Download ANTIGONE IN MODERNISM: CLASSICISM, FEMINISM, AND

ANTIGONE IN MODERNISM:
CLASSICISM, FEMINISM, AND THEATRES OF PROTEST
Keri Walsh
A DISSERTATION
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY
OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
IN CANDIDACY OR THE DEGREE
OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE
BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Advisers: Diana Fuss, Maria DiBattista, C. Daniel Blanton
January 2009
3341312
Copyright 2008 by
Walsh, Keri
All rights reserved
2008
3341312
© Copyright by Keri Gail Walsh, 2009. All rights reserved.
iii
Abstract
Antigone in Modernism: Classicism, Feminism, and Theatres of Protest
In 1936, Simone Weil described Sophocles’s Antigone to French factory
workers as “the story of a human being who, all alone, without any backing, dares
to be in opposition to her own country, to the laws of that country, to the head of
its government, and who is, naturally, soon put to death.” Weil’s insistence on
Antigone as a civilian protester, rather than Hegel’s model of feminine domestic
virtue, recurs throughout writing of the fascist period. From Virginia Woolf and
Louis MacNeice in the British Isles, to Marguerite Yourcenar and Jean Anouilh in
France, Antigone came to embody the brave political resistance of the individual.
By 1950, Hegel’s influential reading of the play as presenting two rightful but
irreconcilable claims seemed ready to collapse: “as for Creon,” the Oxford
classicist Gilbert Murray told a BBC radio audience after the war, “it was of
course preposterous of Hegel to suggest that that he was as much in the right as
Antigone and that our sympathies should be evenly divided.” This partisan
reading of Antigone grew in strength in the post-war period, inspiring feminist,
pacifist, and post-colonial engagements with the play.
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Table of Contents
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………...iii
List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………...v
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………vi
Introduction: οΰτοι συνέχθειν άλλά συμφιλείυ έφυν or, Antigone
in Hatred and in Love………………….………………………......1
Chapter One: Modernist Antigone………………………….…...………………19
Chapter Two: Reading Antigone: Virginia Woolf on Knowing Greek………....61
Chapter Three: Allied Antigone: Jean Anouilh in America and England……....91
Chapter Four: Antigone in Theory ……………………………………………..154
Epilogue....…………………………………………….……….…………….…175
Appendix.……………………………………………………………………….182
Works Cited....…………………………………………………………..…...…188
v
List of Illustrations
1.
Drawing for Antigone, by Jean Cocteau, 1922.
2.
Antigone and Ismene in Antigone at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge,
1939.
3.
Final scene of Antigone at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 1939.
4.
Katherine Cornell as Antigone and Cedric Hardwicke as Creon in Jean
Anouilh’s Antigone at the Cort Theatre, New York, 1946.
5.
Horace Braham as the Chorus with the cast of Antigone, Cort Theatre,
New York, 1946.
6.
Laurence Olivier as Anouilh’s Chorus at the Old Vic Theatre, London,
1949.
7.
The London cast of Antigone, Old Vic Theatre, 1949.
8.
Vivien Leigh as Antigone with her nurse, Old Vic Theatre, 1949.
9.
Vivien Leigh as Antigone and Dan Cunningham as Haemon at the Old
Vic Theatre, 1949.
vi
Acknowledgments
Antigone in Modernism is marked at every turn by the care and guidance
of my three advisers, Maria DiBattista, Diana Fuss, and Dan Blanton. The project
first developed out of Maria’s graduate seminar course in 2003-4, and from her
example I have learned to approach texts with greater patience, discipline, and
objectivity, and to place as much emphasis on small moments as on grand claims.
I hope that even a small amount of her equanimity has rubbed off on me. Dan
Blanton lent his remarkable intellect to every sentence of this dissertation, and
I’m still mulling over his Sphinx-like questions about tragedy, heroism,
modernism, and Sophocles. I came to Princeton with the goal of working with
Diana Fuss, and I have been the beneficiary of her extraordinary mentorship since
I arrived. Not only was she, characteristically, the only person to suggest that I
read Antigone for comedy, but her advice has guided me at every stage, from
shaping the dissertation prospectus to ideas for developing it into a book.
I was well into research on Antigone in Modernism when I realized
something obvious but important: that Sophocles’s Antigone is a dramatic text.
I’m grateful to all the people who encouraged me to join them in the fields of
theatre history and performance studies. Daphne Brooks and Anne Cheng
modelled new possibilities for interpretation during their dialogue on Josephine
Baker; Tamsen Wolff demonstrated how to teach dramatic texts; Kerry Walk
inspired me to merge Shakespeare with writing pedagogy; Paige McGinley
showed me the world through the eyes of performance studies; Stuart Sherman
galvanized graduate students with Manhattan theatre excursions; Simon Gikandi
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shared his advice on a conference paper; Michael Cadden invited me to sit in on
his lectures; Daniel Larlham filled in the gaps of my theatre knowledge on many
occasions; Saikat Majumdar told me stories of his mother’s experiences as an
actress in India, including playing Antigone; P. Adams Sitney recommended
Sophoclean films; Alyson Shaw reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s essays on theatre;
Albert Sonnenfeld recommended lost books on Jean Anouilh; and Kevin Lamb
accompanied me both to Greek plays and Rockettes rehearsals.
Among scholars working on the story of Greek plays in modern
performance, I’m thankful to Olga Taxidou at the University of Edinburgh; Fiona
Macintosh at the Archive for the Performance of Greek and Roman Drama at
Oxford; and Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill at Cambridge. The world of
Classics, though it seemed forbidding at first, turned out to be just as welcoming
as the theatre world, and I am thankful for the patient tutoring I received from
Andrew Ford, Froma Zeitlin, Josh Ober, Jennifer Mann, and Andrew Hui.
Among the many modernists who have helped with this project, my thanks go to
Bonnie Kime Scott, who invited me to present an early version of Chapter Two at
the MLA Convention in Washington in 2005, and Christine Froula, who shared
her thoughts on Line 523. I am also indebted to the staffs at several archives: the
Abbey Theater, Dublin; Columbia University’s Butler Library; the British
Library; the New York Public Library; the Cambridge Greek Play Archives;
Newnham College; the Gilbert Murray Papers, Oxford; and last but not least,
AnnaLee Pauls and Meg Rich of Rare Books and Special Collections at
Princeton.
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The English Department at Princeton has proved an ideal environment to
be a graduate student, and I am especially delighted to thank Michael Wood,
Susan Wolfson, Susan Stewart, Bill Gleason, Starry Schor, Deborah Nord,
Meredith Martin, Jeff Dolven, Zahid Chaudhury, Jeff Nunokawa, Uli
Knoepflmacher, and Tim Watson. Thanks also to April Alliston for all I learned
in her graduate seminar on Gender and Narrative, and to Don Skemer and John
Logan at Firestone Library for their continuing support. Pat Guglielmi has saved
me from administrative ruin on many occasions, and she is the chief reason why
McCosh feels like home. I am grateful to Jason Klugman, Torey Wilson, and
John Webb for all that I learned as a teaching fellow in the Princeton University
Preparatory Program (PUPP). For research and fellowship support I wish to
thank the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Center for Human Values at
Princeton. The Douglas and Mary Hyde short-term fellowship funded my
research in England in the summer of 2004.
I will miss the community of friends and colleagues at Princeton,
especially Briallen Hopper, Nadia Ellis, Stephen Russell, Michelle Coghlan,
Rebecca Rainof Mas, J.K. Barrett, Angela Ards, Renee Fox, Lyra Plumer, Roger
Bellin, Aaron Hostetter, Mary Noble, Hannah Crawforth, Dan Moss, Dave Urban,
Jacky Shin, Evan Kindley, Dave Ball, Jason Baskin, Erin Forbes, WesleyYu,
Dave Urban, Greg Londe, Yaron Aronowicz, and David Russell. Thanks to older
friends, too: Maria-leena Clarke-Logodin and Aimée Comrie, who helped with
French translation; Sarah Sweet, who inspired me to go to Greece; Neil Maybin,
who showed me Rupert Brooke’s Cambridge and Emily Brontë’s Yorkshire; and
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Teresa Bernheimer, John Redmond, and Aly Kassam-Remtulla, who shared the
Oxford years.
The support I’ve received from my family has been the most important of
all. I am grateful to my sister Melanie Walsh, my aunt and uncle Margaret and
Peter Larlham, and my mother-in-law Gerri O’Shea for their perpetual
encouragement. John Bugg has been by my side from the inception of this project
to its delivery to the binder, neither of which would have been possible without
his constant support and love.
This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, John and Deirdre Walsh
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1
Introduction
οΰτοι συνέχθειν άλλά συμφιλείυ έφυν
or,
Antigone in Hatred and in Love
Antigone’s five words are worth all the sermons of all the archbishops.
-Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Two-thirds of the way into Antigone, Sophocles’s heroine explains why
she will not leave her brother Polynices unburied. Creon insists that because
Polynices led an army against his own brother and city, he has become an enemy
and so is no longer entitled to the mourning rituals due to family members and
friends. Antigone responds in line 523 by articulating her own understanding of
the situation, a moment usually considered a definitive statement, not merely of
her loyalty to Polynices, but of her guiding beliefs. Antigone’s response to Creon
has come to be understood as the hallmark of her character, her politics, her
stance toward authority, and her principled ethos of love over hatred. Line 523
was not always considered an interpretive crux. Theodore Woolsey’s
commentary of 1860 did not pause to consider this moment, skipping instead
from analysis of line 521 to line 528. Line 523 came to prominence with R.C.
Jebb’s Victorian translation. In Jebb’s version, Antigone responds to Creon’s
2
suggestion of paying back hate with hate by saying: “Tis not my nature to join in
hating, but in loving” (Jebb 103). So influential was Jebb’s interpretation of this
line to the generation born at the end of the Victorian period that they were still
quoting it at the onset of the Second World War: Virginia Woolf places Jebb’s
version of line 523 at the heart of Three Guineas (1938).
In Jebb’s rendering, Antigone refuses Creon’s expedient system of
allegiances to affirm her commitment to a higher ethical order of love. We might
read this as Jebb’s response, on Antigone’s behalf, to Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit. There, Creon’s ethical order is the universal—the state, while Antigone is
associated with primal bonds of kinship so forceful and yet so innate that they are
barely conscious of themselves. But in Jebb’s version, Antigone too aspires to the
universal, and proposes a higher common good than Creon’s--a loving nature that
transcends both family and state. Because it has influenced modern
understandings of the play so decisively, Jebb’s translation deserves close
examination. Jebb’s edition offers the reader two versions of line 523, in keeping
with his scholarly practice. Jebb was a popularizing translator whose goal was to
make Greek plays comprehensively available to a non-classically educated public
in versions both readable and stage-worthy. At the same time, his editions were
intended for scholars (and are still in print for this purpose). As he explained in
his Introduction to Oedipus the King, he felt it necessary to provide two different
kinds of translations so that he could convey “exactly how the work of Sophocles
is understood by me, both in its larger aspects, and at every particular point” (qtd.
in Blondell 24). To impart the “larger aspects,” Jebb supplied a fluent English
3
facing-page prose translation, and to demonstrate his intricate comprehension of
“every particular point,” he offered prolix glosses for every line. Jebb understood
this double translation technique as a dialogue with and interpretation of the text:
“the vivid exposition of my own mind in relation to Sophocles” (qtd. in Blondell
28).
In line 523, the distinction between Jebb’s “larger aspect” and his
“particular point” is striking. The “larger aspect” Jebb suggests is the idealism of
Antigone’s character and her comprehensive preference for loving over hating,
but his footnote offers a glimpse of a different Antigone: the legalistic, perversely
logical debater recognizable from other moments of the play.1 In the literal
translation provided in Jebb’s footnote, Antigone tells Creon in Line 523: “Even
if my brothers hate each other still, my nature prompts me, not to join Eteocles in
hating Polyneices, but to love each brother as he loves me” (102). The Antigone
of Jebb’s gloss does not defend love as a general principle, but insists upon the
precise calculus of returning to each brother the love they rendered her.
According to this logic, if either brother had shown himself an enemy to
Antigone, she would treat him as such. Her argument mirrors but reverses
Creon’s: just as enemies should be treated as enemies, friends should be treated as
friends. And as Mary Whitlock Blundell notes, at other moments in the play,
Antigone treats enemies as enemies too: her “dedication to philia and rejection of
1
For instance, Antigone suggests that she would not have insisted on burying a
husband or a child, and she repudiates Ismene because she had not offered to help
right away.
4
enmity, though useful rhetorical weapons at this moment of crisis, appear to be
strictly limited in their application” (113).2
Jebb’s version, “Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving,” while a
reasonable extrapolation from Antigone’s words in line 523, is nonetheless an
interpretive move that changes a precise local statement to a presumed general
meaning. Nor is Jebb’s the only imaginable interpretation of the greater principle
at work in the situation (if indeed there is one).
However, Jebb’s interpretation
has proven extremely appealing to succeeding generations of readers. Not only
does it increase audience sympathy for Antigone by the ascription of a noble
motive, but it reduces the interpretive confusion generated by the conflicts in her
position in other speeches. Jebb’s line 523 gives us Antigone’s “real” motive, and
a memorable phrase that can be lifted from the context of the play and applied to
other circumstances. With this subtle modification, Jebb made Antigone available
as a spokesperson for causes larger than her own and larger than family loyalty,
and this elevation of her act from one of family duty to one of principled care has
dominated the reception of Antigone in the modern era.
2
Even if Antigone were consistent in her lovingkindness, the Greek word philia
suggests its own complications. Not necessarily meaning love in the sense of
agapé that Jebb’s line suggests, according to Emile Benveniste, the Greek philia
describes precisely the kind of reciprocal obligations between friends that
Antigone honors, and while it might spill over into feelings of affection, it implies
no general principle of love or non-violence. And linguistically, Antigone’s use
of the word is idiosyncratic. As Mark Griffith points out, Antigone in Line 523
“coins special terms to describe her own φύσις and its inextricable involvement in
‘family’: συνέχθω and συμφιλέω are found nowhere else in classical Greek”
(211;12). Antigone’s neologisms complicate even the idea that we can apply the
meaning of philoi confidently in this narrower Greek sense of the term.
5
Even for translators who know what Sophocles wrote in line 523, the
temptation to follow Jebb’s lead seems irresistible. Like Jebb, Robert Fagles
drops the specific objects of Antigone’s love (her brothers) in favor of a
generalization: “I was born to join in love, not hate—that is my nature” (86).
Declan Donnellan also loses the description of reciprocal love due to Polyneices
and Eteocles, and introduces Jocasta to the scene: “I was not born to separate in
hate. / My mother gave me life to join in love” (38). Paul Woodruff reinforces
Jebb’s move from the particular to the general with his version of 523: “I cannot
side with hatred. My nature sides with love” (22), and David Grene concurs: “My
nature is to join in love, not hate” (158). For Seamus Heaney’s Antigone, love is
not just a general principle but the principled opposite of Creon’s program:
“Where I assist with love, you set at odds” (25). Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ Loeb
translation is nearly unique in its inclination to play down line 523: he omits any
appeal to Antigone’s “nature” and all language of love and hate: “I have no
enemies by birth, but I have friends by birth” (51).
After Jebb, line 523 becomes the most important moment in the play:
Jebb’s translation and those that follow his precedent elevate Antigone’s
presumed preference for love, and refusal of hate, into a creed. It is this principledriven heroine who has proven so compelling to modern readers. “While I was
still at school I became acquainted with a lovely Greek sentence in a play of
Sophocles,” reports Victor, 2nd Earl of Lytton, in a memoir,
where Antigone says, ‘I was not born to share in men’s hatred, but
in their love,’ and all my life these words have defined my attitude
6
to the causes and movements which I have espoused. In religion,
in politics, in social reforms, I have shared the sympathies and
been repelled by the antipathies of every cause, and thus I have
never been able to become a wholehearted partisan. I eschew
labels, because I have found in the great religious and political
struggles of history, and in those of my own lifetime, the adherents
of all creeds and parties, while they condemn the cruelties and
hatreds of others, are themselves cruel and vindictive to their
enemies. To me cruelty is revolting, whether it is practised by
Catholics or Protestants, by the Inquisition or by Athiests, by
Nazis, Fascists or Communists, by aristocrats or Socialists. (167)3
Lytton’s crescendo represents the tenor of much modern encomia on Antigone
and her power to inspire a dedication to principled care against the interdictions of
the state. But if Jebb’s understanding of Antigone has inspired, it has also
provoked, and in keeping with the polarized language of love versus hatred,
critical opinion on Antigone has come in waves of hatred and love. Ironically,
though Antigone insists on her refusal to polarize, her binary language of love and
hate seems to do just that in readers of the play. For every generation that exalts
Antigone’s example, the next produces a backlash. The Victorians loved
3
What Life Has Taught Me, by Twenty-five distinguished men and women.
Introduced by Gilbert Murray, O.M. Selected and Arranged by Sir James
Marchant. Victor, 2nd Earl of Lytton, London: Odhams Press, Ltd. 1946-7.
7
Antigone, the loyal daughter of Oedipus and brother of Polynices, but the high
modernists mocked her. The Second World War generation elevated her to their
muse, and this trend was taken up after the war by feminist, pacifist, and postcolonial performers and activists. But even while she entered the spheres of
feminism and protest theatre, 1950s and 60s cultural critics--of the left, right, and
middle--reacted strongly against all that she was imagined to stand for. And
often, it was Jebb’s idealizing language to which detractors took strongest
offense. The critical effects of Jebb’s commentary are registered wittily by
Jacques Lacan in his seminar on Antigone from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
Antigone is the heroine. She’s the one who shows the way of the
gods. She’s the one, according to the Greek, who is made for love
rather than hate. In short, she is a really tender and charming little
thing, if one is to believe the bidet-water commentary that is
typical of the style of those who write about her. (262)
For Lacan, it is the critical discourse that has swirled around the figure of
Antigone rather than the play itself that should be scorned, but the tone of
irritation at sentimentalized versions of the heroine is unmistakeable: for Lacan,
she is no “tender and charming little thing,” but rather a deliverer of death.
Hating Antigone
Whatever we imagine are Antigone’s motives for burying Polynices,
whether a commitment to her culture’s funeral practices, a desire to keep her
8
promise to her brother,4 a demonstration of resistance to Creon’s new order, a
suicidal gesture, or a principled standing on ceremony for a larger cause of love or
non-violence, Antigone is a provocateur. She provokes by explaining herself
inconsistently; by pushing away those who are loyal and try to help her, including
her sister; and by seeming to resist an outcome of survival at all turns. Like the
Sophoclean hero Bernard Knox describes in The Heroic Temper, and like her
father Oedipus, she is obstinate, individualistic, excessive, melodramatic, and
proud to be an aristocrat and descendent of kings. She exercises her family’s
royal prerogative when she can, reminding Creon that it was her brother, “and not
a slave,” who died. Though her individual courage has always compelled
admiration, she is in significant ways an uneasy fit as a champion of the demos,
human rights, and civil liberties. It is perhaps this difficulty in reconciling what
writers have wanted Antigone to be, and what she is, that provokes the most
exasperated responses. Among the exasperated is the speaker of Ishmael Reed’s
poem, “Antigone, This is It.”
Reed paints a portrait of Antigone-exasperation in the 1966 poem,
“Antigone, This is It.” His Antigone becomes the embodiment of naïve liberal
protest. Refusing to even dignify her by the use of her legendary name, Reed’s
speaker begins with an accusation that he can see right through her noble
justifications to the attention-seeking manipulator beneath:
4
In Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone promises that she will bury
Polynices if he dies in the civil war that he is determined to stir up when he leaves
his father and sisters at Colonus.
9
Whatever your name, whatever
Your beef, I read you like I
Read a book
You would gut a nursery
To make the papers, like
Medea your Poster Queen
You murder children
With no father's consent
You map your treachery shrewdly,
A computer
Click clicking
As it tracks a ship
Headed for the Unknown
Making complex maneuvers
Before splashing down into
Mystery
Suppose everyone wanted it their
Way, traffic would be bottled up
The Horsemen couldn't come
There would be no beauty, no radio
No one could hear your monologues
10
Without drums or chorus
In which you are right
And others, shadows, snatching things
Fate, The Gods, A Jinx, The Ruling Class
Taboo, everything but you
And the while you so helpless
So charming, so innocent
Crossed your legs and the lawyer
Muttered, dropped your hankie
And the judges stuttered
You forgot one thing though, thief
Leaving a silver earring at the
Scene of a house you've pilfered
You will trip up somewhere
And the case will be closed
Standup Antigone,
The jury finds you guilty
Antigone, may the Eater
Of The Dead savor your heart
11
You wrong girl, you wrong
Antigone, you dead, wrong
Antigone, this is it
Your hair will turn white overnight
Reed’s title--“Antigone, This is It”--registers the narrator’s fed-upness
with the intractability, even grandstanding and of the Theban princess. Antigone
is confronted with the Creon-esque pragmatism of a reverse categorical
imperative: “Suppose everyone wanted it their / way, traffic would be bottled up”
(17-8). Reed’s poem projects an Antigone spoiled and disingenuous, her bold
dissent coming from the position of one who has never understood what it means
to confront injustice, and at her first taste of it reacts with foolish heroics. But,
the narrator warns, she is out of her depth with Creon: “You will trip up
somewhere / And the case will be closed / Standup Antigone, / The jury finds you
guilty” (37-8). And rather than ending with pity for Creon’s victim, Reed’s
narrator aims anger at Antigone herself: “You wrong girl, you wrong / Antigone,
you dead, wrong / Antigone, this is it” (41-43). The poem’s final line signals the
rapid educations in the politics of state and the brutality of death that she will
soon face: “Your hair will turn white overnight” (44). Reed’s poem expresses an
ambivalence at the heart of the figure of the Antigone legend: falling in love and
falling out of love with her are two sides of the same coin.
12
For better or for worse, the stark choices of Antigone have shaped the war
and protests literatures of the twentieth century. European fascism made it clear
that Antigone’s choice was not merely a matter for philosophical reflection (as in
Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit) but quite possibly the dilemma of the most
ordinary citizen. Indeed, much of the fiction and poetry written in the midtwentieth century reflects on the state’s intrusion into the spaces of mourning, the
family, and sexuality, and suggests that personal love might represent, as it does
for Antigone, an effective form of resistance against what came to be perceived
by artists as the tyranny exercised over interiority during times of unrest. Works
that display this tension between public duty and private love or loyalty include
E.M. Forster’s essay “What I Believe,” Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central
Station I Sat Down and Wept, W.H. Auden’s “Spain, 1937,” Anna Akhmatova’s
Requiem and H.D.’s Trilogy. More recently, Michael Ondaatje’s The English
Patient borrows and makes more controversial Antigone’s dilemma as he presents
his protagonist’s decision to collaborate with Hitler’s Germany in order to rescue
the body of his beloved. Ondaatje’s characters, like the First World War poets
Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, shares Antigone’s cosmopolitan sympathies
and her insistence on the right to participate in acts of mourning; they all insist on
the power of the individual, lyric voice to challenge the demands of the state.
Ondaatje’s heroine Hana, an Antigone figure who cares for her father, is
described as “alone against everything...the singer could only be one voice against
all the mountains of power….The one voice was the only unspoiled thing” (269).
While every version differently inflects the conflict between duty and desire, loss
13
and remembrance, lyric integrity and epic corruption, they all share Antigone’s
predicament. No work gives a more dramatic sense of the political stakes of
mourning, and the possessive demands of the state, than Antigone.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, writers and theatremakers began to re-examine tragic aesthetics in earnest. While Marguerite
Yourcenar and Jean Anouilh saturated readers and viewers with the fatality of
tragedy, Virginia Woolf tried to write against Antigone’s fatal ending, in search of
strategies for survival. Woolf’s resistance to tragedy was part of a broader
movement to “Euripideanize” and “de-Hegelianize” Antigone—to shift from the
idea that Sophocles’s play was about a conflict of “two rights” and toward a
championing of Antigone’s claim over Creon’s.
Banished or domesticated by writers like Freud, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
H.D., by whom she was found frigid, or moralizing, or otherwise wanting as a
high modernist muse (Penelope, Helen and others proved readier to those
purposes), Antigone’s influence returned in the 1930s, when the qualities of
courage and independence of mind were so highly valued, and when the body was
used for the exercise of political rather than sexual freedoms. This icon of the
Second World War persisted into the post-war period, and flourished in the
contexts of women’s writing, protest theatre, post-colonial writing, and political
theories of literature. The most significant metamorphosis Antigone has
undergone in the last century is her transformation into an undeniably political
being. Other classical women have mattered to the modernist canon-- among
them Penelope, Helen, Persephone, Philomel, Electra, Cleopatra, and Sappho—