Irene Han, New York University
In my examination of Sophocles’ Antigone, I cast the tragic heroine as a transcendent figure. I use Beauvoir’s existential philosophy as a lens and hermeneutic model and apply her language and terms—immanence, transcendence, and ambiguity—to the original ancient text to understand the gendered metaphors of the play and to reveal a blind spot in her treatment of the tragedy. Taking this theoretical approach, I use “feminist” or “existentialist” Beauvoir against herself, that is, her interpretation of the Antigone in “Moral Idealism and Political Realism,” to show how existentialist freedom is achieved. In my reading, I illustrate how Antigone embodies ambiguity, situated in an oppressive context, and I argue that she creates her own project and strives towards freedom, in the Beauvoirian sense. Ultimately, I will claim that she acts as a radical activist and manifests the “twoness” of the existentialist position, a combination of both subject and object, private and public, male and female, transcendence and immanence, freedom and body, choosing agent and trapped object.
Portraying Antigone as a “constructed image,” [1] the Beauvoirian approach offers new insight into the text; it illuminates Antigone’s mode of feminism that moves beyond notions of the feminine and maternity and casts light on a central problem of the play: how women and other Others can have ethical agency under conditions of constraint. A Beauvoirian reading illuminates the actual Antigone of Sophocles’ play much better than other feminist interpretations such as those of Irigaray and Kristeva, as well as kinship-focused readings by Butler and Honig: it is more accurate and brings out a dimension that other critics have missed or neglected. I, therefore, inscribe my reading in a tradition of feminist scholarship surrounding the Antigone and revisit the question of how this ancient heroine expresses a progressive feminist politics; an existentialist Antigone shows us how individuals and collectives can rebel and navigate their existence to transcendent ends in the face of absurd and oppressive contexts. By linking up the Classical with the modern and contemporary, I suggest that the past continues to speak and that the play has political significance to this very day: in this text, we can locate a third-type, that escapes a binary way of thinking, a contemporary theory of gender, and follow the obscure trajectory from ambiguity to transcendence.
[1] As Holland writes: “The images of women constructed in Beauvoir’s fiction are not images of women as they have to be. In constructing these images, Beauvoir is also challenging them and exposing the patriarchal power structures underlying women’s situation” (152). There are other kinds of feminist writing, and, while rejecting the notion of a uniquely feminine style of writing, she supports “women’s writing,” in the sense of “feminist,” a writing that rebels in order to lead to liberation (Brison 193).