#and how it directly intersects with impiety

[iliyad]

to nobody's surprise, i am yet again on my academic antigone bullshit

ok i wrote an entire essay on this for class but i keep thinking about it and i really need to get off my chest how utterly devastating it is that antigone truly is doomed by the narrative.

a lot of academics look at her story as an example of athenian literature which opposes the normative gender ideology of their society because antigone is a woman inserting herself into a political sphere with no conventional place for women, especially as it was often held in athenian society that obedience to men was a feminine virtue, which antigone directly subverts by not only standing against creon but doing so publicly.

but, antigone's actions were driven by her will to adhere to the social norm of surviving women in a family performing funerary rites for the deceased men. this isn't really touched upon in sophocles from what i remember, but antigone isn't just determined to complete polynices' funerary rites because he's her brother—the completion of these rites was a position normally held by women of a family, and the responsibilities of daughters to their families wasn't considered extinguished by marriage or any such thing, so even if antigone had been married to haimon by this point the responsibility still would have fallen to her—but she would have felt a duty imposed by the societal norms placed upon women to honour polynices. this therefore obviously creates a conflict — on one hand (μὲν) society expects her to honour her brother's funerary rights, but on the other hand (δὲ) if she does so she's not only publicly disobeying a male authority figure but in a way which threatens to prevent her from marrying and preserving her family line, which was also considered a daughter's responsibility.

in choosing to disobey creon, antigone has been rendered useless as a bride in his eyes, because this rejection of the status quo has resulted in her trespass of the societal boundaries of her gender and she's therefore no longer considered able to serve the expectations of women, so creon declares that she's to die. but if she hadn't disobeyed him, socially she's still failed to uphold the familial responsibilities demanded of her following the normative gender ideology, and so even if no one would have spoken up directly about it because she's followed creon's command, either by wilful perception or subconscious judgment she likely would have been seen as a traitor to her family on some level regardless.

what this means is that not only is antigone truly doomed by the narrative, where her choices render her a servant to social expectations of women whether she outright defies authority or unwillingly defies her womanly responsibilities, but that her entire narrative is ingrained with the very gender ideology that dooms her to begin with.