1. Condemned to be free

A lasting source of interest for feminist theorists, Sophocles’ Antigone inspires readings and rereadings.Footnote ¹ In my examination, I use “feminist” or “existentialist” Simone de Beauvoir against herself,Footnote ² that is, her interpretation of the Antigone, to show how existentialist freedom is achieved in the tragedy. The deepest goal of this study is to correct Beauvoir’s view of Antigone via a use of Beauvoir’s concepts (ambiguity and existential freedom) in a reading of Antigone, which yields two main fruits: it illuminates the meaning of Beauvoir’s concept of existential freedom, ambiguity, and the figure of the radical activist, and it helps us see Antigone with new nuances, in its applicability to the goal of articulating a progressive feminist politics. My Beauvoirian approach, then, 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:Footnote ³ how women and other Others can have ethical agency under conditions of constraint.

Beauvoir’s existential philosophy operates as a lens and hermeneutic model in my reading, and I apply her language and terms to the original ancient text to understand the gendered metaphors of the play and, in turn, to reveal an area of oversight in her superficial treatment of the tragedy. The theoretical enhancement reveals Antigone as a figure of ambiguity, situated in an oppressive context, and I will argue that she creates her own project and strives towards freedom, in the Beauvoirian sense. That is, by assuming a radical ethical position, Antigone enters into the political sphere, and, though she may fall prey to a Cause (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 49) by at first refusing her freedom, this mistake is due to her “situation” of subjection. A radical activist, she embodies 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. I also extend the subjectivity of ambiguity to Ismene and, in the third section, “Antinomies of Action,” will illustrate the course of her own existential freedom to portray the reversibility of the transcendence/immanence polarity in these two figures and, ultimately, to suggest that the sisters are intertwined.

With this angle, my analysis will make an intervention in the recent scholarly interest surrounding the play, which has noticed the significance of gender to its meaning. This discussion was initiated by Peter Euben, who argues that Antigone vindicates its heroine against a hypermasculinist construction of politics (Reference Euben1997, 178). Then it resumes with Judith Butler, who recognizes Antigone as a destabilizing figure with her subversive gender identity that disrupts both the political and symbolic spheres (Reference Butler2002, 82). Finally, Brooke Holmes picks up the thread: “Antigone holds out the promise of gender severed from sex. Her virginity has the feel of a blank slate. It animates her with raw potentiality and lends her resistance a sense of ideological purity. Moreover, indifferent to her fiancé, she occupies an ambiguous erotic space defined by incestuous birth and her fierce fidelity to her father and brother” (Reference Holmes2012, 149). Among “[t]he restless reinterpretations of Antigone” (Holmes Reference Holmes2012, 149), I will illustrate how she licences the practice of politics in a new way,Footnote ⁴ precisely because Antigone serves as the heartbeat of sororal solidarity in the movement that she creates with her sister Ismene. This paper, then, will also focus on Ismene’s evolution, as the play unfolds over time, for I suggest that Ismene takes political action and transcends both internal and external limitations to exemplify the existential feminist, a complex figure of ambiguity, as a reflection of her sister.

This reading differs from Amy Story’s article “Simone de Beauvoir and Antigone: Feminism and the conflict between ethics and politics,” which argues that Beauvoir’s reading of Antigone in “Moral idealism and political realism” is inadequate, but that resources from Beauvoir’s later thought and work (The second sex, The blood of others) provide tools for a more nuanced reading of Antigone (one that takes into account the situational constraints on Antigone’s freedom). I make the same critical move that is found in Story’s argument—using the later Beauvoir’s thought to critique the earlier Beauvoir’s reading of Antigone—but use a different Beauvoir text with which to read the tragedy, The ethics of ambiguity. The presence and use of this particular text give the reading a new orientation: rather than emphasizing the gendered situational constraints on Antigone, as Story’s reading does, my examination is more interested in showing how Sophocles’ Antigone is a classic figure of existentialism (rather than a moral idealist, which Beauvoir accused her of being in “Moral idealism and political realism”) and acknowledges the significance of Ismene, who also assumes an existentialist ethics. This discussion is therefore more invested in connecting Sophocles’ play to keywords from The ethics of ambiguity like “immanence,” “transcendence,” and “ambiguity” than Story was and sees more to reclaim from the early, pre-feminist writings of Beauvoir than Story did. Furthermore, my reading is more interested in queer models of subjectivity and “in-betweenness” of identity than the Story article, which gave a more classically feminist reading of Antigone’s situation in Ancient Greece.

I look through different prisms in my reading of the play by using The ethics of ambiguity as a key theoretical source in order to shed new light on the Antigone. I illustrate the centrality of the concept of ambiguity in Beauvoir’s thought, which complicates the existentialist’s journey from immanence to transcendence and undercuts the binary poles of a pair. I suggest we have to read The ethics of ambiguity and The second sex together in order to fully comprehend Beauvoir’s feminist existentialist theory and that, in doing so, we will find that a non-binary concept of gender is at work in both Beauvoir’s thought and the Antigone. I will demonstrate the relevance of Beauvoirian terms to the drama, the oppression that both Antigone and Ismene are subjected to (their “situation”) and the resistance (transcendence-freedom) that they manifest. This experience also has universal consequences and speaks to a pressing contemporary issue: how members of any given society may have radically different experiences depending on their position in the social hierarchy and, nonetheless, forge their own subjectivity rather than comply and surrender to domination. The themes of exclusion, objectification, and power, which Beauvoir treats and develops, will enhance the same problems in the Antigone, and these are challenges and realities, which are simultaneously entrenched in the Western context and go beyond it.Footnote ⁵

2. Freedom in the encounter

Beauvoir’s concepts of ethical ambiguity and existential freedom do not simply add additional vocabulary to well-established arguments about the play, but, rather, they advance a new understanding of Antigone’s character. This section will illustrate the affinity between Beauvoir’s thought and Antigone’s mode of being in my application of the theoretical concepts to the heroine. The Beauvoirian framework, while illustrating the ambiguity of Antigone’s freedom, due to her status as an Other, imparts to the figure feminist agency in her act of rebellion. The application of this conceptual apparatus suggests that Antigone and Antigone, in its portrayal of the title character’s activism and political resistance, offer a valuable feminist paradigm of human and female agency, which different feminist readings of the play fail to adequately address when they leave existentialism behind: the treatments of Irigaray and Kristeva, which start from an assumption of feminine difference, and even by Butler and Honig, both of whom do stress gender in their theorizing of the political rather than sexual difference. I engage more at length with Honig’s argument in section 3, “Antinomies of action,” and argue that the Beauvoirian perspective provides us with an additional set of terms with which to reclaim Ismene from her submissive, insignificant status.

I am interested in Butler’s project of deconstruction to dismantle binaries between male and female, inside and outside, from which a concept of “queerness” ensues, the idea that one can inhabit a gray space and combine oppositions, and will approach Antigone from a non-binary perspective, namely, through the lens of ethical ambiguity in Beauvoir. Rather than focusing on the language of kinship to illustrate the family as a contested political site, in other words, the politics of kinship, as Butler does, my intervention believes that Beauvoirian ambiguity initiates another avenue by which to demonstrate the futility and fragility of binary oppositions at work in the play in the moral dilemma that Antigone exhibits. Precisely her ethical ambiguity calls into question the strict division between two opposite choices and illustrates the way in which a subject is never entirely autonomous nor entirely socially constructed. Having the experience of “becoming a woman,” of being a gendered subject, does not necessarily preclude moral agency, and I argue that Antigone’s ambiguity compels the feminist ethics that she construes for herself and for others in a revolutionary project of freedom. Finally, this reading challenges the Hegelian dialectic that Beauvoir uses in “Moral idealism and political realism,” the opposition between Antigone and Creon, state and family, ethics and politics, respectively, and will seek to show that her concept of ambiguity destabilizes any dualistic vision of the world. In contrast to more conservative approaches to the tragedy, which uphold the binary, such as the earlier Beauvoir, the spirit of this paper, therefore, supports a contemporary theory of gender and believes in the feminist potential unleashed by the play.

The feminist project of Antigone is demonstrated by her revolutionary agency and brought to fruition by the cooperation that she elicits from another partner, her sister, Ismene. She is situated in an environment of oppression, yet Antigone manages to construct her freedom by conceiving a project of resistance and simultaneously participates in an act of destruction by striving to eliminate the given situation for herself and another, namely, Ismene (Soph. Ant. 531–81). In this interaction, while relating to her sister, Antigone finds an equal reflection that eludes a power differential and confirms herself in herself; her initial position to defy Creon’s decree is validated, in turn, by Ismene, who ends up supporting the act of defiance: “I did it, I confess. That is, if we are partners, anyway. I am an accomplice, and I bear responsibility with her” (Soph. Ant. 536–37).Footnote ¹⁴ At this particular moment, they look at each other in a state of mutual recognition. Despite facticity, their gender, and the political context into which they are thrown, existential freedom, defined as “the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 24), the ability to “[cast] oneself into the world and of disclosing being” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 44), is found in this encounter.Footnote ¹⁵

From a Beauvoirian point of view, Antigone discloses freedom because she assumes what we can understand to be her ambiguity illustrated by her opacity: she is constrained by her circumstances or situation and occupies a space of negativity, neither inside nor outside, both choosing agent and trapped object, spirit and body. In terms of actual physical space, Antigone fails to belong and literally goes under, “living by her own law” (αὐτόνομος) (Soph. Ant. 821), in order to reassert the law of the dead.Footnote ¹⁶ After reconstituting the bodies of her family members, Antigone returns to the womb of the earth, which she understands to be her “everlasting home” (οἴκησις ἀϵίφρουρος). Resolved to die, “marching” or crossing over to those who are her own (πορϵύομαι πρὸς τοὺς ἐμαυτῆς), she enters into the realm of Persephone, queen of Hades. Clearly, there are strong resonances with the Demeter-Persephone myth:Footnote ¹⁷ the Persephonic principle of vegetation, fertility, and generation is at work in this episode, whose αἴτιον is given in the Homeric Hymn, or, rather, an anti-Persephonic principle of sterility and anti-generation. Antigone, in her case, subverts the rite of passage reserved for the κόρη and, in contrast to the goddess, will never return among the living, and her refusal to marry ensures that she remains childless. With an act of self-sacrifice, she escapes the restraints of marriage and childbearing and assumes a masculine trajectory: by withholding her womb, Antigone chooses a heroic path and comes home to the Earth as one of its original children, “equal in memory to the gods in life and death” (Soph. Ant. 837–38).

The lines between a series of oppositions get blurred, and categories, confused: masculine/feminine, public/private, ethics/politics. By undergoing this trajectory, installing an οἶκος in the world below, Antigone is excluded from the symbolic laws of the πόλις. Finding herself in such a position in a space of “non-belonging,” holy and unholy, dead and alive (Soph. Ant. 810), she moves into the realm of Beauvoiran ambiguity, ultimately a gendered category. In her paper “Theories of desire: Antigone again,” Françoise Meltzer identifies her “foreignness” (Reference Meltzer2011, 171):

As a “third term,” Antigone combines both the masculine and feminine in addition to other binaries or, rather, represents a radical “limit.”Footnote ¹⁸ Lastly, Meltzer argues that even the mode by which Antigone dies is gendered, blurring the distinction between male and female: “Antigone hangs herself with her veil of virginity, symbol (in the words of Loraux) of her sex. Thus the mixture of gendered roles: she is led to her execution like a man, but she hangs herself (already unusual) with a veil of femininity” (Reference Meltzer2011, 184).

The “betweenness” that Meltzer designates to the heroine (Reference Meltzer2011, 185) fails to capture the dynamic interplay between (masculine) transcendence and (feminine) immanence, which defines Beauvoirian ambiguity. The theoretical apparatus contributes to and enhances the language of movement, the posture of activism that characterizes Antigone’s unique androgynous position. She constitutes a project by assuming her “fundamental ambiguity,” what Beauvoir scholars have identified to be a “strange amalgam of consciousness and fleshly materiality, of freedom and constraint” (Kruks Reference Kruks2012, 33), taking responsibility in the given situation, and, in this way, produces a moment of rupture. The movement of departure and her breakthrough are conveyed by the repetition of the language of “going” in her final wedding hymn and funeral dirge. What is emphasized in these last moments is the image of the “road” (ὁδόν),Footnote ¹⁹ illuminated by an eclipsing sun (Soph. Ant. 808–09) or the path that Antigone follows underground. On this path, she goes, “I am going” (ἔρχομαι),Footnote ²⁰ a sojourner among the dead (μέτοικος) (Soph. Ant. 869), “I am led” (ἄγομαι) (Soph. Ant. 877), “I am crossing” (πορέύμαι) (Soph. Ant. 892), and “I leave” (Soph. Ant. 892). Antigone recognizes that she belongs neither here nor there, a “resident alien” (μέτοικος), and inhabits the duality of existence, expressed by the middle voice, “leading” and “being led” (ἄγομαι), and by crossing over.

The relevance of Beauvoir’s concepts to Sophocles’ text is made clear by the heroine’s journey; the emphasis on her passage—from life to death, upper to lower, lightness to darkness—substantiates her in-between status and, at the same time, her elusive and disruptive presence, which resonates with the existentialist. In accepting her untimely death, Antigone constructs a moment of freedom, not fleeing the situation which faces her, and also undergoes what Beauvoir identifies to be “a negative movement which rejects oppression for oneself and others” (Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 170). Her death is, ultimately, a rejection of Creon’s oppression and a political act that gains support from her sister but also the citizens of Thebes. Though she is situated in a bleak context of subjection, Antigone makes a choice, nonetheless, and wills freedom, which constitutes both an ethical and political act: she expresses subjective passion yet pays an enormous price—her life— for the facticity of her situation. Choosing the path of the transcendent hero means choosing death: her act of resistance ruptures the given, and death in this case amounts to transcendence. Antigone, therefore, incarnates Beauvoir’s conception of ambiguity that defines human existence, which is always an admixture of internal freedom and external constraints imposed by the weight of the world, and an ethics of ambiguity calls on others, namely, Ismene and Thebans, to join her in bringing certain values, projects, conditions into being.

Antigone’s barren womb symbolizes a microcosm for the macrocosm, the political experience, and, in both life and death, Antigone, after resituating herself, remains a figure of ambiguity, exerts the power of her existential project, and transcends. She garners support from the citizens of Thebes and opens up the possibility for democracy, as Haemon, her fiancé, explains to his father Creon and protests.Footnote ²¹ In Haemon’s appeal to his father, he describes how the entire city stands behind Antigone and is “mourning for this girl,” for it believes that no woman of all women ever died so shamefully for deeds so glorious (Soph. Ant. 694–95). In his dialogue, the Athenian perspective slips in and permeates the Theban backdrop: Antigone practices παρρησία, the liberty to speak freely, in the face of a tyrannical presence and, by garnering sympathy, creates a democratic movement. She influences and embodies the will of the people, aligned with the “common man” (ἀνδρὶ δημότῃ), who would not dare to speak such words that would offend Creon with his “terrible glance.” Her single voice matches and unites the voice of the many and resonates even after her death: Teiresias warns Creon that an “unholy stench” will come to the city that has confused the living for the dead and leaves its corpses unburied (Soph. Ant. 1064–83). As a result, Antigone has a direct impact on the political fate of Thebes described as a living organism, a body politic, which emits odors and wanes. Political cycles correspond to the patterns of Antigone’s body, which has refused to bear, remains hollow, and serves as the origin of decay.

The rapprochement of Beauvoir-Antigone brings to the fore the question of human and female agency and illuminates Antigone’s actions for authenticity. While she is stubborn, bold, and reckless, Antigone opens a road to human transcendence and achieves immortality after death: her spiritual presence remains and is felt even after her body perishes. Her martyrdom fulfills what Beauvoir describes in The second sex, the destiny of the idealized creator, “who, transcending himself in a work, goes beyond the given and appeals to a freedom in others to whom he opens up the future” (Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2009, 612), and, ultimately, results in glory and a form of celebrity.Footnote ²² In life, Antigone alludes to her own greatness from the start when she claims for herself the “beautiful death” (Soph. Ant. 72), a metaphysical experience that preserves the hero’s innate excellence and yields a snapshot of eternal beauty. It would seem, then, from one point of view, that Antigone’s political act of resistance marks an aesthetic accomplishment as well in its beauty and unbearable splendor. In fact, is it not this splendor that amounts to transcendence, for it persists, after she is buried in a cave, in her immortal reputation when Haemon explains that the entire city is talking and empathizes with her commitment to bury her brother, one of “the most famous deeds” (ἔργων ϵὐκλϵϵστάτων), worthy of golden honor. The emphasis on her golden quality attests to her fame and lasting influence, what organizes the city’s common sensibility and unites the people around her. Her single act of defiance, therefore, coincides with and creates the collective will by establishing a bond between her freedom and the freedom of others. That is, although Antigone’s situation is unique and constitutes her own subjective experience, her own desire for freedom echoes and promotes the entire city’s and, in the end, has universal reverberations; Thebans, on the whole, have aligned themselves with Antigone and are protesting Creon’s tyrannical measures, though their voice is “obscure” (ἐρϵμνή). Thus, she conceives of a future in her lifetime and after her demise by constructing an ambiguous existence and engaging in passionate activism that opens herself and others to freedom, when she leaves and goes home “forever” (οἴκησις ἀϵίφρουρος) (Soph. Ant. 892).Footnote ²³

3. Antinomies of action

The Beauvoirian framework also reveals new dimensions to a treatment of Antigone’s relationship with her sister. The point of this third section is to show that both Ismene and Antigone are figures of ethical ambiguity, in that both choose transcendent ends that are yet limited by their situations given the conflict of inner freedom and external oppression, but that they differ in Beauvoir’s reading in the expression of moral attitudes. I will suggest that there is reason to prefer Ismene as an ethical actor qua Beauvoir because of her ability to change her mind. My Beauvoirian reading thus reorients and builds on Honig’s interpretation in her piece “Ismene’s forced choice”: it tracks the reversal or confusion between two polarities from this particular theoretical framework and elevates Ismene’s status to that of an existential figure.

In an innovative reading, Honig offers great insight into this very problem, that there is more than one way of resisting oppression, and the way most people, including Beauvoir in “Moral idealism and political realism,” have read Antigone as a symbol of heroic resistant sacrifice is only one of them. Honig identifies a conspiracy of sororal solidarity at the heart of the tragedy and challenges the notion that Ismene is anti-political, and the critics who split the sisters, Antigone and Ismene, into active and passive characters, respectively.Footnote ²⁴ Instead, for Honig, Ismene takes a radically ethical stance, recuperated from her passive reception. In order to develop this position, Honig makes various provocative suggestions: first, that Ismene is responsible for the first burial (Reference Honig2011, 40); second, that Antigone ends up supporting and protecting her sister (Honig Reference Honig2011, 45) and becomes a tragic heroine, who “saves her sister’s life and leaves alive a remnant of the family” (Honig Reference Honig2011, 49). Finally, Honig argues that Antigone and Ismene represent Lacanian notions of the classical “forced choice” and modern “forced choice,” respectively.Footnote ²⁵ An uncanny double, Ismene embodies the “modern forced choice,” captured by freedom or death (Honig Reference Honig2011, 58): “there is one character who comes close—awfully and anachronistically close—to this ‘modern’ position, the position in which ‘the subject is asked to accept with enjoyment the very injustice at which he is horrified,’ and that character is Ismene” (Honig Reference Honig2011, 60). Indeed, the interpretation is original when Honig positions Ismene as a symbol of feminist politics and embraces her “worldliness” (Reference Honig2011, 63).

In their opening exchange, Antigone’s attitude differs significantly from that of Ismene, who, at this point, remains within the patriarchal structure of her context. In the ἀγών that ensues between the siblings, Antigone asserts her radical outlook on the situation and relegates Ismene to enemy status.Footnote ²⁶ The obligation Antigone has towards her loved ones, those who are dear, compels her to bury the dead and to remain loyal to those who are below (τοῖς κάτω τῶν ἐνθάδϵ) at any expense, and her unbending will, in turn, frightens Ismene, who admits that she fears very much for her sister. Such an extreme conception of feminine duty to which Antigone is attached ironically turns her into a bold, masculine, Homeric warrior, in her mission to “die nobly” (καλόν…θανϵῖν), a phrase twice repeated. She says, “For me doing this, dying nobly is best. I will lie with him, loved one with loved one,” and, again, “I will suffer nothing so great so as to stop me dying with honor” (καλῶς θανϵῖν). In the Homeric tradition, the beautiful death is an experience towards which warriors strive, the κάλος θάνατος, “a photographic developer that reveals in the person of the fallen warrior the eminent quality of the anēr agathos” (Vernant Reference Vernant and Zeitlin1991, 51). At this moment, we see how Antigone pursues a certain kind of death that is reserved for men and chases after immortality, which would preserve her youth in addition to that of her “dearest brother” (ἀδϵλφῷ φιλτάτῳ), and in this way steps outside the boundaries of her (ambiguous) gender.

The way that Antigone understands her relationship with her brother is startling and stands in strong contrast to her treatment of Ismene, who is also a sibling but turns into an enemy (ἐχθρός). Blood-ties are confused in this scenario, and kin-relations constructed, as Antigone privileges some family members to others and seems to betray a desire for intimacy with Polyneices, for she will “lie with him” (μϵτ’ αὐτοῦ κϵίσομαι) together in their grave. Ismene uses the language of erotic desire to describe her sister’s motives, “You love the impossible” (ἀμηχάνων ἐρᾷς). Perhaps statements like these are meant to evoke the tragic demise of Oedipus, his incestuous and self-destructive tendencies, which, evidently, have been transmitted to his children. In any case, the repetition of φίλοι language, one of the leitmotivs of the play, magnifies her tragic family history: categories have been disturbed, stretched, and redefined; family members have been written off as enemies, killed each other, or taken as lovers and beloveds. The situation is further complicated when family misfortune bleeds into the public sphere, for Antigone’s personal act of rebellion against Creon, who is her uncle, also constitutes a political act of which Ismene is aware when she disagrees with her sister: “But to act in violation of the citizens’ will—of that I am by nature incapable.” Rather than reducing Antigone’s political motivations to psychoanalytic causes, we see what is truly at stake, and it is political in the most literal sense: it has to do with the πόλις, with what the citizens want, and, by resisting, Antigone assumes a more democratic way of construing the will of the people, as Haemon later suggests in the play (Soph. Ant. 688–700).

Categorical statements such as the ones Ismene makes reinforce the transcendence/immanence polarity at work in the play, where these two categories move along a spectrum of extremes, reverse, and mix, and a Beauvoirian reading brings to the fore the ambiguity of this contrast. It is true that Ismene sinks into immanence, what Beauvoir identifies to be a state of stagnation to which women are traditionally assigned, and accepts her situation as an objectified Other. The immanence that Ismene embodies, in turn, validates a condition of inequality and the patriarchy, for she participates in a chain of oppression, which Antigone, with an unruly body, disrupts, and the sphere of immanence occupies one polarity in a set of two. That is, these two sisters face a set of choices: Antigone can either resist and die, or she can do as Ismene suggests, decide that as a woman she is powerless (ἀμήχανος) to resist (Soph. Ant. 79),Footnote ²⁷ obey Creon, and tell herself this is not immoral because ought implies can; an agent, if morally obliged to perform a certain action, must logically be able to perform it.Footnote ²⁸ In Beauvoirian terms, Ismene can resist and transcend, or she can fall back into immanence/ facticity and act in bad faith, in other words, deny her own innate freedom and live inauthentically.Footnote ²⁹

Antigone and Ismene interpret what it is to be human/ethical and the nature of citizenship differently, in that Ismene sees it as gendered, or, rather, sexed, and Antigone simply doesn’t share the same viewpoint at this point in the drama, though, in her dirge, she understands her plight from a gendered point of view (Soph. Ant. 891–928). On the one hand, Ismene maintains a posture of modesty by encouraging Antigone to stay silent about the covert operation: “At least give no one notice of this act; you keep it hidden, and I’ll do the same.” Ismene believes in and adheres to a standard Athenian conception of feminine virtue, which is coded with silence, voicelessness, and invisibility. Pericles in the Funeral Oration, for example, defines female excellence precisely as obscurity (Thuc. 2.45). Antigone, on the other hand, rejects this model of behavior and breaks through the silence when she protests: “For god’s sake, speak out. You’ll be far more hated for your silence, if you fail to proclaim these things to everyone.” The use of the imperative “speak out” (καταύδα) highlights her fearlessness and demonstrates another way in which Antigone assumes nonconformist attitudes: she uses her voice to speak loudly and, thereby, appears in the public eye; she will also be talked about by men, citizens of Thebes, and future generations.Footnote ³⁰

Antigone is, at the same time, a flawed character, limited by her situation and displays her ambiguous nature as a composite of internal freedom and external oppression. With regard to the matter of “internal freedom,” I recognize that tragic protagonists like Antigone or Oedipus exhibit something like an “internal” necessitation: their very “will” or their character is a product of an inherited destiny and, thereby, of divine influence. Jean-Pierre Vernant, for example, problematizes any claim to find something like “free will” in ancient Greek tragedy: he wants to deny anything like a modern space of interiority and free self-determination in Greek thought, prior to at least Aristotle. He argues the genre of tragedy, instead, portrays the “tension between the active and the passive, intention and constraint, the internal spontaneity of the hero and the destiny that is fixed for him in advance by the gods” (Reference Vernant, Vernant, Vidal-Naquet and Lloyd1988, 79). Such a condition of the Greek tragic protagonist does not obstruct the freedom or transcendence which Antigone ultimately exhibits, for divine causality does not prohibit nor does it completely exclude human initiative, that is, the act of making certain decisions in the case of our heroine, self-described as the “very doer” (αὐτόχϵιρ) of her actions (Soph. Ant. 900). She also actively asserts her responsibility for the burial of Polyneices: “I admit that I did it and do not deny it” (καὶ φημὶ δρᾶσαι κοὐκ ἀπαρνοῦμαι τὸ μή) (Soph. Ant. 443). The tragic system provides room for the individual to navigate his/her life towards a fated end, to exercise agency, and to express intimations of the will, against a backdrop of divine power.

The Beauvoirian apparatus brings into view another source of restrictions that limit and misguide Antigone’s will: rather than exposing the heroine’s character through the lens of divine necessity and determination, it puts the accent on the gendered constraints, which are imposed upon her and shape her experience as a woman living in a patriarchal society. Simon Goldhill, in a critique of Honig’s reading, makes the point that kinship (always, but especially here) involves a choice: the family is a conflictual space (Reference Goldhill2012, 244–45). Antigone, in fact, knows this very fact about existence: like the Wife of Intaphrenes in Herodotus’ Histories (Her. 3.119), she would choose her brother over her husband; here she has chosen her brother over her sister as well as over Haemon and the children they might potentially have had (Soph. Ant. 909–12). In view of the decision that she makes, this is another place where the existentialist, and existentialist feminist, reading proves illuminating because, as Sartre says in Being and nothingness: “the choice of total ends although totally free is not necessarily nor even frequently made in joy” (Reference Sartre and Barnes2001, 448). The Antigone, after all, is a tragedy and especially captures woman’s tragic situation, as described by Beauvoir in The second sex: she reinstates the ethical “agency” that men have refused women and then shows that the choices women make are often very bad ones, even/especially when they think they are nobly sacrificing themselves “for the good of the family” (Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2009, 267).

The same limitations apply to Ismene when she changes her attitude and, in a surprising turn, chooses transcendent ends, i.e. freedom. After Creon hears about the secret and makeshift burial from the guard, how “from the earth up rose a dusty whirlwind, pain in the sky,” which would reveal a lone girl, after the passing of the storm (Soph. Ant. 416–23), he confronts both sisters.Footnote ³¹ At this time, Creon suspects an alliance between the sisters and understands them as two and a pair: their sisterly allegiance is reinforced when he claims to have nurtured “two plagues, two revolutions against the throne” (τρέφων δύ’ ἄτα κἀπαναστάσϵις θρόνων) and exclaims in the dual, “What a pair of children!” (τὼ παῖδέ). Ismene, in fact, stands by her sister and changes her original stance. At this moment, she sheds her passivity and submissive attitude and reveals her true self and intentions, which are fiercely loyal to her family and to those who are dear.Footnote ³²

What happens over the course of the drama is that Ismene changes her mind, and she tries to share responsibility with her sister in their public “performance” before Creon and admits, “I did the deed.” Beauvoir’s anti-deterministic point of view—that existence precedes essence, “to be” a woman should be interpreted in the dynamic Hegelian sense of “to have become” (Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2009, 24)—is well adapted to dramatic analysis and elucidates this shift. While vacillating between two positions, Ismene’s primary motivation for joining Antigone now is a fear of being alone, for she asks, “What life would there be for me alone, without her presence?” She, therefore, displays a consistent line of behavior by supporting her sister because, at this time, as well as in the beginning, she acts out of a fear of being abandoned and desires to preserve members of the οἶκος. At first, she discourages Antigone from disobeying Creon’s decree in order to keep alive the two who remain and urges, “Now think about the two of us. We are alone” (νῦν δ’ αὖ μόνα δὴ νὼ λϵλϵιμμένα σκόπϵι) (Soph. Ant. 58). Now, she will share punishment for the crime in order to remain with her sister and to avoid being alone.

Although her line of reasoning remains the same, Ismene’s confession indicates a dramatic revision and draws attention to the progression of the plot (μῦθος): as the crisis heightens, she realizes what is at stake. At first, she disagrees with her sister (Soph. Ant. 69–97); then she understands the gravity of the situation and decides to show solidarity with her sister, after the fact. In her intervention into the ongoing debate about the relationship between the two sisters, Rawlinson prefers Ismene to Antigone as a model for feminist politics, due to her “fluidity” (Reference Rawlinson, Chanter and Kirkland2014, 115), and finds in Ismene “a courageously transgressive and experientially grounded moral agent, one who does not deny but acknowledges in her deliberations the irremediable conflicts and tensions that attend all human decision making” (Chanter and Kirkland Reference Chanter and Kirkland2014, 11). It is true that, at this time, Ismene makes an important decision by choosing to stand by her sister, and this stance—her “mobility,” in the words of Rawlinson (108)— makes her a principled ethical agent, even if Antigone rejects her. This rejection might come from Antigone’s compassionate desire to save Ismene’s life, as Honig thinks (Reference Honig2011, 47), or from a worse motivation: that Antigone does not want to share the κλέος with anyone, or because, as Beauvoir’s own reading in “Moral idealism and political realism” suggests, she is too much in love with her own abstract political ideal to count the cost to others in the real world.

The imposition of the Beauvoirian concepts, ambiguity and existential freedom, on the figure of Ismene reveals another weakness of the essay “Moral idealism and political realism,” which completely overlooks her. Story, too, misses an opportunity to push the confines of her critique of Beauvoir even further in her own Beauvoirian approach to the Antigone and to bolster her reinterpretation of the tragedy as “a tale of unification,” “[i]nstead of a story of division” (Reference Story2008, 177), when she dismisses Ismene as “pathetic” and “false” and upholds the dichotomy between the two sisters: “If the play makes a division between actor and non-actor, then it is between Antigone and Ismene, not Creon and Antigone, both of whom are actors” (Reference Story2008, 177). The flexibility of Ismene, that she makes ethical decisions without clinging to moral absolutes, helps resolve the question of means and ends, which lies at the core of the tension between ethics and politics, the relationship between present values and future political aspirations, such as world peace or revolution. In her attempt to reconcile morality and politics in the early ethical essay, Beauvoir fails to account for all the factors that influence and color the choices that an individual makes, given the ambiguities of human situatedness and freedom. On the view Beauvoir fleshes out in The ethics of ambiguity, Antigone and Ismene can both be principled ethical agents, even if they act for different reasons and even if they are at odds with each other. In the section, “The antinomies of action,” Beauvoir describes the complex situation of the world in which we live.Footnote ³³ Beauvoir recognizes that the world is defined by antinomies or paradoxes and the irreconcilable nature of values, not only among different individuals, but also within a single individual. Ethical dilemmas that confront the individual constitute the ambiguity of existence, but Beauvoir upholds freedom as a “supreme end,” and the path to this end is oftentimes nuanced and consists in separate and inconsistent projects.

The application of Beauvoirian concepts to the original text brings to light both the conditions of possibility for ethics in general and the conflict between autonomous, authentic ethical agency and ethical failure. These conditions, in turn, are exemplified by the Theban situation and, particularly, by Antigone and Ismene, for they embody two poles, which converge into a supreme end, and, as the play develops, each expresses her own moral attitude. Being an ethical actor for Beauvoir is inextricable from being able to change (Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 154): the “mobility” that Rawlinson identifies is, in fact, what we might understand to be Ismene’s ambiguity, and Antigone changes too, if one compares her initial reasoning (and verbal style) to her dirge in the moments preceding her death, where she considers her gender roles as a wife and mother (Soph. Ant. 891–928).Footnote ³⁴ For this reason, Beauvoir provides a powerful alternative model for feminist activism to Honig’s, which tacitly requires that a good feminist also be a good person, maybe even “a good woman,” and doesn’t question the terms on which being “good” gets constructed. The ethics of ambiguity suggests that ethical/political Goods may in the real world be truly incompatible, and there tends to be a “remainder:” real wars involve collateral damage, and it is bad faith to pretend otherwise (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 156–57).Footnote ³⁵

The inconsistencies that Antigone and Ismene display make them both ambiguous creatures, as seen in the way in which they inhabit positions of both immanence and transcendence and embody contradictory content. From one perspective, by putting herself in the service of divine law and refusing to compromise, Antigone falls victim to what Beauvoir calls a “Cause.” In The ethics of ambiguity, Beauvoir provides a ranking of different individuals who function in the world, and defines the serious man as a person who “suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which, sanctified by respect, appears in the form of a Cause, science, philosophy, revolution, etc” (Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 49). The principal ethical problem is consistently applying abstract ethical principles in the face of unclear and changing situations. Like a serious man, does not Antigone fall prey to a Cause in the Beauvoirian sense, of one of the many ways to refuse one’s freedom? She holds fast to the principle of the unwritten or divine laws, which she invokes in her defense: “As to whose deed it is, Hades and the dead are witnesses. A friend in words is not the type of friend I love.”Footnote ³⁶ Adopting this brutal point of view, Antigone makes a final cut and separates herself from her sister: “Because you chose life, and I chose death.” Ismene replies, “At least your choice was not made without my protests.” The sisters that Creon understands to be a pair, Antigone again divides into two, “You” (σὺ) and “I” (ἐγὼ), a rupture that reflects their initial disagreement (Soph. Ant. 44–68). Finally, Ismene’s response is the admission that alludes to their previous disharmony and exhibits a conservative outlook, which promotes the secondary status of women, echoed by the patriarchal voice of Creon: “They are women, and they must not be free to roam about.”

In one sense, on this occasion, Antigone negotiates her existence with an unconditionally unambiguous attitude. She adopts a Cause as unambiguously of absolute value, and such a rigid posture, to a certain degree, sacrifices her freedom to an external object or goal. In the end, by facing her death, Antigone accomplishes the serious man’s mode of being and destiny: “He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 49). Certainly, her subjectivity is, on the most literal level, erased when Antigone rebels at all costs and dies for her Cause. Yet, at the same time, the interaction between Antigone and Ismene in the scene (Soph. Ant. 531–81) is significant: it amounts to one instance where she goes beyond the destiny of the serious man and transcends. When these two sisters are confronted by Creon, against this oppressive force, Antigone creates a situation whereby she collects a partner, her sister, Ismene, to withstand his presence. Her individual will participates in a mini-collective, and, consequently, the tragic heroine assumes the position of a radical activist, seen as acting with at least one other person, albeit not always harmoniously but with some sense of shared purpose. In her commitment to the unwritten laws, Antigone actually organizes rebellious political action and contradicts Beauvoir’s description of the “arrogant” ethical idealist, who prefers to remain in the abstract, ethereal realm or “heaven” and abstains from the world of politics: “He wants to keep his hands clean, his conscience clear, and intends to escape all earthly defilement” (Reference Beauvoir and Simons2005, 189). The coalition is driven by the exigencies of the political world, whereby both sisters confront the worldly realities of “defilement, failure, horror” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Simons2005, 190): Creon, on his part, understands them to be “two rebellions” (δύ’…κἁπαναστάσϵις) and accuses Ismene of “sharing in the burial” (Soph. Ant. 533–34). Ismene, in response, contends, “I did it, I confess” (Soph. Ant. 536).

As Beauvoir wrestles with the problem of moral political action in “Moral idealism and political realism” in an overly individualistic account, she does not emphasize the key point of relationality, which is developed by The ethics of ambiguity: the idea that human beings, and, particularly, those who are oppressed, can practice and assert an ethics in political situations by forming alliances and advocating on behalf of others. By supporting her sister, Ismene takes a political stand, and her confession, whose truth-value is contestable,Footnote ³⁷ still has some moral force; she decides to join the cause, and the risks involved in symbolic action can become very real ones. Though Ismene may not be the original “pure revolutionary,” she joins Antigone at the last minute and asserts, “But I still want to help you. What can I do?” (Soph. Ant. 552) and “Without her, why should I live? I’d be alone” (Soph. Ant. 565). These postures become political, as Ismene joins her sister’s project of revolt, which Beauvoir identifies to be the only escape from the serious world: “the oppressed can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite” (Reference Beauvoir and Frechtman1997, 93–94). When Ismene makes statements like, “the offense is identical for both of us (νῷν)” (Soph. Ant. 558), she challenges the oppressive order of the patriarchal structure as a “natural situation,” along with her sister, and moves closer to freedom in the act of rebellion. The use of the dual νῷν emphasizes their joint project, whereby Ismene comes to seem much more like Antigone, an existential figure rather than a purely “immanent” one. That is, she takes up her fundamental ambiguity by simultaneously transcending her physical limitations through the political posture, ultimately, through thought, and combining the essential paradoxes of her internal experience—autonomy and dependence, sovereignty and objectification, past and future—all of which are folded into an external environment radiating back inwards. At the moment of confrontation, Ismene mirrors back Antigone’s reflection and position of dissent and reinforces the reciprocity between self and other.

4. Future mythology

The play opens with the tragic refrain—“friends” and “enemies”— uttered by Antigone in the prelude: “Our enemies are on the march to hurt our friends” (Soph. Ant. 10). What follows is the clash and confusion between these two polar categories, and it would seem, in the end, that the dramatic players have taken their friends as enemies. In my reading, I present the existentialist dilemma that the tragedy exhibits, explore the limitations of polarized perspectives, and illustrate the complexity of radical ethical/political decisions, which may be accompanied by losses, especially under conditions of oppression. To this end, I position Antigone as a radical activist, who rejects her imposed situation in a project of revolt and identify a feminist way of being in her stance and attitude, for she assumes and inhabits ambiguous spaces, creates a collective, and acts as a vessel for her own freedom and the freedom of others. In “Antinomies of Action,” I trace the transcendence/immanence polarity with respect to the figures of Antigone and Ismene and illustrate the ambiguity of both. Reversing the transcendence/immanence dichotomy, which maps onto Antigone/Ismene, respectively, I bring to light the inner freedom and existential project of Ismene, who changes over the course of the drama, and the elision of these oppositions in the sororal bond. The value of having read Antigone via Beauvoir lies in the ability of the theoretical apparatus to put into relief the concept of a third type that escapes a binary way of thinking and to yield a paradigm of female moral agency emanating from a context of ambiguity beyond maternity and the reproductive function. The rapprochement, then, offers a new feminist analysis of the ethical, political problem of the tragedy from a gendered perspective and suggests that we can find in the play a progressive model of feminism for renegotiating power relations, ultimately, to eliminate hierarchies based on sex and gender. Lastly, by linking up the classical with the modern, I am suggesting that the past continues to speak and that the play has political significance to this very day as well as for the future, in its poetic portrayal of the obscure trajectory from ambiguity to transcendence.