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Article Excerpt
In high school and college classrooms around the world, as well as in some of the most influential, notably Hegel's, scholarly endeavours into the text, Sophocles's Antigone is read as a story of conflicting orders of value, of radical division and of opposition between family and state, woman and man, ethics and politics, religion and law. Read in such a manner, with Creon and Antigone standing on opposing sides of what seems to be a fruitless and irreconcilable debate, both characters take on a quality of madness, foolishness, blindness, and fanaticism. Such is the reading offered by Simone de Beauvoir in her essay, "Moral Idealism and Political Realism," which uses Antigone to set up the long-standing clash between ethics and politics embodied in the roles of Antigone and Creon. What Beauvoir is ultimately aiming at, however, is less a thorough reading of the play than a reading of the political divisions and competing value systems of post-WWII France. She uses Antigone and Creon to dissect the commitments of the political players of her own time, when France had ousted the Vichy government and was trying its collaborators, when the revolutionary Left could no longer turn its head from the abuses of Communist Russia, and when the pacifistic Left had been proven reprehensible in its quietism. It is the tension between these political and ethical positions that Beauvoir sees played out through Antigone and Creon--the "moral idealist" and the "political realist."
Instead of a story of division, I suggest here that Antigone's is actually a tale of unification, one that exemplifies a very different relationship between ethics and politics than either Hegel or Beauvoir imagines. As opposed to exemplifying irreconcilable values and divisions between political and ethical commitments, the play, I suggest, is about the falsity and failure of such oppositions and about the impossibility of maintaining them. It is, as I see it, a feminist text about revealing and breaking down false dichotomies, such as man and woman, public and private, morality and the law. In what follows, I lay out Beauvoir's view of the play, which casts Antigone and Creon in radical opposition to each other, and in so doing, problematically mirrors Hegel's opposition of state and family and his gendering of action/inaction within these spheres. In critiquing the interpretations of Hegel, Beauvoir, and additionally, Martha Nussbaum, I claim that any account of the interaction between Creon and Antigone is inadequate without a feminist understanding of the gendered situations of the characters, specifically how radically limited Antigone's situation is in being a woman (albeit fictional) in ancient Greece and how profoundly political Antigone's rebellion actually is for the same reason.
Perhaps surprisingly, while I critique Beauvoir's actual, "pre-feminist" reading of the play in "Moral Idealism and Political Realism" for lacking an attention to gender and an adequately contextualized understanding of human freedom (problems I explore at length below), I ultimately see her later feminist existentialist theory as providing precisely the tools needed to best understand the play. Beauvoir's concepts of situated freedom, oppression, and the moral necessity of rebellion against coercive and oppressive power supply the groundwork for a reading of Antigone that Beauvoir might have given later in her career. Instead of being a figure of divisive moral obstinacy or political quietism, on my revised Beauvoirian reading, Antigone suggests a model of social rebellion that insists upon the uniting of the moral and political, the private and the public. She is a character who refuses the injustice brought about by their separation, and who acts in the only way she can to take a stand against that injustice. She does this not as an "everyman" moral/political hero, but specifically as a woman in a masculinist state, and thus her story demands a feminist interpretation.
Like Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit, Beauvoir sees the ancient world as portrayed in Antigone as a world fundamentally divided. Where for Hegel that division is between the family and the state, private and public, Beauvoir casts the same basic divide as between the ethical and the political, the morally right and the pragmatically necessary (Hegel para. 451). Antigone, for Beauvoir, represents the clash of these "two irreconcilable orders of values" ("Moral" 176): "Antigone is the prototype of those intransigent moralists who, while being contemptuous of earthly goods, proclaim the necessity of certain eternal principles and insist at any cost on keeping their conscience pure--even though they may forfeit their own lives or the lives of others. Creon incarnates the political realist concerned only with the interests of the state and determined to defend them by every possible means" (175). Antigone represents the moral idealist who is absolutely unbending in the values that she deems "eternal" and imagines being more important than life itself. The moralist sacrifices efficacy for unflinching values, as opposed to the realist who sacrifices the right for the useful. The political realist, on the other hand, the "man of action," intent on getting things done and bringing about a particular vision for the community, finds himself uninterested in the dictates of a morality that only inhibits his actions without providing specific guidelines for what should be done (178).
The basic wrong of both of these positions is in their absolutism, their dedication to the necessity of either moral purity or political efficacy. The wrong of absolutism, for Beauvoir, is, above all, a moral wrong, a form of bad faith, an attempt to escape the strain of, and the responsibility for, our freedom. We can make more sense of the positions of the moral idealist and the political realist and their particular failings by turning to Beauvoir's catalogue of moral personalities in The Ethics of Ambiguity. The political realist--Creon--parallels the "serious man," the one who attempts to solidify his freedom by adopting certain limited values as absolute. "The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned" (46). The moral idealist--Antigone--embodies the "passionate [wo]man," a character similar to the "serious man" in that she is absolutely devoted to a particular object, but different in that that object is "disclosed by [her] subjectivity," instead of her subjectivity being subsumed by her adherence to something outside of itself (64). Beauvoir sees both idealism and realism as escapisms that "can free...
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