Foley argues that despite Antigone’s valiant fight, it is telling that Antigone closes “with the punishment of the female intruder that implicitly reasserts the cultural norm” (14), excluding the female presence from the political realm – through the punishment of death, no less – with a note of finality. As Antigone’s defense of her familial right to bury her brother clashes against Creon’s defense of Theban law, it seems like “the female becomes the locus of oppositions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ household and state” (Foley 14), especially as Antigone appeals to divine law while Creon appeals to man-made law. Such restrictions on female independence can be seen in Antigone: while Antigone and, to some extent, Ismene, struggle to assert their will in the political sphere, they are overwhelmed by various male actors including Creon and the Chorus, who chastise the women for acting out of line. Gender essentialist distinctions, while seemingly neutral, skew the power dynamic away from the feminine and towards the masculine, so much so that “the culture does not normally permit adult moral autonomy to the female agent” (Foley 126). Written against the backdrop of such a political context, Antigone appears to reinforce the gender essentialism pervasive in ancient Greece at the time. Thus, in ancient Greece, gender essentialism operated to box men and women into gendered roles. Such an expulsion seems inevitable given that the political realm has been, by the gender essentialist’s definition, deemed out-of-bounds for women, with no place for so-called feminine emotionality. Such a systematic dichotomization of gendered characteristics, while seemingly arbitrary, has systemic political consequences – the political structure “identifies itself with a limited group of free men… that has definitively expelled women from its androcentric sphere” (Cavarero 48). ![]() According to Helene Foley, ancient Greek culture “reinforced symbolic links between female, ‘nature,’ domestic/private, emotion/the irrational, and passivity and male, culture, public, rational/the self-controlled, and activity” (232). In ancient Greece where Antigone was written in or before 441 BC, gender norms systematically oppressed women and enforced an essentialist gender binary. In this paper, I suggest that while characters in Antigone – Creon, the Chorus, and Ismene – appear to reinforce gender essentialism by playing out stereotypes entrenched in an essentialist gender binary, the moments where they most aggressively regulate essentialist gender norms actually reveal the contingency, fragility and encultured nature of these norms, thus challenging contemporary gender ideologies in ancient Greece. It implies a limit on the variations and possibilities of change – it is not possible for a subject to act in a manner contrary to her nature" (84). As feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz explains, essentialism "entails the belief that those characteristics defined as women's essence are shared in common by all women at all times. In feminist theory and gender studies, gender essentialism refers to the attribution of a fixed essence to women. The starkly separate realms into which Antigone relegates men and women prompt a reading of the play through the lens of gender essentialism. Even the Chorus of Theban elders, assumed to hold a neutral perspective so as to advise Creon on matters of society, consists entirely of old Theban men, excluding female perspectives from the political arena. Creon’s insistence that “I won’t be called weaker than womankind” (680) reveals a male superiority complex that aligns masculinity with strength and dominance and femininity with weakness and subordination. Ismene’s advice to Antigone, “we two are women, / so not to fight with men” (61-62) points to the inferior power position that women hold in Theban society and the gendered assumptions that inform civil obedience. In his play Antigone, Sophocles presents a skewed power dynamic between men and women in Thebes as the conflict between Antigone and Creon unfolds. The following essay by Luka Cai Minglu received an honorable mention in 2017. ![]() McLeod Freshman Writing Prize recognizes original research papers that explore some aspect of race, gender and/or identity.
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