The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone

15 Pages·2007·0.55 MB·English

The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
and Margaret Drabble
Author(s): Gerhard Joseph
Source: PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 22-35
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462002 .
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GERHARD JOSEPH
I he Antigonea s Cultural Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel,
G(eorge Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret l)rabble
HO
lW PROPS,i n these bad days, the mind is narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can
by providing what is still a classic de- no longer sympathise.A n action like the action of
fense of the classical action's enduring the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the
verity-if not Matthew Arnold? For in a Vic- conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's
torian extension of the case Swift made in The corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no
longer one in which it is possible that we should
Battle of the Books, Arnold insists that the dis-
feel a deep interest. (Preface, p. 12)
tinction between the ancients and the moderns
is specious: the ancients are the moderns. Against When we remember E. M. Forster's remark in
those false critics who would argue that the con- Two Cheers for Democracy about the necessity
temporary writer must leave the dead past be- of betraying the state before betraying a friend
hind, Arnold proclaims the great human actions (much less a brother), when we recall how
that attracted antiquity as the stuff of poetry to Kierkegaard in Either/Or meditates on the psy-
be independent of time. "Achilles, Prometheus, chology of Antigone's pain as the single best ex-
Clytemnestra, Dido,-what modern poem pre- ample of "The Ancient Tragical Motive . . . Re-
sents personages as interesting, even to us mod- flected in the Modern," or when we consider the
erns, as these personages from an 'exhausted antitotalitarian uses to which the Antigone
past'?" he asks in the Preface to his 1853 edition mythos has been put in our time (preeminently
of Poems. No time and place are more reflective by Jean Anouilh), Arnold seems downright per-
of, or more deeply significant for, the Victorian verse in excepting this play from Greek poetry's
present than fifth-century-B.C. Athens, he goes lasting appeal. And since this judgment appears
on to say in "On the Modern Element in Litera- in an essay that centrally affirms a major Vic-
ture," where he continues his polemic; and cer- torian writer's classical values (the Preface is at
tainly no literature has ever been quite so any rate one of Arnold's most frequently anthol-
"adequate" to the expression of an ageless mo- ogized pieces), his startling blindness here, if
dernity as the poetry of that time, particularly the that is what it is, calls attention not only to itself
work of Sophocles.1
The way in which the singer of sweet Colonus' but even more to the peculiar status of the An-
steady and whole perspective serves to correct tigone in the nineteenth century. Arnold's ani-
Victorian instability and narrowness is so well madversion and our puzzled response suggest
known a part of Arnold's message that it hardly that the play's action is especially problematical
needs demonstration. And yet not all of -and even that it may be, in a full Arnoldian
Sophocles appears to Arnold so immediately sense, the most "interesting" classical foil
useful. In what is surely one of the strangest against which a modern author's attitude toward
local judgments Arnold ever made, he specifi- the ancients may be gauged.
cally, in the 1853 Preface, excludes the Antigone To explore this possibility we must place Ar-
from modern pertinence: nold's assessment of the Antigone in at least a
brief historical context. I therefore examine how
What, then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be the play has been viewed by a great theorist of
our sole models? the ancients with their compara- tragedy in the generation preceding Arnold's
tively narrow range of experience, and their widely (Hegel); by a critic and novelist who was Ar-
different circumstances?N ot, certainly, that which nold's contemporary (George Eliot); and by
22
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Gerhard Joseph 23
two writers who, because of their fictional sur- historical limits and that would seem to consti-
veys of English joylessness and incertitude in dif- tute the Antigone's most obvious claim to age-
ferent generations of the twentieth century, less modernity.
would seem to qualify as among his direct heirs But although Arnold does not mention it, a
in our own time (Virginia Woolf and Margaret conceivable ground for the charge of obsoles-
Drabble). We can then turn to the new perspec- cence does exist in the bizarre hierarchy of fam-
tives on Arnold's judgment that become avail- ily values that Antigone asserts in her bond to
able when it is seen within this frame. her brother. Deserted by the chorus, facing im-
minent death, stripped of all consolations, she
If we concentrate on the character of Anti- retreats into a strict final ratio: for a husband
gone, as Arnold's judgment asks us to do, we she would not have done what she has done, nor
can find little that is outmoded in her defiance of would she have made the sacrifice for a child,
Creon's order that she not bury her dead but a brother makes an undeniable claim be-
brother, a traitor to Thebes. Arnold considers cause "with my parents hid away in death, no
her motive culturally dated because she believes brother, ever, could spring up for me." Hus-
that the soul of an unburied Polyneices would be bands and children are replaceable; brothers,
condemned to wander restlessly along the banks once one's parents are dead, are not (11.9 04-20).
of the Styx for a hundred years. But surely every Here, in the chilling formula of these much dis-
age since that of Sophocles has quite naturally puted lines,4 if anywhere in the play, we can find
translated into its own terms the imperatives of some justification for dismissing the action's
family loyalty and religious duty that inspire modern appeal.
Antigone. The morning mail, for instance, brings But Antigone's reasoning has not struck every
the latest issue of the New York Review of modern ear as particularly jarring. Almost the
Books, with Caroline Blackwood's "Liverpool: entire section of Hegel's Phenomenology of
Notes from Underground," a mordant account Mind concerning Sittlichkeit 'ethical behavior'5
of the overflow of corpses stored in unrefrig- focuses on a discussion (though a maddeningly
crated, disused warehouses during a gravedig- implicit one, in the usual fashion of the Phenom-
gers' strike in northern English towns. The enology) of Antigone's logic. For about three
"horrific last straw" in an ongoing process of pages, Hegel argues that the feminine has the
national decay, highest intimation of the ethical life-but only
insofar as the woman is a sister, that is, insofar
this eerie and unexpected strike aroused feelings of as she is willing to acknowledge her highest duty
ofeuetlrinagge t,h aa ts iefn osen eo'fs svoicoileattyio onw. eTsh oenree ins oath ignegn eelrsael to a brother, whether living or dead. Precisely
at least it owes one the right to be decently buried. because a woman's relationship to a husband,
In a pub I heard a woman saying, "The bereaved parents, or children is based on natural feelings
can't stand the idea that the people that they've and emotional dependence, ethical considera-
just lost are floatinga roundr ottingi n warehouses."2 tions tend to be secondary. An "unmixed in-
transitive form of relationship," in contrast,
Even in our enlightened times, few tribes of the binds a brother and sister:
race can accept with equanimity the prospect of
unburied kin.
Moreover, Antigone's local conception of They are the same blood, which, however, in them
duty is accompanied by something even more has entered into a condition of stable equilibrium.
universal than respect for one's dead: the ex- They therefore stand in no such natural relation as
travagant egoism that colors her early words and husband and wife, they do not desire one another;
grows increasingly insistent as it encounters the nor have they given to one another, nor received
from one another, this independenceo f individual
equally overbearing rigidity of her antagonist. being; they are free individualitiesw ith respect to
("Such orders they say the worthy Creon gives each other. The feminine element, therefore, in the
to you and me," she rages at Ismene, "yes, yes, I form of the sister, premonizesa nd foreshadowsm ost
say to me-.")3 This towering willfulness is completely the nature of ethical life (sittliches
precisely the sort of hamartia that transcends Wesen). (pp. 475-76)
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24 The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone
And for Hegel the most eloquent demonstration ence to the royal command. But Creon too, as
of the ethical life, a sister's disinterested love for father and husband, should have respected the
her brother, is the fidelity of "the heavenly Antig- sacred tie of blood and not ordered anything
one, the noblest of figures that ever appeared against its pious observance. So that there is im-
manent in both Antigone and Creon somethingt hat
on earth."6
in their own way they attack, so that they are
My point is not that Hegel's argument, what gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to
Walter Kaufmann calls such special pleading,7 their own actual being. (Aesthetics, II, 1217-18)
is particularly compelling as either philosophy or
literary criticism. Rather, I wish to suggest that Classical tragedy of the finest sort thus repre-
Hegel's addiction to the play, partially for so sents for Hegel the "collision" (Kollision) of
idiosyncratic a reason, may be seen as the nine- two ethical substances, both justified in some
teenth-century appreciation exactly polar to Ar- sense but "criminal" in that neither partial sub-
nold's summary dismissal. For if Arnold focuses stance has as yet transcended a self-estranging
on the Antigone as the classical work irrelevant ethics in the evolution toward pure Spirit. The
to modern existence, Hegel keeps returning to it dialectical process stands out in brilliant clarity,
as the single most expressive play in Western and the Antigone is for Hegel the paradigm of
literature. His frequent praise is habitually that process in the most dialectical of art forms,
couched in absolute terms: "Of all the master- the drama. For drama, particularly tragedy, in
pieces of the classical and the modern world," its mediation between epic and lyric, between
he rhapsodizes in the Aesthetics, the Antigone music and sculpture, can be discussed most read-
"seems to me to be the most magnificent and ily in terms of a dialectic that moves toward a
satisfying work of art of [its] kind"; it is "one of third-term resolution.9 Antigone's death and
the most sublime and in every respect most ex- Creon's despair at the consequent deaths of his
cellent works of art of all time."8 And so on. son and wife are the balanced price of a final
An early section of the Phenomenology, then, cathartic harmony, a synthesis that goes beyond
celebrates the play's ethical perfection. But eth- ethics and brings us closer to Absolute Spirit. The
ics alone may not be enough to explain its recur- aptness with which the play acts out Hegel's di-
ring appeal, since a later section of the Phenom- alectics reinforces his view of its moral excel-
enology (pp. 509-48) argues that ethical lence and explains why it is his favorite work of
judgment and behavior are at best limited way art, whatever reservations we may have about
stations in the development of Absolute Spirit, his larger theory of tragedy. For it must be said
Hegel's Geist, and at worst "self-estranging" that, however well that theory may apply to the
(sich entfremdeten) obstacles. The Aesthetics Antigone, Hegel's description of tragedy as the
indicates that another, perhaps deeper reason for clash of right and right fits relatively few other
Hegel's prizing of the Antigone is the play's ideal examples of the genre.10
embodiment of something more fundamental, If Hegel's celebration and Arnold's dismissal
the action of Hegelian dialectic. of the Antigone's ageless appeal may themselves
Arnold's assessment locates the play's strug- stand as thesis and antithesis of a nineteenth-
gle within a single character's conflicting loyal- century argument, the synthesis-at least in
ties to family and state; Hegel's plot description, England-occurs in the work of George Eliot.
in contrast, finds the ethical commitment of An- For while she does not allude directly to either
tigone and Creon equally defensible. The two Hegel or Arnold when treating the matter, her
characters are self-deceived parts of one poten- imaginative sympathy allows her to mediate
tial whole in that between the positions they best exemplify.
Eliot's fullest discursive, as distinct from nov-
they are in the power of what they are fighting, and elistic, response to the play appears in "The
therefore they violate what, if they were true to Antigone and Its Moral," the review of a school
their nature, they should be honouring. For ex- text that she wrote for the Leader of March
ample, Antigone lives under the authorityo f Creon; 1856. Her opening, an acceptance of the notion
she is herself the daughter of a King and the that the Antigone contains a dramatic motive
fiancee of Haemon, so that she ought to pay obedi- "foreign to modern sympathies," may quite con-
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Gerhard Joseph 25
sciously echo Arnold's similar assertion in the Goethe, and Schiller) inferior because it blurs
1853 Preface, as Pinney was the first to sug- the confrontation of divine agencies with the
gest.'1 clash of mere characters, thus obscuring the col-
But if the Antigone seems outdated, she con- lision of ethical substances with the accidentals
tinues, it is only superficially so: of mere personality. In "romantic" modern lit-
erature the irruption of realism into a classical
It is true we no longer believe that a brother, if left idealism renders, say, Shakespeare's characters
unburied,i s condemnedt o wander a hundred years excessively idiosyncratic and individual, their
without repose on the banks of the Styx; we no aims too personal and eccentric.
longer believe that to neglect funeral rites is to From the perspective of this distinction we
violate the claims of the infernal deities. But these can see that, if Eliot diverges from Arnold by
beliefs are the accidents and not the substance of insisting on the modernity of Antigone's ideal-
the poet's conception. The turning point of the ism, she parts company with Hegel in arguing
tragedy is not, as it is stated to be in the argument that the play is less a clash of pure, speculatively
prefixed to this edition, "reverence for the dead determined ideas than a dramatization of the
and the importance of the sacred rites of burial,"
but the conflict between these and obedience to the heroine's unique being pitted against the crush of
State. Here lies the dramatic collision: the impulse flattening circumstance. For Eliot the collision
of sisterly piety, which allies itself with reverence of Antigone and Creon, finally, "represents the
for the Gods, clashes with the duties of citizenship; struggle between elemental tendencies and estab-
two principles, both having their validity, are at lished laws by which the outer life of man is
war with each other. (Essays, pp. 262-63) gradually and painfully being brought into har-
mony with his inward needs" (Essays, p. 264).
In asserting such a "collision"-what she In insisting on the primacy of inward needs,
calls, with explicit reference to the German critic Eliot transforms Antigone into precisely the sort
Augustus B6ckh, the "antagonism between valid of modern figure that Hegel criticizes as idio-
claims"-was Eliot consciously echoing Hegel?12 syncratically subjective and "romantic."
Admittedly, although as a Germanophile she The best place to follow Eliot's personaliza-
obviously knew Hegel's work and mentions it tion of Sophocles' heroine, however, is not in the
now and then in passing, she only once, as far as criticism but in the fiction, where Antigone ap-
I can discover, alluded specifically to his views pears both in momentary allusion and as mythic
of tragedy13 and never to his reading of the foil for entire novels. David Moldstad, for in-
Antigone. But such matters were certainly in the stance, has suggested that the struggle between
air, and her use of B6ckh's formulation to but- Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the
tress her own reading of the play demonstrates Floss is analogous, from beginning to end, to the
her debt to the Hegelians, if not to Hegel di- Antigone-Creon conflict as described in Eliot's
rectly. For B6ckh was the leading advocate of Antigone essay.15
the Hegelian view that the Antigone dramatizes But the work that most explicitly addresses
the struggle between partial truthsl4-and our immediate concern, Antigone's (and the
B6ckh's edition of the play was reviewed by Antigone's) modern relevance, is Middlemarch.
George Henry Lewes in the Foreign Quarterly While the Prelude to Eliot's masterpiece estab-
Review of April 1845. lishes Saint Theresa of Avila as the ancient
Eliot thus seems to be using a Hegelian inter- whose pioneering spirit and moral grandeur
pretation of the Antigone to correct the narrow- most significantly prefigure similar qualities in
ness of an Arnoldian one-an ironic enough Dorothea Brooke, halfway through the novel
charge to bring against Arnold! But if that is the Antigone emerges as a pendant foil from the
import of her strategy, it must be added that she past. To see why, we must look briefly at the
qualifies Hegel as well. For Hegel, as we have scene in which the connection is made. In Book
seen, classical tragedy dramatizes the clash of II, Chapter xix, Will Ladislaw and Adolph
ethical substances, though in the most schematic Naumann, a German artist embued with the
fashion. In general he finds modern tragedy (by sensuous fervor of continental Romanticism that
which he means the works of Shakespeare, has not yet penetrated cold English climes, are
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26 The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone
admiring the "marble voluptuousness" of the re- tion between the passionate willfulness of Anti-
clining Ariadne at the Vatican Museum in Rome gone in the Antigone and her softer virtues in
when Dorothea, on her disastrous wedding jour- Oedipus at Colonus is important, and I discuss
ney with Casaubon, enters dressed in "Quaker- its conceivable relevance to Middlemarch below.
ish grey drapery." Initially, the German is struck With respect to Romola, let it suffice that, as
by the "fine bit of antithesis" between art and Barbara Hardy has remarked, Tito's Bacchus
life, between the erotic perfection of Ariadne's and Ariadne is "revalued" by Piero's Oedipus at
antique loveliness and the equally stunning Colonus,'s since Piero understands that Antig-
beauty of the living Dorothea, marred for him, one's repeated self-sacrifice befits Romola more
however, by her drab attire. While he at first accurately than does Ariadne's triumphant
describes Dorothea as "the most perfect young eroticism.
Madonna" (i.e., as the Saint Theresa of the nov- Extending this fully developed contrast of
el's Prelude), he changes that characterization competing ancient models forward to Middle-
to suggest a conjunction of classical and Chris- march, we can understand the parallel revalua-
tian elements within her. In a subsequent passage tion of Naumann's fine antithesis between Doro-
she becomes for him "antique form animated by thea and Ariadne into one between Dorothea
Christian sentiment-a sort of Christian Antig- and Antigone. For while Eliot certainly prizes
one-sensuous force controlled by spiritual pas- the Bacchic impulse throughout her work and
sion."16 within Romola in particular (Tito Melema's
Since Naumann has just paralleled Ariadne's surname means "precious gift" in Greek),"' she
ancient perfection with Dorothea's modern ex- also suggests that the Bacchic Ariadne, the fig-
cellence, we might expect Eliot to have him call ure associated with the fertility cults, is too
Dorothea a "modern Ariadne," especially since blatantly sensual to serve as unqualified mythic
Casaubon approximates a Minotaur: his "attrac- type for either Romola or Dorothea; the appro-
tively labyrinthine" mind and great work (p. priate substitute is the suffering, severe, though
17) eventually become "anterooms and winding still representatively Hellenic Antigone. In a pat-
passages which seemed to lead nowhither" (p. tern confirmed by Romola, Middlemarch may
145). To understand the shift to Antigone as thus be said to set up a continuum of mythic
classical analogue, we must examine the other foils for Dorothea between the Christian virtue of
occasion in Eliot's work where Ariadne gives self-denial embodied in St. Theresa and a Greek
way to Antigone, in Romola; for the displace- capacity for appetitive joy associated with the
ment in Middlemarch makes complete sense Bacchic Ariadne. As each figure/culture curbs
only in the light of a similar but more allegori- the extreme tendencies of the other, Antigone
cally elaborated switch in that earlier novel. In holds the two ideals in tension, defining some-
Book I, Chapter xvii ("The Portrait"), Tito thing like a synthesis of, or a middle state be-
Melema commissions the artist Piero di Cosimo tween, what Arnold would call Hebraic and
to paint as a wedding present for Romola a Hellenic impulses.
triptych whose major picture will show Bacchus For if Antigone serves to revalue the exces-
adorning Ariadne with a crown of joy. In this sively self-indulgent "Greek" intentions of Tito
intended emblem for the coming union between in Romola, her corrective force in Middlemarch
Tito and Romola (Tito stipulates that the two of moves in a counter direction: there she tethers
them must act as models for the ancient pair), Dorothea's Christian propensity for martyrdom,
Ariadne (Romola) will join Bacchus (Tito) in a her passion for "giving up," as her sister Celia
lifelong celebration of the Greek ideal of sensu- puts it (p. 13). One of the ways in which En-
ous delight. Piero, as much an artist-spokesman gland and Dorothea are narrow (or "short-
for Eliot in this novel as Naumann is in Mid- sighted," to adopt the imagery assigned to her)
dlemarch,17 says that he will use Romola for is that both lack the Romantic Hellenic spirit.
Ariadne only if Tito will in turn persuade her to With Naumann's introduction of the Ariadne-
sit for Antigone in a painting of Oedipus and modulated-to-Antigone parallel, Eliot estab-
Antigone at Colonus-Piero habitually thinks of lishes the balance between Christian and pagan
Romola as "Madonna Antigone." The distinc- sentiment. And that balance is confirmed in the
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Gerhard Joseph 27
novel's penultimate paragraph, in which the Eliot's minutely calibrated social determinism
Hebraic Saint Theresa and the Hellenic Antig- will not allow her to believe, in the individual's
one combine, in the sentence I have italicized, ability to define with a measure of clarity the
to become the single type of the moral pioneer: terms of his or her fate. If an Antigone prefig-
ures the Dorothea of the novel's plangent closing
Certainly those determining acts of [Dorothea's] chapters, it is the compassionate sufferer of
life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed Oedipus at Colonus, not the fiery spirit of the
result of young and noble impulse strugglinga midst Antigone whose willfulness partakes of a dialec-
the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which tic by which, in Eliot's own humanistic ap-
great feelings will often take the aspect of error, praisal, the "outer life of man" is being forced
and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is "into harmony with his inner needs" (Essays, p.
no creature whose inward being is so strong that
262).20 In Middlemarch inward being willy-
it is not greatly determinedb y what lies outside it.
A new Theresaw ill hardly have the opportunityo f nilly accommodates itself to, is "greatly deter-
reforming a conventual life, any more than a new mined by," the world's iron. Or, as Hegel would
Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all put it more reductively, the poetic idealism of
for the sake of a brother'sb urial: the medium in tragedy gives way to the "Dutch realism" of the
which their ardentd eeds took shape is for ever gone. novel, the "middle-class epic," which he consid-
(p. 612) ers prose, mere imitation, nonart.
Eliot refers to the Antigone at least one more
Thus, pace Arnold, the character of Antigone time, in her late work. In Chapter xxxii of Dan-
is profoundly relevant to a "modern" life, pro- iel Deronda, Mirah Lapidoth says that "it is
viding one of the mythic types against which much easier to me to share in love than in
Dorothea's soul making asks to be measured. hatred" and recalls reading a play in German in
But what of the action of the play, which was which the heroine says something like that.
after all the focus of Arnold's judgment? The Deronda supplies the name, Antigone, and the
above quotation suggests that Eliot all but sec- reference is to line 523 of the play-"I cannot
onds Arnold's charge that the action is obsoles- share in hatred, but in love," in the Wyckoff
cent, although her grounds differ. The distance translation. This line-"Ovioi ovre8zetvd,a ;da
between the heroic, larger-than-life context of ovU,U/ tetri' evv"-seems to have had a special
Thebes and the prosaic reality of Middlemarch significance for Eliot, since it appears on the front
is too great. From the perspective of Dorothea's flyleaf of her Commonplace Notebook, now in
life, the clash of Antigone and Creon seems too the Beinecke Library at Yale.21 And George
grand, too concentrated, too bald, its issues too Eliot is not the only novelist in whom that sen-
readily identifiable by all participants to have timent has called forth an answering echo. Her
much application to their murky and unfocus- most direct twentieth-century feminist heir, Vir-
able equivalents in Dorothea's struggle, what- ginia Woolf, also singles out line 523 for special,
ever her moral grandeur. Compared with the no doubt self-referential attention. Indeed, their
immaculate single crossing of purposes that comparable sympathy for an Antigone in whom
structures the Antigone, the manifold "tests" love outfaces hatred and fear is a good way of
that Middlemarch throws up, the imperceptible defining the sibylline bond between the two writ-
motions in the web of circumstance that shape ers. Creon's determination not to be bested by
human choice, come in subtle clusters, and char- an irrational "girl" (1. 561), Ismene's conven-
acters recognize them as tests mostly in baffled tional acceptance of woman's inferior status (11.
retrospect: "The choice of Hercules"-or, Eliot 61-62), and Antigone's pride in herself as self-
might have added, of Antigone-"is a pretty sufficient being throughout the play have made
fable; but Prodicus makes it easy work for the the Antigone a natural counter for both sides in
hero, as if first resolves were enough" (p. 139). late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dis-
For all Dorothea's dogged integrity, the equiva- cussions of the Woman Question. If Eliot's
lent of Antigone's fabled piety, the action of choice of Antigone as heroic model in Middle-
Sophocles' play constitutes primarily a negative march and elsewhere indicates the figure's posi-
model, a reminder of a society that believed, as tive uses for the feminist cause, the very title of
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28 The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone
W. F. Barry's three-volume attack on the "new don and has made a gift of his translation of the
woman" of the 1880s, The New Antigone: A Antigone to another cousin, Sara. Crippled by a
Romance, encapsulates the broadly ironic pur- childhood accident, she imagines herself buried
poses Antigone's feminist implications could alive like Antigone, in a brilliant hallucinatory
also serve.2" In her political tract Three Guin- fantasy released by reading the play (pp. 132-
eas Virginia Woolf is the most polemical of all, 37).
momentarily advancing Antigone as the classical Such earlier scenes prepare for the climactic
forerunner of Mrs. Pankhurst and of the anti- reference in the "Present Day," where at Delia's
Fascist martyr; and it is within this context of party we encounter Edward and his generation
female rebellion against patriarchal tyranny that of Pargiters for the last time, now through the
Woolf quotes line 523 (in Greek and in the Jebb critical eyes of his nephew North. With "the
translation) as "worth all the sermons of all the look of an insect whose body has been eaten out,
archbishops."2': leaving only the wings, the shell" (p. 405), Ed-
But immediately thereafter Woolf recognizes ward betrays in every word and gesture the
the danger of appropriating Antigone for suffrag- sepulchral hollowness of the Pargiters, especially
ette and antitotalitarian propaganda: "if we use the men. Such a verdict on the family is gener-
art to propagate political opinions," she warns ated in North by the chance mention, once
her reader and herself, "we must force the artist again, of line 523 of the Antigone:
to clip and cabin his gift to do us cheap and
passing service." If we are to render the charac- Edward nodded. He paused. Then suddenly he
ter full justice, we must like Sophocles "use . . . jerkedh is head back and said some words in Greek:
freely all the faculties that can be possessed by a "oizot ovVY8Etv', aLUa ot,Vi/UItl 'r 8cfVP,."
North looked up.
writer" to weave Antigone into a complex work "Translateit ," he said.
of art (p. 259, n.). And that is the alternative Edward shook his head. "It's the language,"h e
Woolf did indeed choose in The Years, the novel said.
she was working on when she wrote Three
Guineas. In Edward's refusal to translate (conceivably
A chronicle novel describing the fortunes of because he recognizes the line's indictment of his
the upper-middle-class Pargiter family as it own loveless existence), North reads the timo-
moves from the 1880s to the early 1930s, The rousness of all the Pargiters, including himself-
Years uses elliptical repetition of image and in- their fear "of criticism; of laughter; of people
cident to establish the deeper pattern that under- who think differently.... That's what separates
lies the drift of the period's social history. More us; fear, he thought" (pp. 413-14). With a
specifically, the recurrent allusions to the Anti- complex irony worthy of Sophocles, Woolf lets
gone, with its theme of being "buried alive," line 523, in which Antigone courageously pits
constitute one of the leitmotivs intended to ex- her love for her brother against Creon's attempt
emplify the cyclical rhythm the book's title to frighten her into submission, confirm, unbe-
offers as the paradigm of human experience. In knownst to North, his self-definition and epiph-
the "1880" section we first meet Edward Par- any about the family. Such subtlety is the
giter as a student glancing over the play while opposite of propagandistic flatness, for Woolf
preparing for university examinations. As he portrays the gradual decay of a house into a
drinks a glass of port, the image of a passionate tomb-the variegated lot of a class, if not of all
Antigone merges with that of his cousin, Kitty humanity. Still, the feminist critique of Three
Malone, the love of his life and one of the live- Guineas is at least a subtext: it is the Pargiter
lier Pargiters, who "held herself upright, lived, women who dream, who are the vessels of the
laughed, and breathed."4 But Kitty, sensing the intense passion associated with the line from the
funereal coldness of Edward and of the aca- Antigone, while the men sink into the power
demic life that marriage to him woPtld entail, structures they dominate-the university, the
refuses him-and marries the comparably un- law, the military-and congeal into the fearful
satisfactory Lord Lasswade. By the time of the attitudes with which they bury alive both them-
"1907" section Edward has become an Oxford selves and a patriarchal society's women.
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Gerhard Joseph 29
The Years, as well as other works by consequently the dead end of his career-Linton
Woolf,25 thus argues for the continuing res- complains bitterly "about falling standards in
onance of the Antigone and of classical ideals education, about the menace of trendy school-
generally. Her deliquescent Bloomsbury way teachers who couldn't even teach children to
with such materials approaches Arnoldian sad- read, about the dangers of assuming that all
ness, but with a finer touch. To all except irre- learning could and should be fun...." His stu-
deemable pessimists, there is something over- dents these days
wrought about Arnold's melancholia, something
lugubriously "Victorian," as "The Dover Bitch," had been appallinglyb adly taught;C ambridgeL atin
Anthony Hecht's double-edged lampoon of that was in his view a disaster. None of them had any
attitude, suggests. In comparable fashion Ar- solid grounding in grammar, none of them could
write a prose even to old O Level standards,t hey
nold's high-minded defense of Culture seems had all been corruptedb y vague "classical studies"
both overly pious and palpable in an age that and thought that if they knew a few Greek myths
prefers the nonpedagogical virtues of understate- and could recognize a piece of Ovid or Homer and
ment and indirection. (It is arguable that, in ad- make some approximates ense of it, that would do.
dition to the English utilitarians, Hegel had-in (pp. 67-69)
the later pages of the Phenomenology [pp.
507-59]-dealt the honorific use of "Culture," Anthony Keating, the friend and former class-
his "sich entfremdete: Geist; die Bildung," a mate through whose consciousness we experi-
mortal blow even before Arnold began to ence Linton's malaise, evaluates it from a skep-
write.)" At any rate, to a modern ear Arnold's tical distance. Puncturing all that is socially rigid,
ringing tones sound a trifle stentorian, a bit hol- cowardly, and self-serving in such jeremiads,
low; we tend to prefer the intricacy of Virginia Anthony habitually thinks of Linton as "a pond,
Woolf as she describes both Edward's officious- out of which the water had slowly drained, leav-
ness and the lasting power of the tradition to ing [him] stranded, beached, useless." The re-
which he is the fallible heir. currence of this draining water figure (pp. 67,
Defenders of classical learning may well feel 72) to indicate Linton's fear of obsolescence in
themselves even more in tune these days with the 1970s recalls an earlier, more famous ver-
another Oxford don, Linton Hancox in Margaret sion of that figure and that lament-the with-
Drabble's The Ice Age, her survey of contem- drawal of the Sea of Faith in "Dover Beach." If
porary English society as brazen prison.27 (The the rather old-fashioned realism of The Ice Age,
Arnoldian figure-from "A Summer Night"-is its sympathetically ironic catalog of ineffectual
rather directly pertinent in that two of the nov- social attitudes, is indebted to Drabble's ac-
el's major characters literally end up in prison.) knowledged master, Arnold Bennett, the gloomy
One does get the sense from The Years of free- postindustrial landscape in which her characters
floating English anxiety, of a generalized na- find themselves stranded, beached, and useless
tional decline, but the class structure still allows recalls nothing so much as the joyless, hopeless
Edward Pargiter a measure of insularity. His darkling plain of Arnold. That Arnold, and es-
fastidious and priestly guardianship of Greek pecially the brittle stoic of "Dover Beach,"
studies makes for complacency, provides a com- strikes Drabble as the most modern of the Vic-
fortable enough redoubt against the revolution- torians may be gathered from her treatment of
ary changes of his time. His equivalent in The him and that poem in For Queen and Country:
Ice Age is not so fortunate. With a good degree Britain in the Victorian Age (pp. 118-19,
and a safe post at Oxford after a golden youth, 123-25),28 her popularizing run-through of
Linton, a talented poet and classicist with his how England got from a Victorian past to the
share of honors and prizes, has turned sour. He present. The way in which the poem epitomizes
and his friends have discovered how a new polit- her conception of the period, however, emerges
ical dispensation, a new egalitarian culture, and most forcefully in the closing paragraph of the
an illiterate television age have left them irre- book: using the Sea of Faith passage to define
trievably behind. Brooding over England's what is for her the "most resounding note" of
wholesale dismissal of the classical past-and the entire period, that of dignified resignation,
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30 The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone
she asks in peroration, "Which was the Vic- anotherc hild, but where will I find anotherb rother?
torian age; a grassy bank teeming with life, Linton explained this in terms of endogamy and
warmed by the sun of prosperity, an endlessly exogamy; even Linton, old world as he was, had
fascinating spectacle-or a naked shingle? That become a reluctant structuralist. ... in a way, it
melancholy, long withdrawing roar echoes be- was the pointlessness of Antigone's sacrifice that
was so significant.L inton Hancox recognized this.
hind what we read of Victorian life, and echoes
"While accepting the force of the anthropological
still today" (p. 138). argument,"h e wrote, "we nevertheless today con-
Nowhere do we hear that echo more clearly tinue to be moved by the abstract nature of the
than in the work of Drabble herself, since The sacrifice .... Maybe our society, so lacking in rigid
Ice Age is surely a "Dover Beach" for our im- codes of behavior, so influencedb y the rationalism
mediate time. And just as Sophocles by the of the eighteenthc entury,t urns all the more strongly
Aegean with his archetypal awareness of human toward the apparentlyi rrational .. ."
misery's turbid ebb and flow had provided the (pp. 283-84)
appropriate ancient frame for an earlier portrait
of "modern" dessication, he does so for Drab- Or, as a foremost nonfictional authority on
ble's as well. Her purposefully random crosscut- Sophocles, H. F. D. Kitto, has commented about
ting among the novel's characters manages to the same absurd line of reasoning that Hegel
convey the aimlessness, panic, and despondency found so compelling, "A frigid sophism bor-
of contemporary England, but the most recur- rowed from Herodotus? Yes, the finest borrow-
ring focus is on Anthony Keating. Unlike his ing in literature. This is the final tragedy of
former classmate Linton Hancox, Anthony has Antigone: novissima hora est-and she can
at least tried to grapple with the new society on cling to nothing but a frigid sophism."2:'
its own ever-changing terms. Also a child of the That is, for an age that has celebrated the
professional middle class with a good Oxford blind existential leap, the acte gratuit, the very
degree (in history), Anthony has drifted through irrationality of Antigone's motivation can be-
a life of "careless gambles and apostasies"- come the ground of its cogency; the irrelevance
from hospital porter to launderette assistant to of her self-justification to a modern sense of self,
BBC editor and producer to real estate specula- like the purported irrelevance of Greek attitudes
tor, from financial killing to financial ruin, from toward burial, can determine her relevance.
marriage to permanent irregular union. At nov- Such, at any rate, is her prefigurative force in
el's end he finds himself, a "weed on the tide of The Ice Age: shortly after reading Linton's in-
history," trying to rescue Jane, the fractious and troduction, Anthony Keating quite mindlessly
irresponsible daughter of his present love, from sacrifices his own safety and freedom to save
imprisonment in an Eastern European country Jane, a perverse "child of her time" for whom he
on the verge of revolution. Having got hold of does not particularly care. (That the Antigone
Jane's effects, he finds in her traveling bag a figure of the novel is male demonstrates pre-
paperback copy of Sophocles' Theban plays, cisely Drabble's recently affirmed intention of
translated and introduced by Linton Hancox; moving from the feminist themes of her earlier
and mulling over the dangers in his present situ- work to broader social criticism-"a retreat to
ation, Anthony contemplates the martyrdom of masculinity and androgyny" for feminist readers
Antigone: who disapprove of the shift.)30
We have come full circle in our argument,
He reopened Antigone. Antigone had gone out and then. If Arnold with his belief that art directly
died for a completely meaningless code. She had teaches us how to live rejects the action of the
buried her brother, although her brother was a no-
good traitor.H e noted that Linton, inevitably,m ade Antigone as meaningless to a modern audience,
some interesting anthropologicalk inship commen- Drabble searches out an apparently absurdist
tary, in his introduction, on Antigone's extraordi- motivation as the very basis for its contem-
narily unconvincing explanation for her behavior: porary appeal. Both the discursive criticism of
I would not have done this for husband and child, the play and the mythic returns of the heroine in
said Antigone, for I could get another husband or our fiction stress her uncertain cultural status.
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