[image description: tags reading "# i think she swings both ways! # she champions traditional values sure but she also challenges creon's autocracy and undermines his appeals to rule of law. as a monarch # which in an athenian context matters too i think # re: my post where i let them parrot left and right wing talking points in turns." end description.]
i think it is rly productive to point out how creon is pulling an autocratic move that athenian audiences would see as a real political problem but! i actually don't agree that antigone's undermining of that appeal to autocracy/monarchical power is all that progressive or proto-leftist. @finelythreadedsky put it rly well in the replies:
did she effectively utilize girlpower by putting the aristocratic oikos over the democratic polis in the fifth-century dramatization of the tensions between them???
anyway i think my reading of antigone as a character is deeply informed by that one article on women and culture in herodotus' histories which shows how women, when they do act in history, act as conservative agents to 'correct' the actions of men who've departed from traditional values
so antigone's rejection of creon's claims to authority imo don't read as necessarily democratic. even if we read antigone as a democratic figure, athenian democracy wasn't synonymous with progressivism or what we would recognize today as leftist political values.
i also really appreciate situating antigone's actions as a woman in the public sphere within the context of women who act similarly in historiographical texts. it's a later point of comparison but i find that plutarch (and even to a very limited extent livy) does a similar thing with women who intervene in the political misbehavior of men and are held up as positive exemplars for doing so. i should also note that it makes a difference that women in these types of narrative are often from aristocratic or royal families. if our contemporary assumption is that a woman standing up to a male politician is automatically progressive, we might lose out on seeing the nuances around how some women in greco-roman texts (although certainly not all and who knows about real life) are not seen as bucking the normative order of things but actually restoring and representing them. the literary/narrative trope of the woman who is forced by socio-political decadence to step out of the private sphere and become a conduit for traditional values is one we can recognize even today in conservative and reactionary discourse.
i think the real challenge antigone poses for adaptation among progressive audiences is that, if we do start to explore the conservatism of antigone's position, creon doesn't exactly offer a positive alternative for us to hold up as the 'good guy,' which links to the tags' observations above. and when what an adaptation really wants is to reflect an assumption about the audience's values back at the audience via the authority of classical text, it wants to have a 'good guy' to represent those values. and and and creon's perspective is at times explicitly misogynist, something that would make it very hard for him to be a sympathetic hero or perspective in a feminist reading.
ultimately, i find antigone is more interesting if we let go of the idea that there must be a character who is a stand-in for the audience's values and allow antigone and creon to both be challenging to us in ways that disrupts the authoritative-affirmative feedback cycle of "we are like the ancient greeks so that means we are uniquely enlightened because the ancient greeks were uniquely enlightened."
also i just think women characters are more interesting when we let them be unlikable. i'm tired of women and girls (maybe especially girls) from classical literature having to be reduced to a mirror that reflects back a very narrow, milquetoast subsection of feminism, as i think lots and lots of us on classics tumblr are. it's just antigone has so canonically been accepted as a progressive feminist hero that it can be hard to see the ways she is getting that kind of treatment. a really interesting feminist reading could take a conservative, reactionary, hyper-religious antigone as a starting point for probing why some women are indoctrinated into or even drawn to those kinds of ideologies (and this is where something like a focus on the aristocratic background could be translated into a contemporary consideration of how class and other kinds of privilege engender reactionary ideologies in women).
anyway this is why i like elektra better when it comes to loudmouth girls who hate their families. she was always wearing her ugly on her sleeve.
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