Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Who is the tragic hero in "Antigone", and what's Antigone's tragic flaw?

Oedipus is the prototypical tragic hero, according to Aristotle in The Poetics.  Aristotle has little to say about the play Antigone, which presents at least two primary tragic heroes: Creon and Antigone.


My favorite definition of tragic hero is critic Northrop Frye's:



Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments as well as victims of the divine lightning.



According to this definition, Creon, as king, is the "highest point" of the human landscape and the greatest "conductor" of divine lightning.  Antigone is highest among women, ahead of her time in her outspokenness against men and authority. Therefore, Haemon and Eurydice are the lower points of the human landscape, the "clumps of grass," who are also struck down by the strike.


Death is also a deciding factor.  Antigone dies; Creon suffers more.  Haemon is affected by both Antigone and Creon's stubborness; Eurydice is affect by Creon's stubborness and the death of her son.  It's a tragic cause and effect: hubris leads to bad law; hubris leads to stubborn rebellion of bad law; hubris leads to stubborn punishment of rebellion; hubris leads to hasty suicide.


Really, the play involves two lightning strikes, two tragic heroes who present two extreme cases of hubris in the exercise of and reaction to law and power.  Sophocles, as much as he wants to be objective, sides with Antigone, I think.  He gives her the moral high ground, as she upholds gods' law above man's.

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