#iphis.txt

[kallistoriae]

— Iphigenia’s saffron dress…

part 2: agamemnon’s gown

[kallistoriae]

[Polyxena’s death] is not placed at the beginning or at the end of the play but muffled in the middle; it does not constitute either cause of culmination of the action; it does not change the plot or other people in any substantial way; and it forces us to no moral conclusion at all except that such sacrifice is irrelevant to the world in which it is staged. Polyxena is a shooting star that wipes itself across the play and disappears.

— Anne Carson, preface to "Hekabe" in Grief Lessons

[kallistoriae]

CASSANDRA: the child outstretches handsfull of flesh. please don’t forget me. it is written, written in clear black—everywhere dead girls. dead girls. the sadness washes all the rest away

— Oresteia, Robert Icke

IPHIGENIA: Hold me. Please. I can feel the dead girl's breath inside this dress. I feel all the dead through me.

VIOLETA IMPERIAL: Girls die everyday here, and no one mourns them.

— Iphigenia Crash Land Falls On The Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, Caridad Svitch

CLYTEMNESTRA: It’s becoming a habit. Soon it’ll be normal and before you can turn round it’ll be a law. Before it was ring giving, ring taking, ships of gold and ships of spices, poets and harpists in the banquet hall. And if a sacrifice was wanted it was a calf or a deer. Now it’s girls. The blood of spotless girls these new gods want. What is this terrible new pact among men?

— Girl on an Altar, Marina Carr

[kallistoriae]

i think more people should jerk off to theory and scholarship

[kallistoriae]

— Haemon’s suicide in Antigone as an act of sexual violence against Antigone

The suicide of Haemon at the end of Antigone is a sexual scene and is usually read as such. Sophocles makes it clear that Haemon joining Antigone in death is an act of marriage through suicide: “he has won his bride at last, poor boy, not here but in the houses of the dead” (1240-1241, trans. by Fagles).

But people usually overlook that this marriage is an act of violence. It denies the narrative that Antigone built for herself. It denies her the choice she thought she was making when she committed suicide.

Antigone insists on the fact that she dies a virgin (she says she is given in marriage to Acheron/Hades). Even if she laments this lack of marriage so that she will be pitied, she never mentions Haemon, not once in the play. She chooses to hang herself — a maiden’s feminine death, despite the way she transgresses gender roles throughout the play. She claims that what she does for her brother, she would do for no other, and specifically not for a child or a husband (“if my husband died, exposed and rotting— i’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself // a husband dead, there might have been another” (906-909)): she removes herself from the structure of marriage, she refuses the societal norms that would have her forget the family she’s born in for the family she will marry into — she does not want to leave her oikos, she claims the curse of her house for herself. Antigone is transgressive as an unmarried girl, a sister & daughter rather than a wife.

And Haemon, in his distress, kills himself over her corpse and negates this. The play laments them both, married in death at last, but Antigone did not ask for it.

Antigone’s corpse is literally violated by Haemon’s death. Marriage must be consumed, and the description of the suicide is sexual. When he dies, Haemon embraces the corpse of Antigone, and he “released a quick rush of blood, bright red on her cheek glistening white” (1238-1239): blood is of course metaphorical semen; he taints her body and claims her.

Her corpse and her death are violated by this suicide, it intrudes into her narrative, and claims her as Haemon’s bride, despite her refusal to take upon this role.

Now—do I think Haemon’s intent is to metaphorically rape Antigone? Not exactly. But he is aware that he is going against her wishes by claiming her as his. Part of why he does that anyway is obvious: he is distressed, he stands next to her hanging corpse, he wants to share her fate. But that’s not all of it.

Haemon’s suicide happens in front of Kreon. Kreon witnesses the death of his son and the marriage it performs. I believe that even though Haemon’s suicide is partly due to his distress, its specific context is a performance. And the intended audience is Kreon. This happens just after he tries and fails to kill his father. Kreon is the one who tried to take Antigone away from Haemon. Here, Haemon goes against his father’s orders: he defies his authority both as father and as king. In doing so, to harm his father, he affirms himself as a man (and not a boy or a son). To do this, he establishes his own manliness and authority within the patriarchal context of ancient Greek society: in marriage. He kills himself with his sword (a manly death) but that is not enough: he also affirms his gendered and sexual power by claiming Antigone. He diminishes her to the status of an object/bride, and uses her against Kreon.

At the same time, this is (consciously or not) a way to refuse Antigone’s claim that she belongs to her family. Haemon knows she chose to abandon the idea of their marriage to instead bury her brother. He must have heard that she affirms she would not have done the same for a husband. In marrying her anyway, now that she is not in a state to refuse him anymore, he asserts his authority over her. He refuses her choice to belong only to her birth family. Antigone’s suicide was supposed to be solely about her brother Polynices, whom she chose over her betrothed: the fact that Haemon immediately claims her as his negates this. Suddenly, Antigone is not simply a dead sister anymore. She is also a dead bride, a part of a doomed couple that could only marry in death. Haemon proves to Antigone that she could not simply abandon him, that she does not belong to Polynices or to herself, but to him.

By framing his suicide as a marriage, Haemon violates Antigone’s body and mind, and goes against her choices. He refuses her her agency. This violence is psychological but also sexual. Here, suicide is marriage is rape.

[kallistoriae]

alliterations perfec t thing for put poem in to write! alliterations very Beautiful and Good soundly write alliterations in poem. Put Alliterations In Poem. no problems ever in alliterativve poetry because good Shape and Sound for poem weak of poetic devices. Apoem yes a place for an alliteration put alliteration in poem can trust alliteration for giveing good sound to poem. friend alliteration

[kallistoriae]

sappho in my neighbor’s tree

[kallistoriae]

Memory itself, the ability to describe this founding moment in the future of the ills of the house of Argos, is beginning to strain and crumble under the terrible weight of the past. The focus on silence and speech in the two stanzas we have been listening to sets up the aposiopesis that follows; as though these old men knew already that the end would have to be left out, unspeakable and unspoken. It is as though, recalling in words the terrible scene at Aulis, they are also inaugurating a meditation on the impossibility of continuing the story; as if, faced with the agonizing clarity of the tableau they are describing, they are already dimly aware that their speech will be unable to show the whole picture, that they will have to leave it fragmented, leave us with an image that will have to serve as synecdoche for the whole narrative. [Iphigenia’s] death is effaced even as it is described. […] Her silence, her nakedness, and her being transformed into the kind of visual object that can be vividly described are all part of the narrative: in this story, Iphigenia turns into an image. At the moment of her death, she is transformed, not into an animal but into a mimetic representation, a painting. […] This memory of Agamemnon’s attempt to transform his daughter into a mute sacrificial beast tells us something about the impossibility of remembering the atrocity. Iphigenia’s death begins to disappear behind a cloud of occluding language and gestures, and it is clear speech, memory itself, that is being killed. Faced with the task of uttering what we cannot, we resort to literary language. We speak in figures that, we hope, will conceal the unspeakable while leaving it legible at the same time. Thus the task of remembering and narrating the sacrifice of Iphigenia has something in common with undertaking the sacrifice: in both cases we must proceed toward the impossible, hoping that at the final moment the thing will be elided or replaced in some salvific transfiguration. Just as the old men leave off their story before the critical moment, so would Agamemnon hope that something will transform or translate Iphigenia, so that the impossible act would itself be transformed into something possible, as Isaac was replaced at the last moment beneath the blade of Abraham. Agamemnon tries to do this for himself twice, first by silencing Iphigenia, an attempt to make her mute and bestial, and second by forgetting ("setting at naught") her former status in the house. These are attempts, in the absence of divine intervention, to make Iphigenia into something she is not, into an empty simulation of the thing that would have made her murder atrocious.

— Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology, Sean Alexander Gurd