Antigone’s Secret

“Perhaps nothing ennobles a human being so much as keeping a secret,” Kierkegaard observes in Either/Or. And in the Danish philosopher’s view, it is Antigone, princess of resistance, the tragic daughter of the king, who knows the answer to the riddle of the plague that has ravaged Thebes.

Years earlier, Oedipus had identified “man” as the answer to the sphinx’s riddle: what crawls on four legs at dawn, stands on two at noon, and walks on three at dusk? Solving this riddle frees the Thebans and makes Oedipus a hero, but it leads to a more disturbing and arguably more profound riddle. No prophet can disrupt the chain of events that leads Oedipus to become king and to marry Jocasta without realizing that she is his mother and that Laius, a man he killed in a dispute at a junction where three roads meet, was his father.

According to Kierkegaard, Antigone knows what no one else knows. She knows the truth before her father (and brother) does. She knows that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, and that this is a sin even if done unknowingly. The burden of bearing this secret is her greatness.

“Thus does our Antigone bear her secret in her heart like an arrow which life has, unrelentingly, driven in deeper and deeper without killing her. For as long as it remains in her heart, she can live. But in the moment it is drawn out, she must die. The beloved must strive constantly to wrest her secret from her. And yet it is this which means her certain death.” This, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, justifies describing Antigone as “a bride, but in all innocence and purity,” as well as a virgin mother, fruitful and undefiled. Her father’s death has deprived her of the only means by which she could free herself from her secret; for the secret could have been confided only to Oedipus.

If we read the trilogy in narrative order, we first see Antigone as a loyal and affectionate companion of a devastated man, the implacable detective, who disdains all warnings to drop the case until getting to the truth of the matter: that he is himself the culprit he has pursued. The detective story in all the many forms it has taken since Poe invented it with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841 has not reached a more profound insight.

In Oedipus Rex, the king achieves a vision of the truth in all its horror at the cost of his eyesight: he blinds himself physically as punishment for his mental or emotional blindness. Antigone cares for the self-blinded former king in exile in Oedipus at Colonus, which Sophocles wrote toward the end of his life to fill in the missing middle of the trilogy that commences with Oedipus Rex and concludes with Antigone, in which the tragic heroine takes central stage: she rebels against the tyrannical rule of Creon, Oedipus’s successor as king. Creon will not let her bury the dead body of her brother Polyneices, who died in combat with his brother Eteocles and has been deemed a traitor.

In a fierce display of hubris Creon ignores the contradiction between his son Haemon’s love for Antigone and his own authority to boss the boy around.  Death ends the contest in a stalemate that feels like a defeat. Creon locks Antigone in a cave, burying her alive. She hangs herself.  She would otherwise die of starvation, so by taking her life in her own hands she converts a death sentence into an act of defiance. Haemon’s suicide follows; his mother kills herself; and Creon is swamped in misery. It is a pity that Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara did not attend the 1967 American Shakespeare Festival’s production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, directed by Jerome Kilty. LBJ and McNamara were two stubborn men who might have sympathized with Creon—or even benefited from his bad example—in their conduct of the war in Vietnam, the defining issue for an entire generation of Americans.

Antigone exhibits the feminine powers extolled by Ovid in the story of Arachne, weaver of webs, who has the nerve to challenge Pallas Athene in the Metamorphoses. She is audacious, skillful, celebrated for her artistry, defiant in defeat.

Though sister Ismene has long been thought comelier, and Antigone has been depicted as a scrawny brat, the real Antigone, with her red hair, high cheekbones, and circumflex eyebrows, was beautiful, with a profile like that of Greer Garson in Pride and Prejudice, and a force of personality that overshadowed that of her worthy husband, Walter Pidgeon, the perfect number two man, in Mrs. Miniver. Mr. Miniver (Pidgeon) crosses the Channel in his little skiff to help the evacuation of Dunkirk; Mrs. Miniver (Garson) beats that by single-handedly disarming a German soldier.[1]

Antigone dies a virgin. She and Joan of Arc share much but represent two opposing versions of the mythic feminist ideal, the key difference being that Antigone stands for pacifism and a rebellion against male hierarchy while Joan is a warrior who can lead her people in glorious combat. Jean Simmons comes to mind as the Hollywood image for a character somehow blending the two archetypes in a 1948 film Carol Reed didn’t make with Ralph Richardson as Creon, and with a happy if bittersweet ending in which Sophocles is contravened; Creon and his wife die of food poisoning, and Antigone buries her brother after her sister (Olivia de Havilland) elopes with her fickle ex-boyfriend (Zachary Scott).

Antigone rates very high in intensity of sex appeal, the passion she arouses inversely correlated with the likelihood of consummation. A symbol of resolve and heroic resistance, she would have lived to a grand old age if she weren’t willing to die for the sake of a principle.

There are a multitude of scoundrels but only two primary types of villain: the spiteful, envious Iago type, on the one side, and the Robespierre type on the other. The Iago type is all too familiar; the divorce courts are full of them, as are the morgues, but they turn up, too, in your average business office with the water cooler, the cubicles, and the loathsome boss. Creon fits uncomfortably into the Robespierre category. He is the ruler who knows better but fucks up and it couldn’t happen to a more obstinate guy: LBJ, for example.

You can argue that Antigone is Creon’s tragedy.  Tiresias warns Creon—just as, in the first play of Sophocles’ trilogy, the blind prophet wisely if futilely warns Oedipus not to proceed with the investigation of his father’s violent end. In David Grene’s translation, Tiresias tells Creon:

Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.
Yield to the dead. Why goad him where he lies?
What use to kill the dead a second time?

So, Creon has a decision to make, and he makes the wrong one.

But if Creon were the tragic hero, the play would be a bore and a box office dud. Just as Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar, preferred dealing with hotheads Antony and Brutus (Marlon Brando and James Mason in the movie) rather than wasting his genius on pompous lazy-ass Caesar (Louis Calhern), so Sophocles disdained Creon, who comes off no better than an authoritarian bureaucrat, in favor of Antigone, the paragon of loyalty, faith, love, self-sacrifice, and steadfastness. [2]

To be a rebel while proving your loyalty is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and Antigone in Paris emerged as one of France’s most alluring leading ladies, a symbol of resistance against the Nazis during World War II. In Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, she represents French defiance of Vichy authority, a simple enough reading. To be sure, Anouilh has her sister Ismene say, “I see Creon’s point of view, too,” but that was the French for you, ambiguity at the service of hedging your bets. There were plenty of collaborationists in the audience.

Why is Antigone revived so often? Just look at modern warfare and see how many bodies are denied a proper burial. Then consider how the plot lends itself to the circumstances of the day.

With Vietnam searing its way into the national consciousness, the 1967 version of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone featured Maria Tucci as the heroine in “an azure pants-suit, besmirched with the dirt she has used to bury her rotting brother.” Morris Carnovksy played Creon. On Bastille Day, Caldwell Titcomb (from whom I am quoting) reviewed the American Shakespeare’s Festival production for The Harvard Crimson. The headline: “Anouilh’s ‘Antigone’ Electrifyingly Done.”[3] According to the critic, “The current Stratford [Ct.] production is as up-to-date as today’s newspapers. It is framed by the on-stage playing of a rock ‘n’ roll combo, with a bunch of teenagers frugging away (including Antigone’s sister Ismene, in a yellow and black miniskirt). … It is clear that [director Jerome] Kilty [Harvard ‘49] has on his mind such things as our peace marchers, draft-card burners, and Berkeley protest students.” Titwell praises Tucci and Carnovsky most enthusiastically. It seems somehow apt that “Anthony Mainionis’s Haemon is adequate but somewhat colorless,” while “Marian Hailey manages sufficiently to convey the weak-willed and vacillating Ismene,” an observation that lifts the writer to journalistic eloquence. “Antigones are rare, but Ismenes are a dime a dozen.”

As Sophocles maintained, one look at the world would prompt any baby to return instantly to the womb. Making the best of a bad business, Antigone decides to act even at the expense of her own life and love, thus ensuring that her effigy would always be that of the woman she was at the time of her death. Did she want children? No one thought to ask. But her treatment of her brother came to a high erotic climax without violating the taboo on incest that made her family infamous.  

Have Antigone’s secrets dropped out of sight in recent times? Far from it. George Steiner devotes his book Antigones (Oxford UP, 1984) to the belief that Sophocles’ tragedy is singular, the only literary work to explore “all the [five] principal constants of conflict in the condition of man: the confrontation of men and women, of age and youth, of society and individual, of the living and the dead, and of men and gods.” Each is “an equilibrium of fatalities.” What Antigone and Creon conduct is a dialogue of the deaf. Steiner is okay with Hegel’s “reading of the play as a dialectical conflict of equal opposites.” He even endorses Jacques Lacan’s view that Creon is the “denier of desire” and that Antigone’s loyalty to her brother was a reaffirmation of the Oedipal triangle.

Academic feminists would have none of it. Women’s studies have given us the “Antigone Complex” to contravene Freud, appropriate Sophocles, rebuke Lacan for his “phallocentrism,” and submit that the play by Sophocles is an ancient exposition of woman’s tendency to sacrifice herself and subordinate her desires to those of a man. Judith Butler has argued that Antigone’s behavior defies feminine norms, subverts biology, and thus counters heteronormative values. Not Oedipus but Antigone should have been the normative neurotic ideal. Butler, riding the crest of critical adulation, made the case in Antigone’s Claim in 2000, though to get what she says you need to be fluent in scholarly jargon.

The notion of Antigone as the exemplary gender-bending paragon flew in the face of orthodox psychoanalytical theory. Freud bestowed the nickname Antigone on his own daughter, Anna, but I wonder what the inventor of psychoanalysis would have made of the theory that Antigone—unlike, say, Electra—provides, or should provide, the classic model for the self-defining conflict that adolescents must endure with the parent of the opposite sex.

 Antigone’s sexuality has long been recognized for its complexity. It cannot be denied that Antigone kills herself for her brother. Her fiancé doesn’t figure. As Edmund Wilson puts it in The Wound and the Bow, it is Ismene, Antigone’s “timid sister,” docile and desirable, who represents the conventional “feminine point of view.”

In 2023, the Harvard Business Review weighed in with the thought that “Antigone’s story warns organizational leaders that hubris can drive them to simplistic solutions when situations demand an appreciation of complexity, moral humility, and thoughtfulness. From Creon, leaders witness the—in this instance, dire—consequences of ignoring input from multiple points of view, especially when others’ perspectives are uncomfortable or inconvenient.”

In Nouveaux Cahiers in 2024, Jacques LaPlume advised readers to keep the example of Antigone in mind when they witness Faye Dunaway’s plight as daughter and sister in Chinatown.

In the cavern of her doom, Tiresias comforted Antigone. “There are two kinds of modern women: Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. There are two English Romantic poets: Keats and Shelley. But there is only one Hamlet, and you are destined to meet him in Hades in 1987.”

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[1] Greer Garson is equal to the task of being Mr. Chipps’s wife in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, as well as the heroine of Pride and Prejudice. Besides the films in which he is paired with Garson, Walter Pidgeon gets to play Bob Munson, the best Senate majority leader in US history, in Advise and Consent.

[2] It must be acknowledged that Caesar is given a great line: “Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant never taste of death but once.”

[3] Caldwell Titcomb, The Harvard Crimson, July 14, 1967 https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/7/14/american-shakespeare-festival-iii-pstratford-conn-what/