questions attached in file
1)
Antigone is both admirable and troubling as a heroine, and despite characters’ statements to the contrary, she reveals the power and influence that women in the Greek culture held. Ismene attempts to caution her sister’s brash plan by advising, “Remember, we’re women. How can we fight men. They’re stronger. We must accept these things–and worse to come.” Despite this, however, Antigone defies Kreon, and through her actions she gains the sympathy of the populace, her sister, and many others. Yet, as a direct result of her actions, other characters also die.
So, is her determination and independence admirable, or is her action ultimately one of self-destruction?
2) Look at Antigone’s speech starting, “My tomb, my bridal bedroom, my home” in the text. Do you think that Antigone has changed her motives for burying her brother? What does this speech say about her character and state of mind?
3) Red Group: What role does suffering play in the play? Is it good or bad? Compare and contrast two specific scenes or speeches to define your answer.
Blue Group: What is the role of fate/free will in the play? Discuss in connection to one of the following characters:
·
· Ismene
· Haemon
· Kreon/Creon
4) Read the article
“Unburied” from The New Yorker.
Download “Unburied” from The New Yorker.
Part of reading Antigone for many of us is that we tend to identify with Antigone and agree with her decision to bury her brother. Sometimes reading literature, it’s easy to make assumptions about how me might act or not act in a similar situation. However, this piece tends to show how difficult going against the grain of society can be in our own time and lives.
Pick a short passage from the article that you find interesting in connection to Antigone and put it into conversation with a meaningful and relevant scene/extended speech from the play. What do you make of the connection between politics and public pressure in such moments?
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Page-Turner
Unburied:
Tamerlan
Tsarnaev and the
Lessons of Greek
Tragedy
By By Da n i e l Me n d e l s o h nDa n i e l Me n d e l s o h n May 14, 2013
“Bury this terrorist on U.S. soil and we
will unbury him.”
So ran the bitter slogan on one of the
signs borne last week by enraged
protesters outside the Worcester,
Massachusetts, funeral home that had
agreed to receive the body of the accused
Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan
Tsarnaev—a cadaver seemingly
so
morally polluted that his own widow
would not claim it, that no funeral
director would touch it, that no cemetery
would bury it. Indeed, even after Peter
Stefan, a Worcester funeral director, had
washed and shrouded the battered,
bullet-ridden body for burial according to
Muslim law, the cadaver became the
object of a macabre game of civic and
political football. Cemetery officials and
community leaders in the Boston area
were concerned that a local burial would
spark civic unrest. (“It is not in the best
interest of ‘peace within the city’ to
execute a cemetery deed,” the Cambridge
city manager, Robert Healy, .)
While the state’s governor carefully
sidestepped the issue, asserting that it was
a family matter, other politicians seemed
to sense an advantage in catering to the
high popular feeling. “If the people of
Massachusetts do not want that terrorist
to be buried on our soil,” declared
Representative Edward J. Markey, a
Democratic candidate for the U.S.
Senate, “then it should not be.”
And so it went until late last week, when
—due to the intervention of Martha
Mullen, a Richmond, Virginia, woman
who’d been following the story, a
practicing Christian who cited Jesus’s
injunction to “love our enemies” as her
inspiration—Tsarnaev’s body was “nally
transported to a tiny Muslim cemetery in
rural Virginia, and interred there in an
unmarked grave. Until then, the corpse
had languished for over two weeks—not
only unburied but, in a way, unburiable.
In one of several updates it published on
the grisly affair, quoted Ray
Madoff, a Boston law professor who
specializes in “what she calls the law of
the dead,” about the case. “There is no
precedent for this type of thing,” Madoff
told a reporter. “It is a legal no-man’s
land.”
A legal no-man’s land, perhaps, but
familiar territory to anyone even casually
acquainted with the Greek classics. From
its epic dawn to its tragic high noon,
Greek literature expressed tremendous
cultural anxiety about what happens
when the dead are left unburied. In part,
the issue was a religious one: the souls of
the dead were thought to be stranded,
unable to reach the underworld without
proper burial. (And without a proper
tomb, or sêma—a “sign” or grave marker
—a dead person could not hope for
postmortem recognition, some sign that
he or she had once lived and died.) The
religious prohibition had civic
consequences: refusal to bury the dead
was considered an affront to the gods and
could bring ritual pollution on the
community. The right of all sides to bury
soldiers who had fallen in battle was a
convention of war; burial truces were
regularly granted. In myth, even
characters who act more like terrorists
than like soldiers—for instance, the great
warrior Ajax, who plots to assassinate his
commanding officers but ends up dead
himself—are deemed worthy of burial in
the end. Which is to say, even the body of
the enemy was sacrosanct.
This preoccupation with the implications
of burial and non-burial haunts a number
of the greatest works of Greek literature.
The opening lines of , the oldest
extant work of Western poetry, refer with
pointed revulsion to the possibility that
the bodies of the warriors who died at
Troy could become the “delicate pickings
of birds and dogs”; indeed you might say
that getting the dead buried—even the
reviled, enemy dead—is the principle
object of the epic’s grand narrative arc.
Fifteen thousand lines after that opening
reference to unburied corpses, the poem
closes, magni”cently, with a scene of
reconciliation between the grief-
maddened Achilles—who has daily
de”led the unburied body of his mortal
enemy, Hector, dragging it back and forth
through the dirt before the walls of Troy
—and Hector’s aged father, the Trojan
king, Priam. In a gesture of redemption
for himself as much as for the Trojans,
Achilles “nally agrees to release the body
for burial. The gigantic epic ends not (as
some “rst-time readers expect) with the
Wooden Horse, or the Fall of Troy, but
with the all-important funeral of the
greatest of the Greeks’ enemies—a rite of
burial that allows the Trojans to mourn
their prince and, in a way, the audience to
“nd closure after the unrelenting violence
that has preceded. The work’s “nal line is
as plain, and as “nal, as the sound of dirt
on the lid of a coffin. “This was the
funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.”
As for the Odyssey, it, too—for all its
emphasis on its fantastical, proto-sci-”
adventures—reveals a telling
preoccupation with this issue. The great
adventure epic features an extended visit
to the underworld, where, among other
things, the $itting shades of the dead
express anxiety about their own funerals
(and where Odysseus learns how he
himself will die, many years hence, “from
the sea”); precisely at the poem’s
midpoint, Odysseus dutifully halts his
homeward journey—and the epic’s
narrative momentum—to bury, with full
honors, the body of a young sailor who
has died in a clumsy accident, as if to say
that even the most hapless and pointless
of deaths merits the dignity of ritual. And
in the work’s “nal, culminating book,
Homer slips in the information,
ostensibly en passant but of course
crucial, that the bodies of the hated
suitors—whose gory deaths we are, to
some extent, invited to savor, given their
gross outrages against Odysseus and his
family—were duly permitted to be
retrieved by their families for burial.
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* * *
But no work of ancient literature is as
obsessed with unburied bodies as
Sophocles’ “Antigone,” a tragedy “rst
produced in Athens around 442 B.C.: the
entire plot centers on the controversy
over how a community that has survived
a deadly attack will dispose of the body of
the perpetrator of that attack—the body,
as it happens, of a young man who had
planned to bring destruction on the city
that had been his home, who “sought to
consume the city with “re…sought to
taste blood.”
The young man in question is Polyneices,
a son of the late, spectacularly ill-fated
king Oedipus who, after a power struggle
with his brother Eteocles, $ed the city,
eventually returning with an invading
army (the “Seven Against Thebes”) to
make war on his homeland. At a
climactic moment in the battle, the two
brothers slay each other, but the invasion
is ultimately repelled and the city saved.
In the opening lines of the play, we learn
that the body of Eteocles, the defender of
the city, has been buried with full honors,
but, according to a decree promulgated by
the new king, Creon (who is the young
men’s uncle), no one, under pain of death,
may bury or mourn Polyneices, whose
corpse is to be left “unwept,
unsepulchered, a treasure to feast on for
birds looking out for a dainty meal.” (The
particular horror, expressed from
the Iliad
on down, that humans could become the
food of the animals we normally eat
ourselves is noteworthy: a strong signal of
a total inversion in the scheme of things
of which the unburied body, the corpse
that remains above rather than below
ground, is a symptom.)
Creon, like the Senate candidate from
Massachusetts, cares a great deal about
public opinion, as we later learn; but it’s
certainly possible to argue that his edict is
grounded in a strong if idiosyncratic
morality. When confronted about his
rationale for enshrining in the city’s law
what is, after all, a religious abomination,
the king declares that Polyneices’ crime
against the city has put the young man
beyond morality—that while burial of
any dead is a religious obligation, it is
impossible to imagine that “the gods have
care for this corpse,” that one might ever
see “the gods honoring the wicked.” As
he sputters his “nal line in this debate,
you sense that he is acting out of a
genuine, if narrow, conviction that evil
men do not merit human treatment: “It
cannot be.” (“It should not be”:
, apropos of the
burial that offended the sensibilities of
Massachusetts voters.)
But just as strong as Creon’s convictions
are those of his niece Antigone, sister to
both of the dead young men—Eteocles
enshrined in his hero’s tomb, Polyneices
lying naked on the ground, his nude,
weapon-torn body exposed to the
elements, to the ravenous birds. From the
moment she appears on stage, outraged
after having heard about the new edict,
Antigone’s argument is for the absolute
imperative of burial—indeed, for the
absolute. For her, burial of the dead is a
universal institution that transcends
culture and even time itself: the
“unwavering, unwritten customs of the
gods … not some tri$e of now or
yesterday, but for all eternity.” (She
mockingly asks whether these can be
overruled by the mere “pronouncements”
of Creon.) This conviction is what leads
her to perform the galvanizing action of
the play: under cover of night she goes to
the desolate place where Polyneices’ body
lies out in the open and performs a token
burial, scattering some dirt on the body.
It is to this symbolic burial that a terri”ed
soldier—one of the guards whom Creon
had set around the body, to make sure no
one would inter it—presumably refers
later on, when he anxiously reports to
Creon that someone has performed the
rite. Enraged, Creon orders the man to
go back and “unbury” the body: to strip
off the thin covering of dirt and expose
the corpse once more to the elements. It
is upon his return to the foul-smelling
site that the soldier discovers Antigone,
who at that moment is arriving, and who
cries out in despair when she sees the
denuded corpse. She is taken prisoner,
has her great confrontation with her
uncle (from which I quote above), and, in
one of the diabolically symmetrical
punishments so beloved of Greek
tragedians, is herself buried alive as
punishment for her crime of burying the
dead—walled into a tomb of rock, to
expire there. (By not actually killing her,
Creon, who has the master bureaucrat’s
deep feeling for the small procedural
detail, hopes to avoid incurring ritual
pollution.)
There she does die—imperious to the
end, she hangs herself, rather than waste
away as anybody’s victim—but not before
Creon has been persuaded of the folly of
his policy. As often happens in tragedy,
the persuasion takes its “nal form as a
heap of dead bodies: not only Antigone’s
but those of Creon’s son, the dead girl’s
“ancé, who has slain himself over the
body of his beloved, and Creon’s wife, too,
who kills herself in despair at the news of
their child’s violent end. The king who
had refused to recognize the claims of
family is, in the end, made horribly aware
of how important family is.
“The claims of family” is just one way to
describe what Antigone represents. The
titanic battle between her and Creon is,
in fact, one of the most thrilling moral,
intellectual, and philosophical
confrontations ever dramatized;
inevitably, it has been seen as
representing any number of cultural
con$icts. Certainly in the play there is the
tension between the family and the
community, but there is also that between
the individual and the state, between
religious and secular worldviews, between
divine and human law, feminine and
masculine concerns, the domestic and
political realms.
But perhaps a broader rubric is
applicable, too. For you could say that
what preoccupies Antigone, who as we
know is attracted to universals, is simply
another “absolute”: the absolute
personhood of the dead man, stripped of
all labels, all categories—at least those
imposed by temporal concerns, by politics
and war. For her, the defeated and
disgraced Polyneices, naked and
unburied, is just as much her brother as
the triumphant and heroic Eteocles,
splendidly entombed. In the end, what
entitles him to burial has nothing to do
with what side he was on—and it’s worth
emphasizing the play is not at all shy
about enumerating the horrors the dead
man intended to perpetrate on the city,
his own city, the pillage, the burning, the
killing, the enslavement of the survivors
—but the fact that he was a human
being, anthropos. (This tragedy is, indeed,
famous for expressing a kind of
astonished wonder at what human beings
are capable of, accomplishments for
which Sophocles uses the ambiguous
adjective “deina,” which means both
“terrible” and “wonderful”—“awesome,”
maybe, in the original sense of that
word.) This is why, during her great
debate with Creon, while the king keeps
recurring to the same point—that
Eteocles was the champion of the city,
and Polyneices its foe, and that “a foe is
never a friend”—such distinctions are
moot for Antigone, since the gods
themselves do not make them.
“Nonetheless,” she “nally declares,
putting a curt end to another exchange
on the subject, “Hades requires these
rites.” The only salient distinction is the
one that divides gods from men—which,
if true, makes all humans equal.
* * *
It was hard not to think of all this—of
the Iliad with its grand funereal “nale, of
the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so
many burials, and of course of
“Antigone”—as I followed the story of
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over
the past few weeks. I thought, of course,
of canny politicians eyeing the public
mood, and of the public to whom those
politicians wanted to pander. I thought
even more of the protesters who,
understandably to be sure, wanted to
make clear the distinction between victim
and perpetrator, between friend and foe,
by threatening to strip from the enemy
what they saw as the prerogatives of the
friend: humane treatment in death. The
protesters who wanted, like Creon, not
only to deny those prerogatives to an
enemy but to strip them away again
should anyone else grant them—to
“unbury the body.” I thought of Martha
Mullen, a Christian, who insisted that the
Muslim Tsarnaev, accused of heinous
atrocities against innocent citizens, be
buried just as a loved one might deserve
to be buried, because she honored the
religious precept that demands that we
see all humans as “brothers,” whatever the
evil they have done.
This “nal point is worth lingering over
just now. The last of the many articles
I’ve read about the strange odyssey of
Tsarnaev’s body was about the reactions
of the residents of the small Virginia
town where it was, “nally, buried. “What
do you do when a monster is buried just
down the street?” the subhead asked. The
sensationalist diction, the word “monster,”
I realized, is the problem—and brings
you to the deep meaning of Martha
Mullen’s gesture, and of Antigone’s
argument, too. There is, in the end, a
great ethical wisdom in insisting that the
criminal dead, that your bitterest enemy,
be buried, too; for in doing so, you are
insisting that the criminal, however
heinous, is precisely not a “monster.”
Whatever else is true of the terrible crime
that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of
having perpetrated, it was, all too clearly,
the product of an entirely human psyche,
horribly motivated by beliefs and
passions that are very human indeed
—deina in the worst possible sense. To
call him a monster is to treat this enemy’s
mind precisely the way some would treat
his unburied body—which is to say, to
put it beyond the reach of human
consideration (and therefore,
paradoxically, to refuse to confront his
“monstrosity” at all).
This is the point that obsessed Sophocles’
Antigone: that to not bury her brother, to
not treat the war criminal like a human
being, would ultimately have been to
forfeit her own humanity. This is why it
was worth dying for.
* * *
Sometimes, a less elevated instinct, a raw
practicality, could lead the characters in
Greek plays to a version of the same
conclusion: that because we will all want
to be treated like human beings at some
unimaginably low moment—because we
all die—we must treat the “monsters”
thus, too. This, too, is a possibility worth
considering right now.
It is, in fact, the point of the tart ending
of another play by Sophocles—one he
wrote about Ajax, the good soldier turned
evil terrorist. At the end of this tragedy,
written not long before “Antigone” was
composed, a con$ict arises over whether
the body of the criminal should be
buried. His enemies—Agamemnon and
Menelaus, the leaders of the Greek
expedition, whom Ajax had plotted to
murder—insist, of course, that his body
be cast forth unburied, like the body of
an animal, “food for the birds.” (Again.)
Yet unexpectedly, there springs to his
defense a man who also had been his
enemy. That man is Odysseus, who in a
climactic confrontation with the two
Greek generals—who are his allies and
commanding officers—persuades them
that to pursue their hatred after death
would be grotesque. Rather typically for
this type, the swaggering Agamemnon
worries that to relent would make him
appear “soft”; but Odysseus, wily as he
always is, argues that “softness” is nothing
more than justice—nothing more than
acting like a human being. Then he
makes his “nal, stark point, one with
which, you suspect, even Creon wouldn’t
argue:
Agamemnon: You will make us
appear cowards this day.
Odysseus: Not so, but just men in
the sight of all the Greeks.
Agamemnon: So you would have
me allow the burying of the dead?
Odysseus: Yes; for I too shall
come to that need.
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10/22/19, 3:58 PM
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