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women had few rights and their parts were always played by men.
In Antigone’s case, however, gender is not so clear. After suggesting
that in some respects, Antigone is ‘also a man,’ Judith Butler adds:
And this is the title that Oedipus bestows upon her, a gift or reward for
her loyalty. When Oedipus is banished [in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus],
Antigone cares for him, and in her loyalty, is referred to as a man
(aner).12
In Sophocles’ Antigone, Creon voices a similar idea:
This girl knew well how to be insolent then, transgressing the established
laws, and after her action this was a second insolence, to exult in this and
to laugh at the thought of having done it. Indeed, now I am no man, but
she is a man [μὲν οὐκ ảνήρ, αὕτη δ̓ ảνήρ], if she is to enjoy such power
with impunity.13
In short, Antigone’s transgression is to aspire (and act) outside the
realms of those allotted to or legitimate to her standing as a woman.
She will not know her place.
The most extensive study to date on the mythical Theban prin-
cess is George Steiner’s Antigones, the author typically displaying a
vast range of knowledge on the subject.14 As Steiner makes clear,
from Hegel’s interpretation of tragedy to Freud’s placing of Oedipus
at the centre of human sexual identity, it is Antigone who provided
the primary model for the tragic mode. Through late antiquity and
Byzantium to twelfth century Provencal poet Arnaut Marueil,
Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale in the late fourteenth century¸ Rucellai’s
Rosamunda in the early fifteenth century, George Gascoyne Jocasta
(1565) and all the way through to Athol Fugard’s The Island (1973)
and David Hopkins’ graphic comic (2007), the line of Antigones is
12 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000, p. 16.
13 Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. and trans., Antigone, from Sophocles: Antigone, The Women of Trachis,
Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994,
pp. 46 & 47.
14 George Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Oxford: OUP,
1984.
ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE