#(and of course eurydice dies for haemon.)

[iphisesque]

once again thinking about haemon

[iphisesque]

do you have any hot takes about antigone characters?

oh honey i am a gold mine of antigone hot takes. it's 10am and i am barely awake so this might not be my best work but i will go through the characters one by one and share a hot take about them

antigone: when it comes to gender she occupies a fascinating liminal space, which i feel like she partly shares with electra; she's a woman who rebels like a man by performing burial rites like a woman, is sentenced like a man for it and kills herself like a woman, specifically like a maiden (hanging is a maidenly form of suicide). her rebellion does not subvert gender roles in the modalities, as burial rites and hanging were both women's prerogative, but it subverts them in its overtness: she doesn't shy away from femininity, she embraces it and stands proud with it in a way that is typically masculine, and as such she's the embodiment of androgyny in the play, which is why i feel she would get along well with tiresias (though not in the romantic way liliana cavani portrays).

ismene: genuinely one of the most overlooked characters in the tragic world. i think she actually feels the same way as antigone does towards her brothers and specifically polynices: ismene is a victim in her own right, both the sisters are, and i feel like she only cares about following the laws in the context of surviving. ismene knows she's not a tragic heroine who faces death head on, knows she is content with burying her feelings and surviving, and it is only when her sister is taken away from her that she begs to die alongside her: she's denied the luxury of becoming a tragic heroine without having a perceived fault to expiate, of course, and that is her tragedy, being condemned to surviving and remembering. in that sense she actually reminds me a lot of helen, i would say!

polynices: he has read the seven against thebes, to steal an expression from @finelythreadedsky; he knows how it's going to end, and though he tries to imagine a world where they both live, he knows they're both going to die (one cannot survive without the other, as they're twins linked by fate). in the antigone, i think that aside from being a symbol of crisis between the laws of man and those of the gods, he and antigone have a relationship that could be tied to labdacid propensity for incest; even more so when you think of antigone's line "had i lost a husband, i could have remarried, [...] but i can't have another brother", where it is made clear to us that love is not a prerogative of the husband, but of the brother.

eteocles: dipshit (affectionate). does what he has to do to protect his city and in that sense he's similar to creon, but to be honest this all wouldn't have happened if he'd given up the throne at the established time and not been so hubristic. antigone says "i would have buried the body all the same if it had been eteocles you had disrespected" and while that is definitely in line with her motivations, she herself knows that creon and the city's little poster boy eteocles would never have been disrespected in death like polynices was. i feel like in general anouilh's antigone really hits the nail on the head when it comes to the twins: they're both hot-headed fools one of which sometimes treats antigone with kindness, and it was only by chance that either of them ended up on the side they each died on.

creon: eteocles but actually competent at what he does: he's a king and a lawmaker, and rightfully so he rules and makes laws. those laws are morally wrong, as they go against the gods' will (godliness=morality), but they're just fine as far as absolute monarchy's laws go: he creates a hero and an enemy of the state out of two hubristic youngsters who killed each other, and treats their corpses and memories accordingly. creon makes human, ephemeral, invented laws with no moral basis, and as such he's a creator, co-writes antigone with his niece: the martyr needs something to die in rebellion against, and the tyrant needs something to bring him down or strengthen him.

haemon: my beloved malewife. all jokes aside i feel like haemon is often a very underused character: of course the play is titled antigone, and it makes sense he'd mostly take up space as antigone's beloved, but some parts of his character are far more interesting than he lets on. his dialogue with creon is exemplary: in it, he goes from trying to appeal to creon as the love-struck prince who just wants his love back, to revealing his contempt of his father and all he stands for. haemon abhors his father's tyranny, and he knows the people do so too, specifically mentioning that he knows dissent is building up among the populace: is haemon a friend of the people? does haemon, the crown prince, roam around the city, sneakily listening to his citizens and learning that way what the people want? does he do so alongside antigone, who also mentions knowing the people's hatred of creon? is this only allowed to happen because they're both younger siblings, guarded by their caregivers less strictly than their older siblings? just thinking about haemon opens up so many fascinating questions about who he was as a person and what sort of ruler he would have been if he'd lived and i love him more than is normal thank you for coming to my ted talk.

eurydice: she's barely a character but i do think she was the one who started weaving antigone's and polynices's shroud before she killed herself. afterwards, as the only woman left, the job went to ismene, who wove polynices's shroud as beautiful as she could make it as an apology for not burying him the first time, and a single shroud for both antigone and haemon to share, together in death as they couldn't be in life.

conclusion: many thoughts head full i love all of these characters and could spend hours dissecting them