia, Arethusa 11 (1978): 159. On the Furies as representatives of negative virginity and creators of sterility, see ibid., pp. 158-60. -4-
dependent upon the maiden/matron dichotomy. At the most basic level of interpretation, there are two possible courses for the virgin, and at least three for the matron. 11 The Maiden. Becoming married is, of course, the normal and positive course for the life of the parthenos, for marriage ensures fulfillment not only of the telos gamou but also of a girl s femininity through the production of children. Since marriage is the primary goal of the parthenos existence, it follows that she should look forward to its completion and even feel some anxiety about it. Homer s Odyssey provides an excellent example of the maiden waiting for marriage in the figure of Nausikaä, the virgin princess whom Odysseus encounters after being shipwrecked on the shores of her homeland. As Odysseus begins to entreat the girl for aid, he expresses a wish that the gods grant you whatever you desire in your heart, a husband and household (σοὶ δὲ θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν ὅσα φρεσὶ σῆισι µενοινᾶις,/ ἄνδρα τε καὶ οἶκον, Od. 6.180-81). From his point of view, as a Greek male, marriage must be on the young Nausikaä s mind, and his assumptions ultimately prove correct: after Nausikaä speaks with Odysseus, she wishes that such a man of the ones living here could be called my husband, and that it would please [Odysseus] to stay here (αἲ γὰρ ἐµοὶ τοιόσδε πόσις κεκληµένος εἴη/ ἐνθάδε ναιετάων, καὶ οἱ ἅδοι αὐτόθι µἱµνειν, 6.244-45). Clearly, from the Homeric Greek s perspective, marriage is the next logical step in the nubile maiden s process of maturation. If the maiden does not marry at the right time, however, she stands in jeopardy of following the second possible course open to her death or destruction. As we have already seen, unresolved maidenhood leaves the parthenos in a state of crisis, during which time she is susceptible to any number of destructive forces that can, and usually do, prevent her from marrying (and thereby attaining her life s fulfillment). The most destructive of these forces is, of 11 I am not suggesting that these are the only courses open to female characters, but I have chosen these five for the sake of relevance to the plays that I shall examine. -5-
course, death itself, which permanently and definitively severs the maiden from her potential to experience marriage and motherhood. Nonetheless, there is an identifiable pattern in Greek literature of viewing a maiden s death as a marriage, a topos articulated most directly by the archaic Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which recounts the abduction of the maiden goddess Persephone. According to the hymn, Zeus gave his daughter Persephone in marriage to his brother Hades (δῶκεν, 3) without first consulting the girl s mother, Demeter (νόσφιν ήµητρος, 4). 12 To enact the wedding, Hades abducted the young maiden (ἁρπάξας, 19; κούρη, 8) and led her (ἦγε, 20) to his underworld realm, where she became his wife (παρακοίτι, 343). Persephone, however, was an altogether unwilling bride (πόλλ ἀεκαζοµένηι, 344), and Demeter secured her return, but not before Hades stealthily gave her to eat a honey-sweet food, a pomegranate seed (αὐτὰρ ὅ γ αὐτὸς/ ῥοιῆς κόκκον ἔδωκε φαγεῖν µελιηδέα λάθρηι, 371-72), necessitating that she remain in the underworld, as his wife, for a third of the year. The remainder of the year she was allowed to spend with her mother, returning from the misty darkness of her husband s kingdom (ἀπὸ ζόφου ἠερόεντος, 402) to the earth above whenever the earth bloom[ed] with all kinds of fragrant spring flowers (ὁππότε δ ἄνθεσι γαῖ εὐώδε[σιν] ἠαρινο[ῖσι]/ παντοδαποῖς θάλλει, 402-03). For the parthenos who dies on the brink of marriage, death comes just as Hades came to Persephone in the hymn: it takes her apart from her parents as well as the life that she would have had as a wife and mother. The important difference, of course, is that the human girl who becomes a bride of death will have no chance for future fertility. Unlike Persephone, whose return to earth each spring brings agricultural abundance, the deceased parthenos will remain forever barren, unfulfilled in her femininity by her failure to produce children. 12 References to line numbers follow the text in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter : Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays, ed. Helene Peet Foley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). -6-
The Matron. For the female who successfully completes the transition from parthenos to gynē, however, the experience of marriage opens out a new set of possible courses that are applicable to her life as an adult woman. This second set of possibilities is significantly different from that available to the maiden, and has a greater range of positive and negative values. All, of course, depend upon the status of gynē, for the attainment of the telos gamou seems to bestow a certain degree of subjectivity upon a female. Unlike the maiden, who typically does not choose marriage or death of her own accord, 13 the matron has the unique ability to determine which of the paths she will follow. The most positive example of womanhood is, of course, the devoted wife and mother, who strives to maintain the oikos, household or family unit, the conceptual center of her family. 14 As the protector of her oikos, the devoted wife/mother usually acts in the capacity of [guardian] of the values of kinship and religion. 15 Thus, like Penelope of the Odyssey, who preserves the safety and financial security of her oikos by steadfastly resisting her suitors during Odysseus twenty-year absence, she may take action to protect her family s assets. Or, like 13 The daughters of Pandareos, for example, are to be married by Aphrodite s agency, not their own, when they are swept (passively) away by the stormwinds. Likewise, the young Persephone does not choose to be married to Hades, but descends very unwillingly (πόλλ ἀεκαζοµένηι, 344) to his underworld realm. Even Antigone, who acts as the agent of her own death, commits suicide only after Kreon has denied her the possibility of marriage by sentencing her to a virginal death. 14 On what constituted the Greek oikos, see Cynthia B. Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 47: if we see the oikos as a place around which were focused experiences of living and dying, producing and reproducing, we might also justifiably understand oikos as meaning household implying the connection between the physical house and the things and people held and produced within it. Thus, oikos has an inclusive sense which could embrace both persons and property.... But however we translate the word, the activities and emotions that cluster around the oikos [sic] argue for our seeing it as the conceptual center of the early Greek family. That is, early Greek family relations are essentially rooted in the relationships of house and household. 15 Bernd Seidensticker, Women on the Tragic Stage, in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 158. See also Dowden, Approaching Women, p. 52. -7-
Euripides Alkestis, she may sacrifice her own life to protect the sanctity of her household and the continued existence of her family. Considerably less than ideal is the adulteress/seductress, whose wayward behavior typically divides or destroys the family unit. The most prominent examples of this type of woman are the daughters of Tyndareos, Helen and Klytaimestra, who are perfect manifestations of the archaic concept of the bad woman, the woman who fails the requirement to support the oikos. 16 Helen s adultery with Paris, the cause of the Trojan War, makes her a power for destruction in Aeschylus Agamemnon (a Trojan horse all on her own) and in Euripides Troades an inexcusable, unduly attractive criminal, and her indulgent sexuality destroys the unity of multiple oikoi. 17 Klytaimestra s adultery with Aigisthos, on the other hand, causes her to follow the third, and last, possible course that I shall examine that of the murderess. This type of woman offers the most violent opposition to the positive values embodied by the devoted wife and mother. She destroys the oikos with her own hand, while the adulteress/seductress, like Helen, usually destroys it only indirectly, through the conflict that erupts over the sexual possession of her body. 18 The Klytaimestra of Aischylos Agamemnon, infinitely more evil than her sister Helen, 16 Dowden, Approaching Women, p. 50. On the division of women into good and bad in early literature, Dowden states: this compartmentalisation of women into good and bad reflects a very limited, and to our eyes distinctive, view of their place. They are there to make an oikos work and the failure to do so may even be, as Aeschylus depicts it in the Agamemnon, to lose the claim to womanhood, to live in some sort of no-woman s land (51). 17 Ibid., p. 53. 18 On the contested female body, see, e.g., Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975): PP; also Nancy Felson and Laura Slatkin, Gender and Homeric Epic (forthcoming): Structurally speaking,...we see that disputes among men whether allies or enemies entail disputed traffic in women. If marriage is the peaceful exchange of women, war is its violent counterpart. For the consequences of disputed claims to women, see Victoria Wohl, Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. xiv: The result of these failed transfers [of women between men] is catastrophic: the relationships between men that -8-
murders her husband, exulting in the shower of bloodshed, and rejoices at the news of her son s death. In the same category is Euripides Medeia, who murders her husband s new bride, Glauke (or Kreousa), as well as the girl s father and her own two sons. She destroys both households over which Jason presides in order to avenge her abandonment. Changing Perspectives: Sophokles By the classical period, the archaic method of conceptualizing and portraying women was under close scrutiny. The development of Athenian drama into one of the central vehicles for evaluating and readjusting the political and social status quo allowed for the interrogation of traditional methods of characterization, and the tragedians themselves, acting as teachers of their polis, began to portray women in a considerably different light. Women in the extant plays of Aischylos, the earliest of the three major tragedians, show the most affinity with their archaic models. Klytaimestra in the Agamemnon (produced c. 458 BCE), for example, can easily be interpreted as a stereotypical bad woman, a man-minded adulteress (ἀνδρόβουλον, Ag. 11) and a husband-killer, but, by the time of Sophokles, female characters begin to look very different from their archaic precursors. Indeed, the major female characters of Sophokles plays do not easily fit into the moulds prepared for them by their predecessors, nor can they be definitively identified as the particular types of women discussed above. The title character of Sophokles Antigone (produced c. 442/1 BCE) 19 begins the play as a normal young woman on the verge of marriage, but she should be cemented are instead sundered; the men who should be declared virile and heroic subjects are emasculated and eviscerated; the social order that should be instituted is more often left in ruins. 19 There seems to be a fairly general consensus among scholars on the dating of the Antigone to 442/1. See, e.g., Mark Griffith, Sophocles, Antigone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2: Antigone is assigned to 442 or 441 on fairly solid grounds, for one of three hypotheseis ( summaries or introductions ) contained in our MSS of the play states (hypoth. 1.13-14), They say that S[ophokles] was awarded the stratēgia in Samos after his -9-
willfully veers away from obtaining the telos gamou when she defies an edict of the king, her uncle Kreon. Sentenced to death because of her disobedience, Antigone experiences a frustration of the transition from parthenos to gynē, but Sophokles describes her virgin death as if it were a wedding, complicating and problematizing the archaic division of the complete and incomplete woman. In much the same way, Herakles wife Deianeira, in the Trakhiniai (produced between 457 and 430?), 20 conflates several of the archaic types used to identify women. A devoted wife and mother, like Penelope, she reacts to Herakles introduction of a second wife into the household by using what she believes to be a powerful love charm to secure his affections. When the charm turns out to be a deadly poison, however, she becomes, like Klytaimestra, a murderess who destroys the family unit and negates the telos gamou. Clearly, Antigone and Deianeira do not conform to the set of conventional plots or storylines associated with women in archaic literature. Antigone experiences both marriage and death/destruction, and Deianeira is both a devoted wife/mother and a destructive murderess. Neither is truly representative of the typical portraits of women in archaic literature. Hence, one may ask, to what extent does Sophokles revise and reconstruct elements of the inherited literary tradition? By analyzing the elements of conventional plotlines present in the Antigone and Trakhiniai and their relationship to the dominant image systems of each play, I hope to show that success with the production of Antigone. The Samian expedition took place in 441-40; and whether or not [Sophokles ] election in fact owed anything to the popularity of Antigone, this explanation would hardly have been advanced unless the play s production was dated just a year or two later. Patricia Johnson ( Woman s Third Face: A Psycho/Social Reconsideration of the Antigone, Arethusa 30 [1997]: 394) places the play in the 440s, and Kirk Ormand (Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999], p. 102) agrees with Griffith in dating the play to 442. Larry J. Bennett and William Blake Tyrrell (Recapturing Sophocles Antigone [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998], p. 438), on the other hand, disagree and date the play s original production to 438. 20 The dating of the Trakhiniai has long been a source of contention among scholars. The broad date given above is that of Easterling s commentary: Sophocles, Trachiniae, ed. P.E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 23: Any date between 457 and, say, 430 would not be implausible; many scholars nowadays would prefer the earlier half of that period. Hellmutt Flashar, Sophokles: Dichter im demokratischen Athen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), p. 80 proposes a date zwischen 438 und 433, and adds, die Datierung ist unsicher. -10-
Sophokles method of representing women marks a shift in the perception of the female in Greek literature one in which women serve as positive vehicles of reflection and change in a form of literary expression that became an integral part of the discourse of the polis. -11-
CHAPTER 2: SOPHOKLES ANTIGONE Set after the deaths of Oidipous and his mother-wife Iokaste, and the civil war that claimed the lives of their two sons, Eteokles and Polyneikes, Sophokles Antigone details the fatal conflict that arises between Oidipous daughter Antigone and her uncle Kreon. As the play opens, Kreon has ascended the throne of Thebes, and has become the guardian (kyrios) of Antigone and her sister, Ismene. As kyrios, he has betrothed Antigone to his own son, Haimon; as king, he has declared that the body of Polyneikes be left unburied, as the body of a traitor. Antigone, however, cannot bear this outrage and, in the play s opening scene, expresses her determination to bury Polyneikes corpse, on penalty of death. Rather than simply a choice between possible actions, Antigone s resolution is a decision that radically alters her identity, for, by choosing to perform Polyneikes burial, she chooses death over her impending marriage to Haimon. In so doing, she knowingly veers away from her telos, and negates her potential to become a wife and mother. As a result, her failure to achieve marriage and motherhood the only avenues of fulfillment open to her by classical Greek standards relegates her to the status of an incomplete woman, whose very existence, as Michael Zelenak bluntly states, is meaningless, a total waste. 21 Sophokles captures the tension of Antigone s conflicted position by employing language and imagery derived from traditional gender ideology and the terminology of certain cultural institutions, such as weddings and funerals, to describe Antigone s gradual isolation from society. After performing Polyneikes burial, she forfeits her chance to achieve social integration through the experience of marriage and motherhood, but it is at this point that the 21 Michael X. Zelenak, Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 80. -12-
language of the play becomes increasingly fraught with motifs of sexuality and marriage. In fact, the strongest concentration of marriage imagery occurs just before Antigone is led to her death, as if to suggest that death itself will provide the fulfillment denied her in life. As she goes to her tomb, she is described as a bride of death, and Sophokles uneasy portrayal of her union with Hades emphasizes the tension between the course that Antigone follows and the course of the typical virgin s story. Ultimately, the frustration that Antigone experiences serves to interrogate the validity of archaic notions of female characters, and challenges the too-neat dichotomy of maiden and matron, making Antigone a vessel for examining and reevaluating previous methods of representing women. Sophokles Antigone and the Expectations of telos By classical period standards, attainment of the telos gamou and, through it, motherhood is doubly important for Sophokles Antigone, who becomes an epiklēros (roughly translated as heiress ) after the deaths of her father and brothers. As an epiklēros a woman whose father has died, leaving no male offspring to continue his family line she has the sole responsibility of ensur[ing] an heir for her father s family rather than her husband s. 22 According to Athenian tradition, she should marry her nearest available, preferably paternal, relative, such as an uncle or cousin, to keep from producing children with conflicting allegiances to two separate oikoi. Thus Antigone should follow the path of the Odyssey s Phaiakian queen Arete, who 22 Christina Elliott Sorum, The Family in Sophocles Antigone and Electra. CW 75 (1982): 204. For a detailed description of the epiklēros and her social function, see Patterson, Family in Greek History, pp. 92-106. The term epiklēros means upon the [paternal] estate, indicating that the heiress stayed with or held onto her father s property instead of being married out into another household (92). As the heir to her father s property, [s]he ought to produce children so that her natal oikos would continue to be a productive and reproductive unit (99). -13-
marries her paternal uncle, Alkinoös, when her own father dies without sons in his halls (τὸν µὲν ἄκουρον ἐόντα... ἐν µεγάρωι, 7.64-65). 23 Antigone s situation, however, is complicated by the fact that her father, Oidipous, has left no living male kin. In order to preserve the royal line, her maternal uncle Kreon betroths her to his son Haimon. Since Antigone is, by definition, an epiklēros, the engagement is, as Charles Segal has pointed out, almost obligatory and certainly familiar procedure to an Athenian audience. 24 Antigone is, at the beginning of the play, exactly where she is supposed to be in the virgin s story pattern on the verge of attaining the marriage that will bring her sexual and social completeness. As Haimon s fiancée, Antigone stands at a critical transitional juncture, balanced in the temporal gap between parthenos and gynē, as the terms νυµφεῖα ( bride, 568), µελλογάµος τάλις ( betrothed bride, 628-29), and µελλονύµφος ( about to wed, 633) indicate. The word nympheia itself equivalent to the more common form nymphē connotes a degree of liminality, for it is applied only to those in the latent period stretching from marriageable to married. 25 Mellonymphos also communicates a sense of Antigone s precarious position, for she is literally, about to experience gamos, the sexual union of the wedding night that will bring about her physical completion as a woman. 23 On Arete as an epiklēros, see Patterson, Family in Greek History, p. 91: From a later Greek legal point of view, Queen Arete of Phaeacia can be considered a classic example of the heiress, an only daughter married to her father s brother, Alcinoos (Odyssey 7.54-66). She and her uncle Alcinoos are, or would have been in later inheritance law, heirs to equal shares of the property of her paternal grandfather Nausithoos. Arete s remarkable authority would then from this perspective be that of the heiress a woman who in classical times was caricatured as a monstrous ruler of both husband and household. 24 Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 178; hereafter cited as Tr&C. Antigone s betrothal is not unique to Sophokles. In Euripides Phoenissai, Eteokles, acting as Antigone s kyrios, secures the promise of her marriage to Haimon by granting Kreon rule over Thebes (Pho. 757-60, 944-46). In Euripides lost Antigone, Haimon and Antigone are married and have a son, Maion. (See, e.g., Griffith, Sophocles, Antigone, p. 9, n. 33.) 25 Helen King, Bound to Bleed, p. 112. -14-