Milli mála - 01.01.2011, Page 84

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The important issue here is that Antigone has served as a model for
systems as widely different as Hegel’s ethics and present day
feminism. The various versions of the Joan of Arc story also borrow
something from Antigone and it is no wonder perhaps that Anouilh
also wrote a play about her (L’Alouette) and another about Euridyce.
Each new adaptor has the freedom to use whatever she or he decides
is suitable to the new work. As George Eliot phrases it in an essay
on Antigone, written in 1856:
Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection
brings him into opposition with the rules society has sanctioned, there is
renewed conflict between Antigone and Creon.17
Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Sophocles’ play places special
emphasis on the funeral rites rather than on the character of the
main protagonist. Entitled The Burial at Thebes, it nevertheless
gives Antigone a very strong voice in a new idiom:
Was I going to humour you, or honour gods?
Sooner or later, I’ll die anyhow
And sooner may be better in my case:
This death penalty is almost a relief.
If I had to live and suffer in the knowledge
That Polyneices was lying above ground
Insulted and defiled, that would be worse
Than having to suffer any doom of yours,
You think I’m just a reckless woman, but –
Never, Creon, forget:
You yourself could be the reckless one.18
Her resistance or ‘wildness’ Creon believes is inherited from her
father, yet it is more than a proclivity for being stubborn or obtuse.
It is a willfulness that is sometimes the only response to inevitable
doom. It is not Antigone’s compassion for a dead brother that
17 Essays of George Eliot, ed. Edward Pinney, New York: University of Columbia Press, 1963, p.
265.
18 Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone, London: Faber and Faber, 2004, p. 21.
ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE