Antigone

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Antigone

• A Study in Tragedy or the
• Tragic Drama

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Who is Antigone?

• Antigone (Pronunciation /æn't?g?ni/ Greek
  ??t?????) is the name of two different women in
  Greek mythology. The name means "unbending", for
  "anti-" (against) and "gon" ("bend" as in
  "polygon"). It also means "anti-generation",
  i.e., "the opposite of her ancestors".

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• Antigone is the daughter of the accidentally
  incestuous marriage between King Oedipus of
  Thebes, and his mother Jocasta (thus, Antigone is
  also her father Oedipus's half-sister and,
  through her father, her mother Jocasta's
  granddaughter). She is the subject of a popular
  story in which she attempts to secure a
  respectable burial for her brother Polynices,
  even though he was a traitor to Thebes.

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• In the oldest version of the story, the funeral
  of Polynices takes place during Oedipus's reign
  in Thebes. However, in the best-known versions,
  Sophocles's tragedies Oedipus at Colonus and
  Antigone, it occurs in the years after Oedipus's
  banishment and death, and Antigone has to
  struggle against Creon. Sophocles's Antigone ends
  in disaster as Antigone commits suicide, not
  realizing that Creon has been persuaded to allow
  Polynices a funeral, and Creon's son Haemon (or
  Haimon), who loved Antigone, kills himself.

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• The dramatist Euripides also wrote a play called
  Antigone, which is lost, but some of the text was
  preserved by later writers and in passages in his
  Phoenissae. In Euripides, the calamity is averted
  by the intercession of Dionysus and is followed
  by the marriage of Antigone and Haemon.

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The Playwright

• Jean Anouilh (19101987) was born in Bordeaux to
  a tailor father and a violinist mother. Though he
  began to write plays at age twelve, Anouilh
  initially pursued legal studies at the Sorbonne
  and worked briefly as an advertising copywriter
  and screenwriter. In 1931, Anouilh married the
  actress Monelle Valentin, became secretary to his
  mentor Louis Jouvet's Comédie des Champs-Élysées,
  and began his writing career. By the 1950s,
  Anouilh was Europe's most popular playwright.

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World War II Antigone

• Throughout his career, Anouilh's drama featured
  biting political critique. The two most notable
  examples in his great postwar period are his
  attacks on Charles de Gaulle in L'hurluberlu
  (1958) and Le songe du critique (1960). Antigone,
  an adaptation of Sophocles's classic produced in
  the context of the anti-fascist French
  resistance, is Anouilh's most often-produced work
  today. Antigone premiered in Paris in 1944, but
  Anouilh had written his tale of lone rebellion
  against the state two years earlier, inspired by
  an act of resistance during World War II.

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Themes in Antigone

• The Nature of Tragedy
• Halfway through the play, the Chorus appears on
  the scene to announce that the tragedy is on. His
  speech offers a commentary on the nature of
  tragedy. Here, in apparently a reference to Jean
  Cocteau, tragedy appears as a machine in perfect
  order, a machine that proceeds automatically and
  has been ready since the beginning of time.

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Themes (continued)

• The Sisters' Rivalry
• As with Sophocles' sistes, Ismene and Antigone
  appear as foils and rivals. Ismene is
  "reasonable," timid, and obedient, full-figured
  and beautiful in being a good girl. In contrast,
  Antigone is recalcitrant, impulsive, and moody,
  sallow, thin, and decidedly resistant to being a
  girl like the rest.

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Motifs in Antigone

• The Chorus
• In Greek tragedy, the Chorus consisted of a group
  of approximately ten people, playing the role of
  death messenger, dancing, singing, and commenting
  throughout from the margins of the action.
  Anouilh reduces the Chorus to a single figure who
  retains his collective function nevertheless. The
  Chorus represents an indeterminate group, be it
  the inhabitants of Thebes or the moved
  spectators. It also appears as narrator, framing
  frames the tragedy with a prologue and epilogue.

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Motifs (continued)

• Tragic Beauty
• As noted above, Antigone's insistence on her
  desire makes her monstrous, abject. At the same
  time, her abjection is her tragic beauty.

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Symbolism in Antigone

• The Gray World
• Upon sneaking in from her brother's burial,
  Antigone tells the Nurse that she has come from a
  "gray world." Like many of Anouilh's heroines,
  Antigone wanders in this gray "nowhere," a world
  beyond the "post card" universe of the waking.
  This world is breathless with anticipation it
  doubles the stage, set apart from the human
  world, upon which Antigone's tragedy will ensue.
  At the same time, the world of the living does
  not lie in wait for Antigone she is meant to
  pass onto another.

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Symbolism (continued)

• Eurydice's Knitting
• As the Chorus remarks, Queen Eurydice's function
  in the tragedy is to knit in her room until she
  dies. She is Creon's final lesson, her death
  leaving him utterly alone. In the report of her
  suicide, Eurydice will stop her knitting and the
  stab herself with her needle. The end of her
  knitting is the end of her life, evoking the
  familiar Greek myth of the life-thread spun,
  measured, and cut by the Fates.

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Works Copied

• http//www.sparknotes.com/drama/antigone/