Antigone Unbound | Part I: Horror & Attic Black-Figures
ἰὼ δύστανος, βροτοῖς
οὔτε νεκρὸς νεκροῖσιν
μέτοικος, οὐ ζῶσιν, οὐ θανοῦσιν.alas luckless, neither mortal
nor shade amongst shades
but as a migrant, not living or dead. (Ant. 850–2)
— —
We can start with the obvious: hasn’t Antigone been done to death?
The short answer is yes: it’s our most reproduced play from antiquity. The more interesting answer is…well, we haven’t really done the death part of Antigone to death yet, have we?
Specifically there’s a lot of horror around death in Antigone, and I mean that in in the sense of the horror genre — considering both the corpse of Polyneices and Antigone being buried alive. The events of the play come back to these themes as the catalyst for the plot’s action.
The play is as follows:
Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, defies her uncle Creon to bury her dead brother Polyneices who had just led an army against their city the night prior. Creon arrests her, challenges her motives, and when he’s unable to sway her he takes his anger out on his other family members — most notably Antigone’s sister Ismene, and Creon’s son Haimon (who’s also engaged to Antigone). When he is abandoned by his son after threatening to murder his fiance in front of him, he instead makes the decision to imprison Antigone on the outskirts of town. It is only when she’s locked up that the prophet Teiresias comes to the palace to warn Creon about the plague he’s caused in the city due to his mistreatment of Polyneices’ corpse. When Creon furthermore refuses to budge, even going so far as to sacrilege the gods, Teiresias tells him that before the night is over, his stubbornness will cause him to lose his family members. It’s at this point that Creon reverses his decision about Antigone and Polyneices, rushing to release one and bury the other. However, Antigone has already hung herself with her veil and Haimon has already discovered her dead body. Creon attempts to console his son, but Haimon first tries to kill Creon before killing himself. As the Messenger relays all of this information to the chorus, Eurydice — the wife of Creon — came out of the palace to hear the news, before returning into the house without saying a word. Creon returns to the palace carrying the corpse of his son and lamenting, only to learn that his wife has heard the news and has taken her own life as well. Creon thus ends the play with his whole family bleeding out around him, having been ruler for less than a day and lost everything, dubbed by the messenger an empsychron necron “animated corpse”.
I’m writing about the Antigone during this HAUNTOLOGICONSUMPTION season not only because she’s one of the most hauntological figures from antiquity, but also because I’ve long wondered about the ways in which the character seems to haunt her own play. When I was writing my masters thesis “Upside-down vs. Inside-out: Considering Imprisonment through the Antigone” under Nancy Worman and Marcus Folch at Columbia, I was very fascinated by the ways Antigone kept “coming back up” in different hauntological senses, leading me to wonder if perhaps she was “coming back up” in her own play in a way that hadn’t really been explored before.
This may at first glance seem like a stretch — perhaps making Antigone do far more than the text allows — but I also have to remind folks that Antigone is given quite a lot when she does quite a little: she’s on stage for only three scenes (438 lines: 1–99, 384–581, 801–943) and interacts with only three characters save the chorus — Ismene, the Guard, and Creon; in direct contrast to her uncle, who’s onstage for over two thirds of the play (he is offstage for only 413 lines: 1–161, 332–386, 781–882, 1152–1260) and interacts with every character except for his wife, Eurydice. Yet despite Creon’s physical dominance over the stage, it’s Antigone’s psychological impact which dominates the conversation, even when she isn’t present. And it’s that presence that she holds over the play that I wanted to explore more in my thesis.
In many ways…I’ve always viewed the Antigone as a ghost story. That’s partly a symptom of the larger subject of Greek tragedy which I’ve long argued should be considered a progenitor of the horror genre, considering it’s an art form designed to evoke extreme emotion around anxiety, disgust, and catharsis, and it often uses myths and folklore to discuss contemporary (5th century Athenian, in this case) fears of society as well. But it was also in asking the question — what can a person do in the wake of a figure like Creon, who’s so expertly turned the world upside-down (as Teiresias says in 1068)? What resistance is there against such physical imposition?
Psychological imposition seemed to be the method of Antigone’s “madness” so to speak, but I was less focusing on her capacity to change minds in a psychoanalytical or neurodivergent sense, and more thinking through the psyche in the psychological, in that animating impulse of life. I was also interested in the final line the chorus of Theban elders says to Antigone before she’s imprisoned:
ἔτι τῶν αὐτῶν ἀνέμων αὑταὶ
ψυχῆς ῥιπαὶ τήνδε γ᾿ ἔχουσιν.The selfsame untamed winds of the spirit still possess her. (929–30)
I was interested in these windy spirits (literally anemon…rhipai refers to the blasts of the north wind, with connotations of rushing, pressure, onslaught) possessing Antigone and making themselves known through what is coming in and out of her mouth (stoma in Greek, which will be dissected more in Part III).
I’ve been drawn to both Antigone and Creon as possessed figures, precisely because they seem to parallel more obvious candidates for exploration on this subject (Agave and Pentheus’ possession under Dionysus in the Bacchae being one of the most prominent examples), as well as the fact that Antigone seems to both possess and be possessed throughout the text. Her doubling around possession puts her in conversation with other heroines from horror that I grew up engaging with, particularly those from the Black horror genre.
One of the more prominent heroines ripe for comparison comes out of not only Black horror, but also Black classical reception of Greek tragedy in the character Sethe from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Partly based on the classical figure of Medea, combined with a quasi-historical narrative around Margaret Garner, a fugitive enslaved woman who murdered her children upon her recapture and was dubbed the “Modern Medea” of her time (for more on the intersections of Morrison and Euripides, see Shelley 1995), Morrison uses both tragic form and Black storytelling narratives to write about the aftermath of slavery and the persistence of cultural memory.
This allows her to create a novel of repeated haunting, the haunting coming through like an endless sung canon, expressing itself with a terror and bittersweet longing that only an innocent uncomprehending child can (for more on her other uses of canon see Morrison 1988). Morrison coins the term “rememory” around this repetition, around the ways in which images and signals can return and press themselves against Black folks during a time period after the world has been turned upside-down and inside out.
Morrison’s rememory is a key function of hauntology for me — in thinking through the prints and impressions that enfold us back into past narratives. Her meditations on what constitute a haunting, I also find extremely illuminating. She says in her “On Beloved”:
“…after following a number of trails trying to determine a structure, I decided that the single most uncontroversial thing one can say about the institution of slavery vis-a-vis contemporary time, is that it haunts us all. That in so many ways all our lives are entangled with the past — its manipulations and, fearful of its grasp, ignoring or dismissing or distorting it to suit ourselves, but always unable to erase it. When finally i understood the nature of a haunting — how it is both what we yearn for and what we fear, I was able to see the traces of a ghostly presence, the residue of a repressed past in certain concrete but also allusive detail. Footprints particularly. That disappear and return only to disappear again. The endings of my novels have to be clear in my mind before I begin. So I was able to describe this haunting even before I knew everything that would lead up to it.”
I was in a similar place with haunting and Antigone, particularly thinking through that idea of her coming back, those footprints retracing themselves through the prints she’s already left throughout the play. Perhaps her unusual mobility throughout the narrative is to highlight her extraordinary mobility in her afterlife?
Her anxiety over her brother, and her not wanting his corpse to be abused echoes other aspects of the Black horror genre. The contemporary trope of zombies originally came out of Haitian folklore, birthed from a slave society bound by the anxieties of bodies being unable to rest even in death and finding no escape from the horrors of said bondage:
“Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Instead, they’d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, undead slaves at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them — soulless zombies. After the Haitian Revolution in 1804 and the end of French colonialism, the zombie became a part of Haiti’s folklore. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion, with Haitians believing zombies were corpses reanimated by shamans and voodoo priests.” (x)
The Haitian zombie and the anxiety around slavery regarding utilizing corpses for profit has resonance in the Antigone. In her impassioned debate with Creon, she exclaims that it was not a slave (doulos) but her brother (adelphos) who died (517).
And later on, the prophet Teiresias even exclaims his disbelief at Creon’s relationship to the corpse, particularly around Creon’s need for the body when it should be in the realm of the chthonic gods:
“Yield to the dead man and don’t keep stabbing him while he lays dead! What is the use of killing him over and over?” (1028–30)
Creon’s obstinance on this matter is not bound only to the Antigone — in fact this tends to be a bit of a mythological variant around the larger tale of Creon not allowing any of the Argive soldiers to be buried and bringing a plague onto Thebes from the gods of the underworld that has to be mitigated by virgin sacrifice. It also is a theme that Sophocles reuses in his Oedipus Rex, as a fatal flaw of Oedipus being unwilling to see that he is the cause of the miasma spreading through Thebes.
In Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Theseus ridicules Creon’s attendant who speaks to him on this matter over his unwillingness to bury the dead Argives:
“Now let the dead be buried in the earth, and let each element return to the place from whence it came into the light of day, the spirit to the upper air, the body to the earth. We do not possess our bodies as our own: we live our lives in them, and thereafter the earth, our nourisher, must take them back. Do you think it is Argos you harm by not burying the dead? You are wrong: all Hellas is concerned if the dead are deprived of their due and kept unburied. If your action becomes customary, it will turn brave men into cowards. To me you have come uttering dreadful threats: are you nevertheless afraid of the dead if they are hidden in the earth? What are you afraid may happen? That they will overthrow your land from the grave? Or that in the depths of the earth they will beget children who will avenge them?” (531–47)
This division of the body and the spirit into air and earth interests me precisely because of that final choral line about Antigone before she’s set into the earth — I wonder if her spirit stays present and ends up haunting through the end of the play after her death, reappearing through Creon as an empsychron necron.
But it’s also the multiple identities that Sophocles has laid over the Antigone — the identity that Antigone fashions for herself in the play, and the additional ones that Creon attempts to fabricate onto her — which brings her to resonate as a horror heroine. Identity in horror often marks the outcome of the action via tropes, particularly focused on issues of gender, race, sexuality, and mentality — female virgins have the best chance of survival, hypersexuality is cause for a gruesome death (what we yearn for and what we fear, to think back with Morrison), Black folks of all genders tend to die even when they’re a Magical Negro, those who are genre-savvy — often expressed through tired tropes of neurodiversity — tend to last longer but are often killed in the third act etc etc.
For figures who tend to transverse those boundaries, particularly with Black women in horror in my research, it’s through understanding the ways in which all of these identities intersect and speak to each other that a broader image can be formed. And the deeper this understanding, the stronger the capacity it has to haunt.
Also, imprisoned women in antiquity is a subject hardly discussed at all outside of their reproductive context — partly due to the lack of historical record (see Folch’s upcoming “Red-Figure is the New Black” for a thorough explanation of this issue), but I’ve also long felt a historical anxiety around what types of bondage women are supposed to be exposed to as well as what types of women are supposed to bondage, from the erotic to the carceral. I find it worth noting in my interrogation of Antigone as a “bound woman who haunts” in conjunction with Black female horror heroines and haunting — that the one image we have from antiquity of a bound woman being tortured is a woman with black skin.
And on that note, of all the scholarship on the vase, there is only one scholar who has talked about the fact that the woman depicted on the vase has black/Black skin; Frank Snowden in his Blacks in Antiquity:
“An episode from a satyr-play is one explanation that has been given of a scene on a fifth-century BC lekythos depicting a Negroid woman tied to a tree and tortured by five satyrs. The woman may be the foreign woman whom, according to Pausanias, fearful sailors were forced to sacrifice after the women on their ship had been assaulted by the Sileni.” (160)
(Many thanks to Marcus Folch for bringing this lekythos and the scholarly silence to my attention, Molly Allen for the image itself and bringing it to Folch’s attention, and to Najee Olya for providing me with the exact citation)
In this lekythos, there is the doubling of erotic and carceral bondage — of a woman bound, tortured, but also sexualized in her body’s reproductive capacity. It is an image that belongs in conversation with Morrison’s Sethe, particularly with her haunting refrain “they stole my milk” throughout the novel, referring to her sexual assault proceeding her flight from slavery when School Teacher and his men forcibly took all of her breast milk so that she didn’t have any for her newborn daughter when she was making her escape. It is a scene that highlights the unwilling participation of Black women in the history of modern gynecology and medical science vis-a-vis horror — a sequence I hope to parallel in my examination of Antigone via ancient gynecological thinking in Part IV.
I’ve always felt particularly drawn to horror and the ways in which it reveals many anxieties around intersecting identities that we don’t often explore in everyday society in rich and emotionally resonant ways. And maybe there’s something interesting I see reflected through the Antigone: a girl so desperate that her brother doesn’t turn into a zombie that she ends up haunting and possessing her uncle in the end to get her point across. Creon turns the world upside-down by creating the zombie of Polyneices, and so Antigone must turn the world inside-out to haunt her uncle. It’s an intense back and forth, centered around the power of their specific mouths and their ability to set definitions — and the inherent eroticism in that power. These are arresting figures, and ones bound to haunt the rest of us through the ends of reception.
Therefore I’m going to go through the Antigone piece-by-piece and build the case for reading it as a ghost story. Hopefully this will make the broader case for considering Greek tragedy as a early progenitor of the horror genre:
Part II: Dawn of the Living Dead (Prologue through Stasimon 1) Reflecting on the corpse of the play in light of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, looking at the Pre-Socratic vs Sophistic philosophical framing around the ability to define bodies, and seeing what is illuminated when this philosophical debate is introduced to the concept of racecraft.
Part III: La Noire de…Femme Tragique (Episode 2 through beginning of Stasimon 3) Considering the Antigone’s arc with the 1966's La Noire de…, Coming to understand what on earth a virgin is on the ancient stage and why she has two strange mouths, via a dive into ancient gynecological texts and an exploration of the parthenos as a “staged” pornotrope.
Part IV: Womb to Tomb (En)gendering Imprisonment (Antigone’s self-lament through Episode 5) combining two forms of bondage together to consider the issue around the lacuna of women in prison in antiquity, Sophocles’ contemporary prison in theory and praxis, and considering the stoma of the prison with Creon’s obsession with food.
Part V: Perse-phonics (The I(c)onic Chthonic Scream Queen) (Stasimon 5, Odyssey 10, Homeric Hymn to Demeter) exploring the resonances between Persephone and Antigone’s mouths, particularly around birds, eating, screaming, and giving testimony.
Part VI: Hyst-Creonics (Messenger speech through the end) a recap of the plays events through the lens of the chorus, and the false arc they’ve been building Creon upon which makes him ripe for a haunting. Plus a consideration of a potential “Final Girl” that Sophocles offers us in the text.
Part VII: Phthoggostoma (Chthonic Soundtrack) This is a bonus — I’ve created a soundtrack to try and evoke the multitude of feelings in this play, and so I’ll go through each song and talk about why I’ve matched certain lyrics and melodies with Sophocles’ text.
