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almost unbroken. Friedrich Hölderlin (whose version was later
adapted by Brecht), both Schlegels, Goethe, Hegel and Kierkegaard
all single out Antigone as the epitome of Greek drama and Hegel’s
own famous theory of tragic collision, a clash between two ethical
rights rather than good against evil or right against wrong, was
long thought to lie at the centre of the tragic. In Hegel’s system,
neither side has the ethical upper hand; it is more a case of an ir-
resistible force meeting with an immovable object, a dynamic dia-
lectic that still stands at the centre of western politics. Perhaps the
meme travels with Hegel’s reasoning through the nineteenth cen-
tury (and despite Matthew Arnold’s inexplicable rejection of the
relevance of Antigone15), informing further theatrical and operatic
works versions as well as well as a host of nineteenth century fic-
tional heroines from George Sand’s Indiana (1832) to George Eliot’s
Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Emile Zola’s
Nana (1880). Twentieth century examples might include Alba in
Isabella Allende’s The House of Spirits (1982) or, more dynamically,
Ellen Ripley in Alien, Paikea Apirana in Whale Rider (2002) or
Matti in Charles Portis’ True Grit (1968) all of which deal with the
plight of an outspoken but disempowered young woman. Indeed,
even Shakespeare’s Cordelia may be seen as sharing some of
Antigone’s properties of character both in her refusal to pay lip-
service to authority and in her willingness to sacrifice herself as a
result of that refusal. As Marta Wilkinson demonstrates in her book
Antigone’s Daughters:
As a paradigm, Antigone serves as a role model for female expression and
self-empowerment. In the preexisting space, her action and authorship are
criminal. Woman must not only act, but create a separate space in which
her actions will be acknowledged and her desires and needs addressed as
valid.16
15 Matthew Arnold, Poems: A New Edition, 1853, Vol. I of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold,
ed. R. H. Super, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960–1977, p. 12. ‘An action, like the action
of the Antigone by Sophocles, which turns upon a conflict of the heroine’s duty to her brother’s
corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which we can feel a deep interest.’
Interestingly, Arnold had published ‘A Fragment of an Antigone’ four years earlier in 1849, as well
as making direct reference to the play in his best known short poem, ‘Dover Beach’.
16 Marta L. Wilkinson, Antigone’s Daughters: Gender, Family, and Expression in the Modern Novel,
London: Peter Lang Pub. Inc., 2008.
MARTIN S. REGAL