Antigone Sparknotes

Plot Overview The Chorus introduces the players. Antigone is the girl who will rise up alone and die young. Haemon, Antigone's dashing fiancé, chats with Ismene, her beautiful sister. Though one would have expected Haemon to go for Ismene, he inexplicably proposed to Antigone on the night of a ball. Creon is king of Thebes, bound to the duties of rule. Next to the sisters' sits the Nurse and Queen Eurydice. Eurydice will knit until the time comes for her to go to her room and die. Finally three Guards play cards, indifferent to the tragedy before them. The Chorus recounts the events leading to Antigone's tragedy. Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene's father, had two sons, Eteocles and Polynices. Upon Oedipus' death, it was agreed that each would take the throne from one year to the next. After the first year, however, Eteocles, the elder, refused to step down. Polynices and six foreign princes marched on Thebes. All were defeated. The brothers killed each other in a duel, making Creon king. Creon ordered Eteocles buried in honor and left Polynices to rot on the pain of death. It is dawn, and the house is still asleep. Antigone sneaks in and the Nurse appears and asks where she has been. Suddenly Ismene enters, also asking where Antigone has been. Antigone sends the Nurse away for coffee. Ismene declares that they cannot bury Polynices and that she must understand Creon's intentions. Antigone refuses and bids Ismene to go back to bed. Suddenly Haemon enters and Antigone asks Haemon to hold her with all his strength. She tells him that she will never be able to marry him. Stupefied, Haemon departs. Ismene returns, terrified that Antigone will attempt to bury Polynices despite the daylight. Antigone reveals that she has already done so. Later that day, the nervous First Guard enters and informs Creon that someone covered Polynices's body with a little dirt last night. He orders the guards to uncover the body and keep the matter secret. The Chorus appears and announces that the tragedy is on. Its spring is wound, and it will uncoil by itself. Unlike melodrama, tragedy is clean, restful, and flawless. In tragedy, everything is inevitable, hopeless, and known. All are bound to their parts. The Guards enter with the struggling Antigone. The First proposes that they throw a party. Creon appears, and the First explains that Antigone was found digging Polynices' grave by hand in broad daylight. Creon sends the guards out. Once he is certain no one saw Antigone arrested, he orders her to bed, telling her to say that she has been ill. Antigone replies that she will only go out again tonight. Creon asks if she thinks her being Oedipus's daughter puts her above the law. Like Oedipus, her death must seem the "natural climax" to her life. Creon, on the other hand, devotes himself only to the order of the kingdom. Antigone's marriage is worth more to Thebes than her death. Antigone insists that he cannot save her. Enraged, Creon seizes her arm and twists her to his side. Antigone remarks that Creon is squeezing her arm too tightly, but his grasp no longer hurts. Creon releases her. He knows his reign makes him loathsome but he has no choice. Antigone rejoins that he should have said no; she can say no to anything she thinks vile. While ruined, she is a queen. Because Creon said yes, he can only sentence her to death. Creon asks her to pity him then and live. Antigone replies that she is not here to understand, only to say no and die. Creon makes a final appeal, saying that Antigone needs to understand what goes on in the wings of her drama. As a child, she must have known her brothers made her parents unhappy. Polynices was a cruel, vicious voluptuary. Being too cowardly to imprison him, Oedipus let him join the Argive army. As soon as Polynices reached Argos, the attempts on Oedipus' life began. But Eteocles, Thebes' martyr, too plotted to overthrow his father. Both were gangsters. When Creon sent for their bodies, they were found mashed together in a bloody pulp. He had the prettier one brought in. Dazed, Antigone moves to go her room. Creon urges her to find Haemon and marry quickly. She must not waste her life and its happiness. Antigone challenges his servile happiness. She is of the tribe that asks questions and hates man's hope. A distraught Ismene rushes in, begging Antigone's forgiveness and promising to help her. Antigone rejects her, but she does not deserve to die with her. Ismene swears she will bury Polynices herself then. Antigone calls on Creon to have her arrested, warning him that her disease is catching. Creon relents. The

Chorus protests. Haemon enters and begs his father to stop the guards. Creon replies that the mob already knows the truth, and he can do nothing. Antigone sits before the First Guard in her cell; his is the last face she will see. The Guard rambles about his pay, rations, and professional quibbles. Antigone interrupts him, pointing out that she is soon to die. She asks how she is to be executed. The Guard informs her that she is to be immured. The Guard asks if he can do anything for her. She asks if he could give someone a letter, offering him her ring. Reluctant to endanger his job, the Guard suggests that she dictate her letter and he write it in his notebook in case they search his pockets. Antigone winces but accepts. She recites her letter, "Forgive me, my darling. You would all have been so happy except for Antigone." Suddenly a drum roll is heard, and the Guards lead Antigone out. The Chorus enters, announcing that it is Creon's turn. The Messenger delivers the news: Antigone had just been immured, when the crowd heard Haemon's moan from within. Creon howled for the slaves to remove the stones. Antigone had hung herself. Haemon then stabbed himself and lay beside Antigone in a pool of blood. Upon being told of Haemon's death, Eurydice finished her row of knitting, climbed to her room, and cut her throat. Creon is alone. The Chorus notes that truly if it had not been for Antigone, all would have been at peace. All who had to die have now died. Only the Guards are left, and the tragedy does not matter to them.

Character List Antigone - The play's tragic heroine. In the first moments of the play, Antigone is opposed to her radiant sister Ismene. Unlike her beautiful and docile sister, Antigone is sallow, withdrawn, and recalcitrant. Read an in-depth analysis of Antigone. Creon - Antigone's uncle. Creon is powerfully built, but a weary and wrinkled man suffering the burdens of rule. A practical man, he firmly distances himself from the tragic aspirations of Oedipus and his line. As he tells Antigone, his only interest is in political and social order. Creon is bound to ideas of good sense, simplicity, and the banal happiness of everyday life. Read an in-depth analysis of Creon. Ismene - Blonde, full-figured, and radiantly beautiful, the laughing, talkative Ismene is the good girl of the family. She is reasonable and understands her place, bowing to Creon's edict and attempting to dissuade Antigone from her act of rebellion. As in Sophocles' play, she is Antigone's foil. Ultimately she will recant and beg Antigone to allow her to join her in death. Though Antigone refuses, Ismene's conversion indicates how her resistance is contagious. Haemon - Antigone's young fiancé and son to Creon. Haemon appears twice in the play. In the first, he is rejected by Antigone; in the second, he begs his father for Antigone's life. Creon's refusal ruins his exalted view of his father. He too refuses the happiness that Creon offers him and follows Antigone to a tragic demise. Nurse - A traditional figure in Greek drama, the Nurse is an addition to the Antigone legend. She introduces an everyday, maternal element into the play that heightens the strangeness of the tragic world. Fussy, affectionate, and reassuring, she suffers no drama or tragedy but exists in the day-to-day tasks of caring for the two sisters. Her comforting presence returns Antigone to her girlhood. In her arms, Antigone superstitiously invests the Nurse with the power to ward off evil and keep her safe. Chorus - Anouilh reduces the Chorus, who appears as narrator and commentator. The Chorus frames the play with a prologue and epilogue, introducing the action and characters under the sign of fatality. In presenting the tragedy, the Chorus instructs the audience on proper spectatorship, reappearing at the tragedy's pivotal moments to comment on the action or the nature of tragedy itself. Along with playing narrator, the Chorus also attempts to intercede throughout the play, whether on the behalf of the Theban people or the horrified spectators. Read an in-depth analysis of Chorus.

Jonas - The three Guardsmen are interpolations into the Antigone legend, doubles for the rank-and-file fascist collaborators or collabos of Anouilh's day. The card-playing trio, made all the more mindless and indistinguishable in being grouped in three, emerges from a long stage tradition of the dull-witted police officer. They are eternally indifferent, innocent, and ready to serve.. Second Guard - Largely indistinguishable from his cohorts, the Second Guard jeeringly compares Antigone to an exhibitionist upon her arrest. Third Guard - The last of the indifferent Guardsmen, he is also largely indistinguishable from his cohorts. Messenger - Another typical figure of Greek drama who also appears in Sophocles' Antigone, the Messenger is a pale and solitary boy who bears the news of death. In the prologue, he casts a menacing shadow: as the Chorus notes, he remains apart from the others in his premonition of Haemon's death. Page - Creon's attendant. The Page is a figure of young innocence. He sees all, understands nothing, and is no help to anyone but one day may become either a Creon or an Antigone in his own right. Eurydice - Creon's kind, knitting wife whose only function, as the Chorus declares, is to knit in her room until it is her time to die. Her suicide is Creon's last punishment, leaving him entirely alone.

Antigone Antigone is the play's tragic heroine. In the first moments of the play, Antigone is opposed to her radiant sister Ismene. Unlike her beautiful and docile sister, Antigone is scrawny, sallow, withdrawn, and recalcitrant brat. Like Anouilh's Eurydice, the heroine of his play Eurydice, and Joan of Arc, Antigone has a boyish physique and curses her girlhood. She is the antithesis of the melodramatic heroine, the archetypal blond ingénue as embodied in Ismene. Antigone has always been difficult, terrorizing Ismene as a child, always insisting on the gratification of her desires, refusing to "understand" the limits placed on her. Her envy of Ismene is clear. Ismene is entirely of this world, the object of all men's desires. Thus she will at one point rob Ismene of her feminine accoutrements to seduce her fiancé Haemon. She fails, however, as such human pleasures are not meant for her. Generally audiences have received Anouilh's Antigone as a figure for French Resistance, Antigone appearing as the young girl who rises up alone against state power. Anouilh's adaptation strips Antigone's act of its moral, political, religious, and filial trappings, allowing it to emerge in all its gratuitousness. In the end, Antigone's tragedy rests in her refusal to cede on her desire. Against all prohibitions and without any just cause, she will bury her brother to the point of her own death. As we learn in her confrontation with Creon, this insistence on her desire locates her in a line of tragic heroes, specifically that of Oedipus. Like Oedipus, her insistence on her desire beyond the limits of reason render her ugly, abject, tabooed. In refusing to cede it, she moves outside the human community. As with Oedipus, it is precisely her moment of abjection, when she has lost all hope, when her tragic beauty emerges. Her beauty exerts a chilling fascination. As Ismene notes, Antigone is not beautiful like the rest, but beautiful in a way that stops children in the street, beautiful in a way that unsettles, frightens, and awes. Creon Antigone's uncle, the powerfully built King Creon is a weary, wrinkled man suffering the burdens of rule. Before the deaths of Oedipus and his sons, he dedicated himself to art patronage but has now surrendered himself entirely to the throne. A practical man, he firmly distances himself from the tragic aspirations of Oedipus and his line. As he tells Antigone, his only interest is in political and social order. Creon is bound to ideas of good sense, simplicity, and the banal happiness of everyday life. To Creon, life is but the happiness one makes, the happiness that inheres in a grasped tool, a garden bench, a child playing at one's feet. Uninterested in playing the villain in his niece's tragedy, Creon has no desire to sentence Antigone to death. Antigone is far more useful

to Thebes as mother to its heir than as its martyr, and he orders her crime covered-up. Though fond of Antigone, Creon will have no choice but to but to execute her. As the recalcitrant Antigone makes clear, by saying "yes" to state power, Creon has committed himself to acts he finds loathsome if the order of the state demands it. Antigone's insistence on her desire in face of state power brings ruin into Thebes and to Creon specifically. With the death of his family, Creon is left utterly alone in the palace. His throne even robs him of his mourning, the king and his pace sadly shuttling off to a cabinet meeting after the announcement of the family's deaths. 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. The Chorus frames the play with a prologue and epilogue, introducing the action and characters under the sign of fatality. We see this fatalism most clearly perhaps its characteristic gesture of demonstration, prefacing many of its remarks with "Et voilà" in the original script. In presenting the tragedy, the Chorus would instruct the audience on proper spectatorship, reappearing at the tragedy's pivotal moments to comment on the action or the nature of tragedy itself. Along with playing narrator, the Chorus also attempts to intercede throughout the play, whether on the behalf of the Theban people or the horrified spectators. The Guards The three Guardsmen are interpolations into the Antigone legend, doubles for the rank-and-file fascist collaborators or collabos of Anouilh's day. The card-playing trio, made all the more mindless and indistinguishable in being grouped in three, emerges from a long stage tradition of the dull-witted police officer. As the Chorus notes, they smell of garlic and beer, concern themselves with the mundane, and are in general not bad people. Serving as a spokesman of sorts, the First Guard gives voice to their thoughts: they follow orders, and they cover for themselves when things go wrong. They are eternally indifferent, innocent, and ready to serve whatever powers that be. In other words, they have no particular loyalty to Creon. As the Chorus indicates, they would arrest him if need be. This indifference makes them brutal and dangerous. Some critics have taken Anouilh's guards, which stand in contrast to the royal heroes of tragedy, as the clearest manifestation of his "aristocratic pessimism." Importantly, the Guards also figure as inappropriate spectators: men left entirely untouched by the tragedy that unfolds before them. The Chorus makes this especially clear in the prologue and epilogue, where the trio appears idly playing cards. As the Chorus notes, the tragedy is "no skin of their backs." In this respect, the indifferent trio recalls the guardsmen from Anouilh's other tragedies, such as the guard whose chatter about the harvest close his Medea.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols Themes 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 meta-theatrical 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. Tension of the tragic plot is the tension of a spring: the most haphazard event sets it on its inexorable march: in some sense, it has been lying in wait for its catalyst. Tragedy belongs to an order outside human time and action. It will realize itself in spite of its players and all their attempts at intervention. Anouilh himself commented on the paradoxical nature of this suspense: "What was beautiful and is still beautiful about the time of the Greeks is knowing the end in advance. That is "real" suspense…" As the Chorus notes, in tragedy

everything has "already happened." Anouilh's spectator has surrendered, masochistically, to a succession of events it can hardly bear to watch. "Suspense" here is the time before those events' realization. Having compared tragedy to other media, the Chorus then sets it off generically, specifically from the genre of melodrama. Tragedy is "restful" and "flawless," free of melodramatic stock characters, dialogues, and plot complications. All is inevitable. This inevitability lends, in spite of tragedy's tension, the genre "tranquility." Moreover, it gives its players innocence as they are only there to play their parts. Though Creon will later accuse Antigone of casting him as the "villain" in her little melodrama, the players are embroiled in a far more inexorable mechanism. Again, note the incommensurabilities between Anouilh's theory of the tragic and political allegory. The latter is necessarily engaged in the generally pedagogical passing of ethico-politico judgment, the arbitration of innocence, guilt, and complicity. Though tragic players face judgment, they do so on rather different terms. 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. Though the Chorus emphasizes the play's distance from conventional melodrama, it is interesting to note how, in revision the opposition in Sophocles' version, it perhaps imports the good girl/bad girl structure typical of this genre, not to mention a number of rather "sentimental" scenes. Ismene advises moderation, understanding, and capitulation. They must take Creon's obligations into account. Anouilh develops another form of rivalry between the sisters with regards to femininity. Whereas Ismene is the appropriate, beautiful girl, Antigone curses her girlhood. Antigone in particular manifests her hatred for the ideal of femininity Ismene incarnates in their childhood, brutally binding her sister to a tree to stage her mutilation. Anouilh attributes Antigone's hate and envy in Ismene's capacity to figure as an object of desire, as the woman men want. Thus, in attempting to seduce Haemon and become "his woman," Antigone steals Ismene's goods— lipstick, rouge, perfume, powder, and frock—in another act of sisterly dismemberment. Through Ismene, Antigone would be a woman; as we will see, however, such "human" pleasures are not meant for her. Motifs 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. In the prologue, it directly addresses the audience and is selfconscious with regards to the spectacle: "we" are here tonight to take part in the story of Antigone. Like its ancient predecessor, Anouilh's Chorus prepares a ritual, instructing the audience on proper spectatorship. The Chorus then reappears throughout the play, marking its another turning points and futilely interceding into the action on "our"—that is, the spectators' and Theban people's—behalfs. 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. Antigone announces this beauty throughout her encounter with Creon. Specifically Oedipus emerges as its model. Oedipus' moment of beauty comes at his moment of total abjection, the moment when he knew all and had lost all servile hope and passed beyond the human community in his transgression of its founding taboo. Like Oedipus, Antigone will become "beautiful" at the moment of his total ruin. As Ismene notes, Antigone's beauty is somehow not of this world, the kind of beauty that turns the heads of small children— be it in fear, awe, and otherwise.

The Tomb/Bridal Bed A number of commentators have cast Antigone as a figure "between two deaths," what we will refer to here as her death as a social or even human being and her death as her demise. The space between two deaths is most certainly materialized her tomb, the cave in which she, as a tabooed and abject body, is to be immured to keep her from polluting the polis. Her death sentence makes her more wretched than animals; such is her "Oedipal" beauty, a beauty in her inhuman abjection. As she appears to sense, however, she will not die alone. Her "tomb" will also serve as her "bridal bed," Antigone ultimately bringing Haemon with her to the grave. Strangely, another of the tragedy's victim—Queen Eurydice—meets her demise in another tomb that doubles as bridal chamber. Eurydice dies in her bedroom—bedecked by familiar, comforting feminine accoutrements, appearing as a maiden queen of sorts, having scarcely changed since her first night with Creon. The wound in her neck appears all the more horrible in marring her virgin neck. Her death would appear all the more tragic because she dies in all her "feminine" purity. Symbols 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. Creon's attack Anouilh symbolizes Antigone's transcendence of state power with Creon's assault on her person during their confrontation. Enraged by her proud defiance and his inability to sway her, Creon seizes Antigone and twists her to his side. The immediate pain passes, however: Creon squeezes to tightly, and Antigone feels nothing. Thus Antigone passes beyond the reach of state power and the realm of men. 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.

Part I Summary The cast sits about palace. The Chorus descends from the top of the staircase and introduces the players to the audience. It begins with Antigone, explaining that she is about to "burst forth as the tense, sallow, willful girl" who will rise up alone against the king and die young. With the rise of the curtain, she began to feel the inhuman forces drawing her from the world of those who watch her now. They watch with little concern, for they are not to die tonight. The Chorus then introduces the chatting pair, Haemon, Antigone's dashing fiancé, and Ismene, her radiantly beautiful sister. They recount that though one would have expected Haemon to go for Ismene, he inexplicably proposed to Antigone on the night of a ball. He does not know his engagement only earns him the right to die sooner. The Chorus then turns to the powerfully built Creon, king of Thebes. When he was younger, and Oedipus ruled, he was an art patron. The death of Oedipus and his sons bound him to the weary duties of rule. Next to the sisters' Nurse sits the good Queen Eurydice. She knits and will go on knitting until the time comes for her to go to her room and die. The Messenger stands against the wall, brooding over his premonition of Haemon's death.

Finally the Chorus presents the three red-faced, card-playing guards. They are common policemen, bothered by the worries of the day-to-day, eternally innocent, indifferent, and prepared to arrest anyone under any leader. The Chorus then recounts the events leading up to Antigone's tragedy. During their recitation, the stage goes dark, a spotlight illuminates the faces of the Chorus, and the characters disappear through the left arch. Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene's father, also had two sons, Eteocles and Polynices. Upon his death, it was agreed that they would each take the throne from one year to the next. After the first year, however, Eteocles, the elder, refused to step down. Polynices and six foreign princes charged the seven gates of Thebes and all were defeated. The brothers killed each other in a duel, leaving Creon king. Creon ordered Eteocles buried in honor and left Polynices to rot. Furthermore, any who attempt to bury him will be put to death. It is an ashen dawn and the house is still asleep. Antigone sneaks in from the outside. The Nurse appears and asks where she has been; she was not there when she went to check if she had flung her blanket off in the night. "Nowhere," Antigone replies, musing on how beautiful the world is when gray, how lovely the garden is when not thinking of men. The whole world was "breathless, waiting," though not for her. The Nurse asks angrily if she went to meet someone—perhaps a lover. Antigone assents. The Nurse is outraged and says that girls are all the same. Even Antigone, who never used to wear makeup, primp in front of the mirror, and ogle boys like Ismene. She was convinced Antigone would be alone for life. Now she knows she is a hypocrite. Analysis Antigone unfolds almost entirely in the course of one day, in one space (the palace), and in largely uninterrupted dialogue/action. Though dispensing with act divisions, Antigone thus relies on the dramatic unities as appropriated by the French classicists. The Chorus frames the tragedy with a prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, the Chorus directly addresses the audience and appears self-conscious with regards to the spectacle; we are here tonight to take part in the story of Antigone. Unlike conventional melodrama, for example, we are not asked to suspend our disbelief or watch a spectacle that would seamlessly pass itself off as reality. In some sense, like its ancient predecessor, Anouilh's Chorus prepares a ritual—the absence of such rituals in modern theater perhaps explains why this first scene might seem somewhat "artificial." In preparing its ritual, the Chorus would instruct the audience on proper spectatorship. Note, in particular, the ironic jab that the spectator need not upset himself as the tragedy does not affect him. This jab recalls the trio of crude and indifferent guardsmen, which the Chorus will cast in similar terms. Unlike the guardsmen, we have come to the tragedy to be upset. The Chorus, who ultimately enters a spotlight, also recounts the events leading to Antigone's story and introduces all of its players under the sign of fatality. They have come to play their roles and, if such is their fate, die. The Chorus is omniscient, narrating the characters' thoughts: their roles, already predestined, should be selfevident, even if the reason they come to doom is ultimately not. Thus the Chorus traces each character's fate. Antigone is here to rebel and die; Creon is the unwilling king; Eurydice's role is but to die in her room; the guardsmen emblematicize the common rank-and-file. Importantly, it also establishes a key contrast between the two sisters: Ismene the full-figured beauty and Antigone the scrawny, sullen brat. The action begins at dawn. Unlike in the Sophocle's Antigone, Antigone has already committed the crime, though the play, perhaps relying on the spectator's memory of the Sophocles's version, keeps this revelation in suspense in the first scenes. Anouilh himself commented on the paradoxical nature of this suspense: "What was beautiful and is still beautiful about the time of the Greeks is knowing the end in advance. That is real suspense. As the Chorus notes, in tragedy everything has "already happened." Anouilh's spectator has surrendered, masochistically, to a succession of events it can hardly bear to watch. Suspense here is the time before the realization of those events. Thus Antigone's death is prefigured in her first words. The first scene involves Antigone and her fussy, aging Nurse. Their touching relationship is one of the more sentimental in the play: note especially Antigone's entrusting her dog, Puff, to the Nurse's care. Like many of Anouilh's heroines, Antigone wanders nowhere in a gray world, a world beyond the postcard 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,

this world does not lie in wait for Antigone—she is meant to pass onto another, one beyond the living. Firmly located in her care-taking duties, the Nurse understands none of Antigone's ramblings. Instead, she bluntly asks if Antigone has taken a lover. Though Antigone is the opposite of the coquettish and hyper-feminine Ismene, to the Nurse she is just the same—another young, foolhardy girl like the rest of them. The Nurse does not appreciate what makes Antigone different from other girls. Notably, Antigone tells the Nurse what she wants to hear—in some sense confirming that she is like the rest— and feigns that she has a paramour. We should weigh this subterfuge carefully. First, as we will discuss later, Antigone has gone out to attempt to become someone's lover, Haemon, having donned her sister's accoutrements to attempt to participate in pleasures that are not meant for her. Second, it is not for nothing that Antigone feigns to have taken a lover after having an illicit visit to her brother's corpse. This feint evokes a familiar trope in the Antigone tradition, that of Antigone's unnatural love for her brother. This love numbers among the desires Antigone refuses to surrender, desires she will follow to the point of death. Though somewhat suppressed in Anouilh's adaptation, this desire haunts the stage nevertheless.

Part II Summary The Nurse shudders to think of what Creon and Haemon will think, and certainly Antigone's mother will reproach her in the underworld. Antigone bids the Nurse not to cry: she was only teasing. She embraces her "sweet red apple" and swears to her purity. The Nurse must not cry as it turns Antigone into a little girl, and she cannot be a girl today. Suddenly a sleepless Ismene enters, also asking where Antigone has been. The Nurse chastises them both for rising so early. Antigone sends her away for coffee. She tells Ismene she should not forgo her beauty sleep. She recalls how she was such a beastly sister, flinging mud and worms at her, tying her to a tree and cutting off her hair. How easy it must be to never be unreasonable with all that "smooth silken hair" set around her head. Ismene abruptly interrupts Antigone, saying they cannot bury Polynices, as Creon will put them to death. But Antigone is unmoved, and replies that it is his purpose, just as theirs is to bury their brother. Ismene insists that she behaves too impulsively. She sort of sees what Creon intends with his edict, and that he must set an example. Antigone rejoins that she, the nasty, willful brat, does not understand. The family has always told her to understand, to not play with water or earth, to not eat from every dish at once, to not run in the wind, or give empty one's pockets for beggars. Ismene warns that Creon has the mob with him, a mob of thousands arms and eyes that will drag them to the scaffold. Antigone pushes Ismene off. Ismene enjoins her to be sensible, since only men die for ideas. Ismene tells Antigone that Antigone is a young and beautiful girl engaged to be married. Antigone retorts that she is not beautiful. Ismene disagrees, saying that she always gives the little boys and girls pause in the streets. Antigone bids her to go back to bed; the sun is up, and she can do nothing today. Ismene retires. The Nurse reappears, calling Antigone to breakfast. Antigone asks the Nurse to keep her warm and safe as she always has, explaining that she is too young for what she must endure. The Nurse is stronger than fever, nightmare, shadow, and night. Her powerful hand, which Antigone presses to her check, wards off all evil. The Nurse implores her to explain. Antigone makes a request that the Nurse must never scold her dog Puff again and talk to her as she does, especially if, for whatever reason, she can no longer. If she gets too unhappy, she should put her to sleep. Indignant and perplexed, the Nurse agrees. Suddenly Haemon enters and the Nurse departs. The betrothed embrace, and Antigone begs his forgiveness. Smiling, Haemon replies that he already had when she stormed out. He wonders from whom she stole the perfume, rouge, powder, and frock. Antigone admits that she filched them from Ismene. She was a fool to waste an evening, especially when they may not have many more. She asks Haemon to hold her with all his strength.

Analysis As with Sophocles's 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. Though the Chorus will later emphasize the play's distance from conventional melodrama, it is interesting to note how, in revising the opposition in Sophocles's version, it imports the good girl/bad girl structure typical of this genre, not to mention a number of rather sentimentally melodramatic scenes. Here, Ismene advises moderation, understanding, and capitulation to difficult sister. They must both take Creon's obligations into account. In any case, women do not die for ideas, only men do. Ismene also conjures the specter of the howling mob, the mob that would stare them down with its thousands of eyes become one, and the guards that would defile them with their beastly hands. A number of critics have underlined this mob as central to the anti-fascist polemic mounted in the play. Strangely, in this nightmare, the spectator perhaps hears the cowardly Ismene's attraction to this fantasy of martyrdom. The sisters' humiliation appears in erotic terms, involving fantasies of looking and touching that culminate in their ecstatic scream of pain. This fantasy indicates that Ismene knows all too well that women do die for ideas. Ismene's attraction to martyrdom perhaps explains her ultimate conversion to Antigone's cause. As we will see later, Antigone has little interest in playing the public martyr. Her agenda belongs to her alone. Interestingly, in contrast to conventional readings of the Antigone legend, here Anouilh's Antigone does not defend her act of rebellion in the name of filial or religious loyalty. Instead, she casts her act in terms of her desire. Just as she always played with water, ate from all the plates at once, or went swimming at dawn, she will bury Polynices. Throughout the play, we will follow the tension that occurs between Antigone's insistence on her desire and her political heroism. Refusing to understand those around her, she will follow her desire to the point of death. In this sense, Antigone departs from the human and becomes a tragic heroine. Thus, as Ismene notes, her beauty as such a heroine is somehow not of this world, the kind of beauty that turns the heads of small children—in fear, awe, and otherwise. With Antigone's beauty in mind, Anouilh develops another form of rivalry between the sisters with regards to femininity. Antigone curses her girlhood. She manifests her hatred for the ideal of femininity Ismene incarnates in their childhood, brutally binding her sister to a tree to stage her mutilation. This reminiscence of torture is perhaps related Ismene's own vision of being defiled by the mob and guards. In any case, Anouilh attributes Antigone's hate and envy in Ismene's capacity to figure as an object of desire, as the woman men want. Thus, in attempting to seduce Haemon and become "his woman," Antigone steals Ismene's goods—lipstick, rouge, perfume, powder, and frock—in another act of sisterly dismemberment. Through Ismene, Antigone could be a woman. But as we will see, such human pleasures are not meant for her. Antigone's exchange with Ismene is followed by another exchange with the Nurse, in which she desperately seeks solace from the fate that has been set in motion. For Antigone, the Nurse assumes an apotrophaic, that which wards off evil, capacity. Note how Antigone's speech on the Nurse's strength ("Stronger than all fever…") reads like an incantation. For Antigone, the Nurse is stronger even than death; her callused hand wards off evil like an amulet. Antigone's pleas for protection echo the promises she will later make to Haemon—that she would have been a "real mother" to their son and kept him safe from all. Antigone poses the world as something to be afraid of, conjuring the fevers, nightmares, silences, beasts, and other unknown forces that menace her from the darkness.

Part III Summary Breathless, Antigone tells Haemon that she would have protected their son against everything in the world, and that he would have feared nothing. Though his mother would have not been imposing, she would have been stronger than those "real mothers." Instead, she would have been Haemon's "real wife." Antigone asks him if he is sure he loved her the night he proposed, that he did not want Ismene instead. His arms and hands do no lie— he loves her as a woman. Haemon assures her that he loves her exactly as she loves him, with all of himself.

Ashamed, Antigone implores him to tell her the truth. When he thinks of her, she asks whether he senses that a "great empty space is being hollowed out" inside him and that something inside him is dying. Haemon assents; Antigone feels the same. Antigone draws away, announcing that she has two more things to say. Haemon must, however, swear to leave instantly after she does. He reluctantly swears. Antigone explains that she came to Haemon in Ismene's accoutrements because she wanted to become his wife before their wedding because she will never be able to marry him. Stupefied, Haemon departs. Ismene enters, terrified that Antigone will attempt to bury Polynices despite the daylight. Antigone says that Polynices is dead and never loved her, instead he was like an enemy in the house. Antigone tells her she is too late and she has just come from burying him. Later in the day, Creon stands on the top step with his Page. The nervous First Guard enters, and Creon asks what has happened with the body. The Guard explains that he has been in the service for seventeen years, is known for his obedience, and is due for a promotion. Creon interrupts his chattering. The Guard continues, saying that the men had the two o'clock watch, the toughest part of the night. When they were not looking, someone covered the body with a little dirt last night. The guards heard nothing, only discovering a kid's shovel on the scene. Creon mutters in disbelief: he broke the back of the rebellion in the banks, the public square, and the temples, and a kid rebels. He will undoubtedly become a martyr. He orders the guards to uncover the body and keep the matter secret, on the pain of death. The Guard excitedly promises to obey and Creon orders him out. Creon turns to the Page and muses that he will have to "clean up the mess." He asks if the Pace would die for him, and he replies that of course he would defy the Guard with his shovel. Both exit. The Chorus appears and announces that the tragedy is on. Its spring is wound, and it will uncoil by itself. Anything will set it going—a glance, one question too many—and the rest is automatic. The machine has been oiled since time began. Death, treason, and sorrow are "on the march," moving in the wake of storm, tears, and stillness. Analysis The lovers' dialogue is another of the play's more sentimental scenes, in which Antigone, after a flurry of sighs and embraces, resolutely bids Haemon farewell. It proceeds according to what "would have been": Antigone imagines their son and herself as a "real wife." She assures herself of Haemon's love, which he articulates in typically narcissistic terms: "I love you exactly as you love me. With all of myself." What is more pressing to Antigone, however, is Haemon's desire, a desire that, in her fantasies, must truly belong with her rival, Ismene. Thus, after his declarations of love, she continues to ask him if his caresses do not lie, if she wants her as a woman, if he does not really want Ismene after all. This desire is predicated on a sense of lack, of insufficiency, the "hollow space" that, despite the fullness their love promises, opens within the lovers whenever they think of each other. The melodramatic nature of this subplot is most clear. Part of the pathos of the scene lies in Antigone's desire remaining unfulfilled. She went to Haemon, having somewhat chilling donned Ismene's guise, to become a woman, and will not die with their love unconsummated. At the same time, the play is also clearly invested in Antigone's virgin death. Her sexual purity, a chastity she takes to the grave, is currency for achieving a tragic effect. Haemon's departure and the revelation of Antigone's already-committed crime give way to the scene of its report to Creon. Creon learns of her crime through the first of the three costumed guards. The card-playing trio, made all the more mindless and indistinguishable in being grouped in three, emerges from a long tradition of the dullwitted rank-and-file officer. As the Chorus notes, they smell of garlic and beer. Jonas gives voice to their thoughts: they follow orders and they cover for themselves when things go wrong. They are eternally indifferent, innocent, and ready to serve whatever powers that be. Thus the guards serve as thinly veiled doubles for the fascist collaborators orcollabos of Anouilh's day. Though enraged by the news, the ever-practical Creon orders an immediate cover- up. The kid's shovel also seems to evoke an allegory of the Resistance. Though Creon has broken the back of the organized resistance, the lone child, perhaps a double for the boy who ostensibly inspired Anouilh's adaptation, rebels, readily

presenting himself for martyrdom. The play is clearly drawn to this image of youthful resistance. Chillingly Creon then turns to the Page. It would seem that he both muses about the Page's potential betrayals and wonders if he could use him in a cover-up. That is, pin the crime on the child and offer him up to the mob. Here the overtones of totalitarianism in Creon's rule are probably the most explicit. The scene then breaks and the Chorus returns, announcing that the tragedy has occurred. His speech offers a meta-theatrical 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. Tension of the tragic plot is the tension of a spring. The most haphazard event sets it on its inexorable march; tension has been lying in wait for its catalyst. Tragedy belongs to an order outside human time and action. It will realize itself in spite of its players and all their attempts at intervention.

Part IV Summary The Chorus continues, evoking tragedy's stillness in the hush when the executioner raises his ax, the silence when two lovers stand naked before each other for the first time, the silence within when the roaring crowd acclaims a winner, leaving you, "the victor, already vanquished," alone in the desert. Tragedy is clean, restful, and flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama. In tragedy, everything is inevitable, hopeless, and known, making for tranquility and "fellow-feeling" among the characters. All are innocent, simply bound to their parts. All one can do is shout. The Guards are heard and the Chorus announces that Antigone has been caught and will be able to be herself for the first time in her life. The Guards enter with the struggling Antigone, the First telling her to give it a rest. Antigone complains of their dirty hands; the Guard gestures to her own. Imagine taking a tobacco break only to find a girl clawing away by the corpse like a hyena. The Second Guard compares her to a nut who exposed herself in the main square the other day. The First proposes that they throw a party. The trio discusses plans, the First insisting that they keep it from their wives. Creon and the Page enter, and the guards stand at attention. The First explains Antigone's arrest. The guards had moved the corpse upwind to mitigate the stench. When he took a break for some tobacco, he found her madly clawing in the broad daylight. Antigone affirms his account and also confesses to having come the night before; the child's shovel on the scene was once Polynices's. The First Guard remarks how one sentry thought she was a dog. Creon sends the guards out. Once he is certain no one saw Antigone arrested, he orders her to bed. She is to say that she has been ill and not left the palace. He will get rid of the guardsmen. Antigone replies that he knows she will only do the same tonight. She says that Polynices is home from the hunt and it is her duty to unlock the house of the dead for him. Creon asks if she thought her being the proud Oedipus's daughter put her above the law. No one has a more sacred obligation to the law than its makers. Antigone retorts that had she been a scullery maid she would have done the same. Creon disagrees and a maid would have taken the edict seriously. Antigone replies that she has never doubted Creon would put her to death. Creon curses the pride of Oedipus. Like him, her death seem the "natural climax" to her life. For them, human happiness is meaningless and human misery unable to satisfy their passion. Only a "cozy tea party" with death and destiny can quench them. Oedipus was happiest when he listened greedily to the revelation of his tragic fate. But those days are over for Thebes. Being more humbly named, Creon will devote himself only to the order of the kingdom. Analysis The Chorus continues its comments on tragedy by underlining its stillness. Stillness appears as a key metaphor in the Chorus's comments on the nature of tragedy. First the Chorus evokes this stillness in its theatrical mode. This stillness is apiece with the spring-like tension and sense of suspense in tragedy that it evokes earlier.

Tragedy's stillness appears in the moment before the execution, the moment at the beginning of a play before the consummation of a love affair. This tension only finds release in the terrible, ecstatic shout. Note this conjunction of sex and death. The stillness of sex and death is precisely where the play's two lovers will ultimately end, lain together in the tomb that figures also as their "bridal bed." Strangely, the Chorus then invokes a filmic metaphor. Tragic stillness is the silence within the spectator when the crowd acclaims the victor. This stillness within perhaps recalls the "hollow space" imagined by Antigone earlier. This inner silence turns the outer world into "no more than a picture," a film without a sound track. This separation of sound from the image of the world is a dissociation of the spectator from that world as well. Again, two disjunctions are at work here: that of the sound from the image and the spectator from the world-become image. The Chorus shifts from a theatrical to filmic metaphor here because these experiences of disjunction are inherent to the cinematic apparatus. The spectator is then identified with the already vanquished victor, who is similarly alone in a desert of silence, similarly disjoined from the world. This disjunction from the world is the plight of the tragic hero and spectator who identifies himself with him. Having compared tragedy to other media, the Chorus then sets it off generically, dissociating it specifically from the genre of melodrama. Tragedy is restful and flawless, free of melodramatic stock characters, dialogues, and plot complications. All is inevitable, which lends, in spite of tragedy's tension, the genre tranquility. Moreover, it gives its players innocence, as they are only there to play their parts. Though Creon will later accuse Antigone of casting him as the villain in her little melodrama, the players are embroiled in different mechanism. Again, note here the differences between Anouilh's theory of the tragic and political allegory. The latter is necessarily engaged in the generally pedagogical passing of political and ethical judgment, the arbitration of innocence, guilt, and complicity. Though tragic players face judgment, they do so on different terms. The Chorus retires, and the Guards bring forth the arrested Antigone. Though not quite a passion, this scene is Antigone's disgrace. The Guards are alternatively brutal, insulting, and indifferent to her plight. Anouilh comically imagines their indifference in their banal party squabbles. Again, the Guards will remain impervious to the tragedy before them. At the same time, under their insults Antigone, filthy, bruised, and with nails torn, begins her descent into abjection. Her insistence on her desire makes her inhuman. Conjuring her wild behavior at the scene of the crime, the First Guard compares her to a hyena. His colleagues thought she was a dog, not a girl. Antigone reminds the Second Guard of an exhibitionist. There is something decidedly perverse in her desires, something amiss in her carrying on in broad daylight. The encounter between Creon and Antigone, the most pivotal dialogue of the play, then ensues. Though displeased by Antigone's disobedience, Creon's impulse is to cover it up, and he sends Antigone to her room. Creon will rather wryly bring a decidedly worldly set of prerogatives to bear on Antigone's tragedy, perhaps giving voice to the criticisms of many of Antigone's modern readers might make today. As Creon makes clear, his only interest is state order. Antigone's role as the mother to the next heir is far more valuable to Thebes than her death. Creon curses Antigone's tragic aspirations, aspirations that mark her as Oedipus' child. Like Oedipus, Antigone finds human happiness meaningless, and human misery cannot satisfy her thirst for torment. She too seeks a "cozy tea party with death and destiny." She believes tragic death to be the "natural climax" to her existence. Like Oedipus, she will be never happier than at the moment of her absolute ruin and abjection. We will return to his moment, what Antigone will call the moment of Oedipus's beauty, when Antigone invokes her lineage herself at the end of their dialogue. Against this tragic lineage, Creon imagines himself of humbler birth. If he was in Oedipus's place, he hardly would have given into such private concerns.

Part V Summary Creon assures Antigone that he does not romanticize his work: ruling is his trade, and a trade he takes seriously. If some wild messenger was to tell him tomorrow his wife was his mother, he would hardly surrender himself to his private feelings. Nor will he execute Antigone today, as she is mother of the next heir, and her marriage is

worth more to Thebes than her death. Moreover, though she may think him prosaic, he is fond of her. Antigone moves wordlessly to the arch. Creon warns her that if anyone else knows of her crime, he will have to execute her. Her act will do no good. Antigone insists that she must do what she can. After a pause, Creon asks if she really believes in the desecrating "mass- production jibber-jabber" of the priests she has seen so many times. Antigone agrees to its absurdity. Creon asks for whose sake then does Antigone go. Antigone replies that she acts only for herself. Creon declares that he wants to save her. Antigone retorts that while he is an all-powerful king, he cannot do so. Aware that Antigone has cast him as the villain of her play, Creon warns her against going to far. He was been far more generous than the average tyrant, and she taunts him when she can see the hesitation in his face. Angrily he seizes her arm. Antigone moans in pain and he twists her to his side. After a pause, Antigone remarks that Creon is squeezing her arm too tightly and his grasp no longer hurts. Creon releases her. Creon insists that he will not let politics cause her death. The entire story comes down to politics. He finds rotting corpses as nauseating as Antigone, and he would have buried Polynices as a matter of public hygiene. But to educate the masses, his stench must fill the town for a month. He agrees that his reign makes him loathsome but he has no choice. Antigone rejoins that he should have said no; she can say no to anything she thinks vile. Because Creon said yes, he can only, for all his trappings, sentence her to death. Antigone knows that she frightens her uncle and his fate frightens him. Creon concurs. Antigone cries that while her nails are broken, her fingers bleeding, and her arms covered in welts, she is a queen. Creon asks her to pity him then and live. There had to be a man who said yes because the ship of state was sinking. On such a sinking ship, nothing can have a name except the ship itself and the storm. Antigone replies that she is not here to understand, only to say no and die. Creon rejoins that it is easy to say no, no is a man-made word. The beasts cannot say no to hunger and propagation. They persevere in their simple, good, and obstinate will. Antigone jeers that Creon would be quite the king if men were animals. Analysis Creon's attempt to save Antigone continues. First, changing his rhetoric, he caricaturizes the funeral rite. As Antigone knows, the priests practice but "mass-production jibber-jabber." Moreover, the Polynices's affair comes down entirely to politics. Creon himself would rather have Polynices buried; he only needs his corpse as an object lesson to the unruly masses. In asking why and in whose name Antigone has rebelled, Creon will progressively strip Antigone's act of its external motivations, be they moral, filial, religious, political, or otherwise. This stripping will appear most explicitly in his unmasking of her brothers. As we will see, Antigone's act will come to "not matter" in terms of filial loyalty, religious devotion, insurrection, and onward. Antigone will have no "just cause," no human reason for bringing herself to the point of death: her act is senseless, gratuitous. Antigone clings to her desire despite its madness. Antigone's appeal to her sisterly duty to her brother is a front. As she tells in Creon, she acts in her own name. As the Chorus says, Antigone's act and arrest finally enable her to be herself. This insistence on her desire puts her beyond the Creon's reach. Anouilh starkly demonstrates Antigone's transcendence with Creon's assault on her person. Enraged by her proud defiance and his inability to sway her, Creon seizes Antigone and twists her to his side. The immediate pain passes. Creon squeezes too tightly and Antigone feels nothing. Her act locates her beyond state power. As she cries throughout, her role is to refuse to understand, to say no simply to whatever she finds vile when others would endure in beast-like fashion. Again this no is not against state oppression or injustice. It is not in the name of liberation, but in the assertion of Antigone's desire. As we will see, Antigone's no makes her a tabooed body that passes outside the human community. Here she revels in her abjection. While her nails are broken, her fingers bleeding, and her arms covered in welts, she is an exalted queen. Antigone's inflexible insistence on her desire reduces Creon to asking for her pity. Despite all his trappings of power, Creon finds himself helpless, unable to act on his own. He wants not to execute Antigone but cannot help

ordering her death. Having said yes to state power, he is circumscribed by his own kingship, by very the throne that makes him the master of the land. He has surrendered himself entirely to the ship of state and knows his circumscription all too well. As he tells Antigone, conjuring the storm-tossed ship as an extended metaphor for the beleaguered Thebes, the ship of state demands that all on board lose their names. Only the ship and the storm remain. To save the ship, Creon has had to terrorize the mob into obedience. He has lost his ties with his family, his life, and other men. Unlike Antigone, he has completely ceded his desires to take upon the mantle of governance. A double for the collaborationist head of state, Creon is rendered loathsome, terrified of what his office requires of him and yet unable to act otherwise.

Part VI Summary Creon murmurs that Antigone must hate him. He has long imagined this conversation, seeing a white-faced boy who would come to assassin him and, despite all Creon's efforts, would only tell him he despised him. He cannot believe that boy is Antigone, coming to him over something so meaningless as Polynices's burial. "Meaningless!" Antigone repeats contemptuously. Creon makes a final appeal that he will tell her the story he alone knows. Antigone sits. He asks her to remember her childhood—how her brothers would torment her and then, when they were older, they would come home late in evening clothes and smoking cigarettes. She must have known they were making her parents unhappy. Staring outward, Antigone recalls how a handsome Polynices once gave her a paper nightclub flower; Creon knows she must have looked to it for courage last night. Polynices, however, was but a "cruel, vicious little voluptuary." Creon recounts how he saw him strike his father once when he refused to settle his gambling debts. Antigone insists that he is lying. Creon continues and says that Oedipus was too cowardly to imprison him, so he let him join the Argive army. As soon as Polynices reached Argos, the attempts on Oedipus's life began. The assassins confessed the identities of their employees. Creon needs Antigone to understand what goes on in the "kitchen of politics," the wings of her drama. Yesterday he gave Eteocles a state funeral, making him Thebes's martyr. He had no choice: he could not afford a story of two gangsters after a civil war. But Eteocles to plotted to overthrow his father. Both brothers were gangsters, fighting over the spoils of Thebes. When Creon sent for their bodies, they were found mashed together in a bloody pulp. He had the prettier one brought in, but he does not know which was buried. Creon could not have Antigone die a victim to that "obscene story." Antigone murmurs that she at least had her faith. Dazed, she raises to go her room. Creon urges her to find Haemon and marry quickly, since she has her life before her. A moment ago, he hear himself in her words, the young, pale Creon whose mind was too filled with thoughts of self-sacrifice. She must not waste her life: the child playing at her feet, the tool, or the bench in the garden. Life is but the happiness you get out of it. Quietly, Antigone challenges him to paint the happy Antigone. She loves Haemon now, but if what she loves in Haemon is to be worn away by Creon's happiness, she will not love Haemon. She laughs at Creon because she sees the impotence he must have had at fifteen. Creon attempts to silence her. Antigone curses his happiness and she refuses his humdrum moderation. Creon tells her to scream on in her father's voice. Antigone cries that she is of the tribe that asks questions, that hates man's filthy, docile, female, and whorish hope. Father was ugly like her but became beautiful at the very end, when his questions were answered, when he could no longer doubt his crime, when all hope was gone. Analysis Creon makes his final appeal. The play imagines it as a story he alone knows, a story left unwritten in Antigone's tragic legend. It remains unwritten because it takes place in its wings, in what Creon describes as the "kitchen of politics." Creon proceeds to systematically demystify Antigone's beloved brothers as brutish, traitorous gangsters, boys who brought their family grief, attempted to assassinate their father, and threatened the kingdom with ruin.

More chillingly, Creon has had one declared a martyr and another a traitor for political purposes. Only this slightof-hand would resolve the civil war and bring order back to Thebes. Creon is not even sure who has been left unburied. This unveiling of the politics at work in the tragedy's wings, the machinations that more closely pass themselves off as the historical account that might accompany the tragedy's events, robs Antigone's act of all justification. As she tells Creon, she has lost her faith. Later she will confess she no longer knows why she must die. Antigone's act and march to death are now entirely gratuitous. Her insistence on her tragic fate reveals that their political, moral, filial, and religious motivations were entirely external. Again, what drives Antigone is her desire. Thus Creon offers the dazed Antigone the promise of human happiness: the pleasure in the banalities of the garden bench, the child playing at one's feet, and the tool in one's hand. This vision of human happiness provokes Antigone's final, fatal explosion. She refuses to moderate herself—she will have everything as beautiful as it was when she was a child or die. If Haemon and she stop thinking the other is dead when one is five minutes late or if he stops feeling utterly alone in the world when she laughs without his knowing why, she does not love him. Antigone insists on her desire in its unmeasured, infantile form. This insistence on her desire makes her monstrous. Once again, Creon tells Antigone to scream on in her father's voice, leading Antigone comes to claim her invoke her lineage against him. Again, against the common reading of the Antigone legend as a play about the conflict between family and state or public and private, Antigone does not appeal to Oedipus here in some sense of filial loyalty. She does so because Oedipus is the model of her abjection. Oedipus was ugly as she. Like Oedipus, however, she will become beautiful at the moment when he lost all hope, at the moment of his total ruin, the moment when he passed beyond the human community in his transgression of its founding taboo. Here Creon also introduces the figure of the thin and pale youth, the assassin whom Creon has long expected. As he tells Antigone, this assassin would remain impervious to all argument, replying to the king with his hatred alone. This youth clearly evokes the fantasmic rebel Creon first imagined upon the discovery of Polynices' shovel. To Creon's surprise, this youth has revealed himself to be Antigone. He is also, however, a double for Creon, or rather, a figure for Creon's adolescent self. Thus Creon hears his youthful voice in Antigone's. He sees in Antigone a self similarly committed to self-sacrifice. Perhaps this self could have also been the present Creon's enemy and assassin. Whatever the case, Antigone smashes this self-image that Creon sees in her body, insisting upon her radical alterity or otherness. Refusing to reflect his self-image, she laughs at Creon because she sees the same impotence he must have had as a boy.

Part VII Summary Creon struggles to cover Antigone's mouth: the anteroom is full, and everyone will hear her. A distraught Ismene rushes in, begging Antigone's forgiveness and promising to help. Antigone rejects her, saying that she does not deserve to die with her. Ismene swears she will bury Polynices herself then. Antigone calls on Creon to have her arrested, warning him that her disease is catching. Creon relents. "At last," cries Antigone, and the Guards take her away. Standing behind Creon, the Chorus tells Creon that he cannot let Antigone die: we will carry the "scar of her death" for centuries. Creon replies that death was her sole purpose and Polynices was but a pretext. Haemon enters and also begs his father to stop the guards. He must save her, lock her up and declare her mad. Creon replies that the nation will know he is making an exception for his son. The howling mob already knows the truth, and he can do nothing. Though master of Thebes, he is but master under the law. Creon urges Haemon to bear his sorrow; he must take up the burden of manhood. Aghast, Haemon wonders if Creon really was that "massive god" whom he loved as a child. Creon does not need to say yes to Antigone's death. He has no right to desert Haemon, to shrink into nothingness and leave the world bare. Creon replies that the world is bare, that Haemon is alone, and that he must see his father as he is.

Haemon flees, crying that he will not live without Antigone. The Chorus murmurs that he is "wounded to death." Creon replies that all of us are. Suddenly the Guards enter, dragging Antigone. They warn Creon that the mob is crowing into the palace. Antigone begs to be alone until her execution. Creon orders the palace emptied. The characters exit. Antigone sits before the pacing First Guard in her prison cell. She remarks that his is the last face she will see. She chides him for hurting her this morning upon her arrest. She asks him his age, whether he has children and if he loves them, and how long he has served in the Guard. The Guard rambles about his pay, the extra rations for his family, promotions, and quibbles between sergeants and guardsmen. "I see," Antigone replies, barely audible. She abruptly interrupts him, pointing out that she is soon to die. The Guard gapes at her and turns away. Antigone asks if he thinks it hurts to die. "How would I know?" scoffs the Guard, but he knows that a saber in the guts would hurt. Antigone asks him how she is to die. The Guard haltingly recites the proclamation from memory: to protect the city from her foul blood, Antigone is to be "im-mured-immured" or buried alive in a cave. The Guard proudly remarks that the Guard and not the Army will stand watch. Antigone murmurs that while a pair of animals can press together in the cold, she will be alone. Analysis Finally Antigone's obstinacy, the presence of the listening mob, and the infection of Ismene force Creon to relent. He plays the part for which he has been destined and sends Antigone to her glorious demise. Here the political allegory of resistance seems especially explicit. As Antigone has insisted throughout, Creon sends her to her death because the throne demands it of him. In saying yes to state power, he has submitted his will to the law. Antigone would subvert state authority, and the once-cowardly Ismene's recantation establishes such subversion as contagious. Thus Creon must condemn his niece. Once again Anouilh conjures the specter of the howling mob, the mob that Creon reigns and remains subject to. Once the mob knows of Antigone's crime he cannot save her. Posed against the mob, Antigone appears as the noble heroine. Ultimately, Anouilh saves Antigone the indignity of facing this mob; she has no interest in playing the martyr in public. Thus Anouilh leaves her to endure the brutalities of the rank-and-file sentry. The Chorus appears at this moment, marking it as another turning point in the automatic progression of Antigone's tale. As in classical tragedy, here the Chorus, functioning until this point as a narrator-figure, intercedes into the action. It enjoins Creon to stop the death sentence. Here the Chorus would directly stand in for the horrified spectator who would futilely protest Antigone's death. Creon's retort is telling. He could not have dissuaded her, as Polynices was a pretext for Antigone's ultimate purpose, death. As we have noted throughout, Antigone refuses cede on her desires, following them to point of her demise. This purpose—one that trumps political, moral, and even familial allegiances in the name of individual desire—is again in tension with the common reading of Anouilh's Antigone as Resistance fighter. As if automatically, Antigone's death sentence sets off Haemon's. As he tells his father, he will not live without her. Haemon stages his own confrontation with Creon, similarly refusing to "become a man" and accept his place in the human world. Unlike Antigone, he explicitly calls upon filial law. He believes that Creon should save Antigone because Haemon is his son. As with Antigone, Creon reveals himself as not the god that guaranteed the young Haemon's world but a man helplessly and loathsomely beholden to the law and state. Haemon refuses Creon's world and moves to join Antigone in death. Antigone then appears in her cell with the First Guard. The pathos of the scene inheres in Antigone's appeals to the last face she will see, a face that is blind and indifferent. The Guard, as small-minded as ever, responds unfeelingly, rambling on about the trivialities of his job. As with the discussion of the party during Antigone's arrest, Anouilh would thus contrast his heroine's high tragedy with the banalities that occupy the guardsmen. Again, the Guard is blind in his dogged and self-interested obedience to the powers that be, an obedience indicated by his halting, callous recitation of the official proclamation. As his replies to Antigone show, he is also brutal.

Antigone's appearance in her cell, the only setting we encounter outside the palace, as outcast and criminal also prefigures her movement into a space beyond the living and yet not the afterlife. A number of commentators have cast Antigone as a figure "between two deaths," what we will refer to here as her death as a social or even human being and her death as her demise. This space materialized is most certainly her tomb, the cave in which she, as a tabooed and abject body, is to be immured to keep her from polluting the polis. Her death sentence makes her more wretched than animals; such is her "Oedipal" beauty, a beauty in her total abjection. As she senses, however, she will not die alone. Her tomb will also serve as her "bridal bed," Antigone ultimately bringing Haemon with her to the grave.

Part VIII Summary The Guard asks if he can do anything for Antigone. She asks if he could give someone a letter after her death. As the Guard is reluctant to endanger his job, Antigone offers her gold ring. Still reluctant, the Guard suggest that she dictate her letter and he write it in his notebook in case they search his pockets. Antigone winces but accepts. She recites her letter, and the Guard mutters it back to her as he writes. She hesitates upon admitting that she does not even know what she is dying for and then asks the Guard to scratch it and the entire letter out. No one must know her doubt—it would be as if they were defiling her corpse. She begins anew: "Forgive me, my darling. You would all have been so happy except for Antigone." Suddenly a drum roll is heard, and the other Guards appear and lead Antigone out. The Chorus enters, announcing that it is Creon's turn. The Messenger appears, calling for the Queen. He tells the Chorus what has ensued: Antigone had just been immured, when the crowd heard Haemon's moan from within. Creon howled for the slaves to remove the stones, tearing at them himself with his bloody hands. They found Haemon holding Antigone's corpse: she had hung herself with the red and gold cord of her robe. Creon approached his son, but he remained deaf to his father's voice. Suddenly he then rose, struck Creon, and drew his sword. Staring at him in contempt, Haemon stabbed himself and lay beside Antigone in a pool of blood. Creon and the Page enter upon the Messenger's final words. Creon announces that he has laid the lovers out side-by-side. The Chorus warns that Creon has one thing more to learn regarding his wife's fate. Creon murmurs that Eurydice is a good woman, always knitting sweaters for the poor. The Chorus moans that the poor will go cold this winter. Upon being told of Haemon's death, she finished her row, climbed to her lavender-scented room, and cut her throat. Creon is alone. Creon tells the Page that while they do not know it, the truth is that the work has to be done. The Page should hope that he never grows up. He asks the time and it is five o'clock, and he has a cabinet meeting. They exit. The Chorus moves downstage that notes that it is true if it had not been for Antigone, all would have been at peace. But now all who had to die have died. They are stiff, useless, and rotting and will be forgotten. We shall never know the fever that consumed Antigone. The Guards then enter and resume their card-game. The Chorus remarks that only the Guards are left, and none of the tragedy matters to them. They go on playing cards. Analysis Here Antigone offers her last thoughts, delivering them through her letter to Haemon. Anouilh complicates the pathos of this message with its dictation to the Guard. The pathos of the scene thus also inheres in the final indignity that Antigone suffers. As before, the Guard considers the condemned Antigone with the same callous indifference. His job security ever in mind, he only agrees to transcribe her letter. As the bribe of the ring suggests, he acts out of vulgar self-interest alone. The ring is also a gift from Haemon, it evokes Antigone's lost love and the virginity she will take to the grave. As a number of critics have noted, Anouilh comically casts the transcription of Antigone's letter as that of a schoolboy doing dictation. The Guard licks his pencil, repeats her words dully, and asks her to slow down. The Guard's muttered repetition of Antigone's wrenching last words would rob it of its pathos. To the Guard, her farewell is a "damn funny letter."

Though addressed to Haemon, some critics have identified the letter as a subterfuge to communicate Antigone's last thoughts. Because these thoughts will never reach the living, and go unnoticed by the Guard, the letter's proper addressee is thus the audience. As we have seen, this opposition between the Guards and the proper spectator is central to the play. Here Antigone reveals her fear and uncertainty, but she does not know what she is dying for even as she knows she must die. If the living knew these last fears, what many critics have identified as her most human ones, they would defile her, rob her of her tragic glory by judging her according to the terms of common men. Perhaps Anouilh enjoins the audience here to resist doing the same. This confession recalls Antigone's struggle with Creon, which forced Antigone to understand that she dies for no just cause and in no one's name except hers and perhaps Oedipus's. Again, Anouilh would distill the political and moral from Antigone's death, making its purposelessness essential to the tragic. Antigone dies because she must: her desire requires it. This futility again complicates the familiar reading of Antigone as an allegory for the Resistance. Antigone's arrest gives way immediately to the denouement. True to classical convention, death takes place offstage in accordance with the rules of bienséance or the "good spectacle." The removal of death from the seen/scene of makes it all the more horrible in the spectator's imagination. The Messenger reports its occurrence, in some sense enunciating the death that has determined the drama throughout. Note especially the trope of the moan from the grave in the Messenger's account. In some sense, the characters marked by death have always been speaking from a place beyond the living. As predicted by Antigone, the tomb becomes the bridal bed, the resting place for the cursed lovers. The lovers preserve their love against the demands of life with their death. The Chorus then announces Eurydice's death. As established by the Chorus, Eurydice functions here as Creon's final lesson, that which condemns him to solitude. Before the Chorus announces her death, Creon fondly and sentimentally recalls his knitting, benevolent wife, a reminiscence made terrible by the death about to be announced, a death of which we already know. The end to Eurydice's knitting, an activity that marks her as the docile matriarch, is the end of her life, evoking the Greek myth of the life-thread spun, measured, and cut by the Fates. In announcing Eurydice's death, the Chorus evokes the domestic bedroom—bedecked by familiar, comforting feminine accoutrements—and, as with Antigone, makes it both bridal chamber and tomb. Eurydice dies a maiden queen, having scarcely changed since her first night with Creon. The wound in her neck appears all the more horrible in marring her virgin neck. Her death would appear all the more tragic because she dies in all her feminine purity. According to the dictates of tragedy, this rapid denouement aims at the audience's catharsis—that is, the provocation, through terror and pity, of a purgation of the passions. The "falling action" after the death announcements would bring this purgation to its close. Creon returns dully to the business of governance. His submission to the State robs him even of his grief. The Chorus then delivers an epitaph, announcing that those fated to die have died and will be forgotten and that a "melancholy wave of peace" has now fallen upon Thebes. The Guards make their final, ironic appearance, resuming their card-game from the beginning of the play. As the Chorus remarks, they remain untouched by the tragedy. The indifferent members of the rank-and-file would thus stand in an almost edifying contrast to the audience that has undergone, or should have undergone, its catharsis. I didn't say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don't have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that your can do is to have me killed. Explanation for Quotation 1 >> The political heroism in Antigone's resistance is her refusal of state power. Antigone says no to all she finds vile, and in this sense she is more powerful than the ruler beholden to his throne. Despite all his trappings of power, Creon finds himself helpless, unable to act on his own. He wants not to execute Antigone but cannot help ordering her death. Having said yes to state power, he is circumscribed by his own kingship, by very the throne that makes him the master of the land. He has surrendered himself entirely to the state and knows his circumscription all too well. Unlike Antigone, he has completely ceded his desires to take upon the mantle of

governance. Creon is rendered loathsome, terrified of what his office requires of him and yet unable to act otherwise. Close

My nails are broken, my fingers are bleeding, my arms are covered with the welts left by the paws of your guards—but I am a queen! Explanation for Quotation 2 >> Antigone makes this delirious proclamation upon reading Creon's weakness. In contrast to conventional readings of the Antigone legend, Anouilh's Antigone does not defend her act of rebellion in the name of filial, religious, or even moral integrity. This insistence becomes especially clear in the course of her confrontation with Creon. In asking why and in whose name Antigone has rebelled, Creon will progressively strip Antigone's act of its external motivations. Antigone will have no "just cause," no human reason for bringing herself to the point of death: her act is senseless and gratuitous. Instead, she acts in terms of her desire, a desire she clings to despite its madness. Ultimately Antigone's insistence on her desire removes her from the human. She becomes a veritably tabooed body and exalts herself in her abjection. As with Oedipus, her expulsion from the human community would make her tragically beautiful. Close

if Haemon reaches the point where he stops growing pale with fear when I grow pale, stops thinking that I must have been killed in an accident when I am five minutes late, stops feeling that he is alone on earth when I laugh and he doesn't know why—if he too has to learn to say yes to everything—why, no, then, no! I do not love Haemon! Explanation for Quotation 3 >> Antigone recants her love for Haemon toward the end of her confrontation with Creon. Creon has unmasked her brothers as treacherous gangsters, making her act and death march entirely gratuitous. Its political, moral, filial, and religious motivations appear entirely external. Thus Creon offers the dazed Antigone the promise of human happiness. This vision of human happiness provokes Antigone's final, fatal explosion. She refuses to moderate herself: she will have everything as beautiful as it was when she was a child or die. Anouilh underscores the infantile quality of this desire: Antigone's fiery love recalls the plight of a child who cannot handle the even momentary loss and separation of the beloved. Antigone insists on her desire in its primary form. Close

As for those three red-faced card players—they are the guards. One smells of garlic, another of beer; but they're not a bad lot. They have wives they are afraid of, kids who are afraid of them; they're bothered by the little day-today worries that beset us all. At the same time—they are policemen: eternally innocent, no matter what crimes are committed; eternally indifferent, for nothing that happens can matter to them. They are quite prepared to arrest anybody at all, including Creon himself, should the order be given by a new leader. Explanation for Quotation 4 >> In the prologue, the Chorus directly addresses the audience and appears self- conscious with regards to the spectacle: we are here tonight to take part in the story of Antigone. Unlike conventional melodrama, for example, we are not asked to suspend our disbelief or watch a spectacle that would seamlessly pass itself off as reality.

Like its ancient predecessor, the Chorus prepares a ritual. In hits preparation, it introduces all of its players under the sign of fatality. They have come to play their roles and, if such is their fate, die. The Chorus is omniscient, narrating the characters' very thoughts. The three Guardsmen are particularly crucial to the political allegory the play offers of the fascist collaboration. The trio, which symbolizes the fascist collaborators or collabos of Anouilh's day are made all the more mindless and indistinguishable in being grouped in three. They also emerge from a long tradition of the dull-witted police officer. They are eternally indifferent, innocent, and ready to serve whatever powers that be. This indifference not only inures them to the tragic, also but makes them brutal and dangerous. Close

Every kind of stillness. The hush when the executioner's ax goes up at the end of the last act. The unbreathable silence when, at the beginning of the play, the two lovers, their hearts bared, their bodies naked, stand for the first time face to face in the darkened room, afraid to stir. The silence inside you when the roaring crowd acclaims the winner—so that you think of a film without a sound track, mouths agape and no sound coming out of them, a clamor that is not more than picture; and you, the victor, already vanquished, alone in the desert of your silence. That is tragedy. Explanation for Quotation 5 >> Stillness appears as a key metaphor in the Chorus's comments on the nature of tragedy. First the Chorus evokes this stillness in its theatrical mode. This stillness is equated with the spring-like tension and sense of suspense in tragedy that it evokes earlier. Tragedy's stillness appears in the moment before the execution, the moment at the beginning of a play before the consummation of a love affair. This tension only finds release in the terrible, ecstatic shout. Note this conjunction of sex and death. The stillness of sex and death is precisely where the play's two lovers will ultimately end, lain together in the tomb that figures also as their "bridal bed." Strangely, the Chorus then invokes a filmic metaphor. Tragic stillness is the silence within the spectator when the crowd acclaims the victor. This stillness within perhaps recalls the "hollow space" imagined by Antigone earlier. This inner silence turns the outer world into "no more than a picture," a film without a sound track. This dissociation of sound from the image of the world is a dissociation of the spectator from that world as well. Again, two disjunctions are at work here: that of the sound from the image and the spectator from the world-become image. The Chorus shifts from a theatrical to filmic metaphor here because these experiences of disjunction are inherent to, though covered over in, the cinematic apparatus. The spectator is then identified with the already vanquished victor, who is similarly alone in a desert of silence, similarly disjoined from the world. This disjunction from the world is the plight of the tragic hero and spectator who identifies himself with him.