Is Antigone Extra? On Adaptations & Teaching for Context
Whenever I’ve taught Hamlet to high school students, I’ve noticed their tendency to want to read it as, above all, a family drama. Son grieves dead father, is disgusted by mother’s speedy remarriage to uncle. Spirals from there.
I suppose it is a pretty juicy story in that alone. But without political context and stakes –– to paraphrase a colleague of mine who explains why she doesn’t teach it anymore –– isn’t it just the story of a bunch of aristocrats self-destructing? Why should we care? Aren’t we sort of… glad to see Fortinbras march in and take over, given that the current royal family is such a bloody mess?
That’s the thing about literature: its insistence on the intimate inner lives of characters, on point-of-view and relationship-driven narrative, can work at odds with itself. This aspect can undermine a work’s political potential, even as the telling of recognizably human stories remains deeply subversive to the dehumanizing ways of the world.
What I mean to say is, if your reading is too close –– too inside the individual and personal –– you might miss the context that makes the text.
I am reflecting on this precarious balance of teaching text and context after attempting a unit this spring on Antigone in adaptation. My college students were to start with the original play and then compare it with contemporary fiction and film versions of the iconic story. I imagined the unit as a chance to add increasingly familiar layers of context to the story so that the piece could come into focus less as a family drama and more as an anti-authoritarian tale for our age.
It wasn’t my first rodeo with these texts, but it was with these students, and as I quickly discovered, my tidy vision of an old story made new would not hold up in the fluorescent light of this particular classroom. For these students, the play’s drama felt emotionally illegible. They were outspoken that young Antigone is, in their parlance, extra. She’s ready to cancel her sister Ismene, forget her boyfriend Haemon, and go head-to-head with the law of the land, all to honor her dead brother Polyneikes. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’d do that for my brother,” one student told us. In their essays, many saw Antigone as a dupe, letting the machinations of her brothers and king usurp her otherwise bright future. As for Kreon, the politician who decrees that Polyneikes be denied burial as punishment for treason, the students identified the source of his villainy as not his authoritarianism, but his rampant sexism (at one point he attempts to persuade his son to stop loving Antigone, his betrothed, since there are other “fields to plow”––Robert Bragg’s translation, which his notes explain as a common metaphor in ancient Greece that would’ve nevertheless struck audiences then as “offensive”).
Should I be surprised that Kreon’s cruel tongue, and not his use of power, most viscerally disturbed them? Maybe it’s because they grew up with a self-identified sexual assaulter as a president; politicians, they rightly understand, tend to be sexist. Kreon’s decree, too, seemed extra, an extension of his cruelty toward women. But should Antigone risk breaking the law for her brother? They agreed, no. There had to be a more reasonable solution here. Out of context, an individual’s dramatic actions make no sense.
Indeed, out of context, with no personal investment in the stakes, it’s easy to dismiss “drama” as excessive, over-the-top, sentimental. Even if you believe that reading about other people’s tragedies is good for, I don’t know, some vague thing we call “empathy,” it’s not clear that such empathy flows naturally out of a play or novel or film.
Nor do we seem to have an easy time relating to messy characters like Antigone, who refuse to do what’s reasonable. Roxane Gay wrote iconically about this in her essay, “Not Here to Make Friends,” a gem from her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist. For her, this dismissal of characters like Antigone is not so much a failure of reading the text, but of reading the context: sexism and misogyny. “Even from a young age I understood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem,” she writes, explaining the ways she was read this way growing up––as mean, unlikable, messy––and by whom: kids with more social power than she. Gay of course borrows the title of her essay from reality TV’s enduring tagline: I’m not here to make friends. When reality TV characters make this pronouncement, Gay explains, “They are freeing themselves from the burden of likability.” Or perhaps, she continues, they’re “freeing us from the burden of guilt for the dislike and eventual contempt we might hold for them.” Maybe Antigone’s problem is that she did not adequately announce her intentions: to fuck shit up.
I’ve noticed that this “burden of guilt for the…eventual contempt we might hold” is a burden quite easily laid down by readers/viewers in other contexts, though: for instance, by lovers of the ‘sensitive but fucked up white guy turns anti-hero as he fights for his family’ story, which not only appears to be the plot of many classic television dramas (The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and most recently The Last of Us), but also turns out to be a decent summary of Hamlet. Men get away with a lot of messiness disguised as heroism. Hammy himself certainly informs us that he’s not here to make friends. His sarcastic way of grieving his father endears him to many of the young readers I’ve known (though just as many have accused him of being whiny). But Antigone lashing out at her sister? At her king? Apparently not how we want to see trauma manifest itself. Be cool, Antigone.
So sexism might be one of the big problems here, after all. Ironically, though, my students can condemn Kreon for his sexist ideology without being willing to grant Antigone grace for her extra-ness. Why do we struggle to see the two as connected?
Indeed, Gay would say that this very quality –– Antigone’s unrecognizable excesses: of faith, of loyalty to her brother, of grief, of protest under autocracy –– is what makes her a good character: “This is what is so rarely said about unlikable women in fiction––that they aren’t pretending, that they won’t or can’t pretend to be someone they are not. They have neither the energy for it nor the desire.” The anti-sexist tools needed for a story like Antigone, therefore, do not only include the ability to identify sexist aggressions when you see them (though certainly if my students hadn’t audibly cringed, as they did, during our in-class reading of that line about “fields to plow,” I would’ve had another set of teaching problems on my hands).
Anti-sexist reading involves understanding that sexism is always operating through the context, both of the story itself and of the reader doing the reading. Sexism in Antigone is operating to silence her (with death threats, by the way), not just because Kreon has told her he’ll literally silence her, but because silencing women is the goal of sexist institutions and societies. My students may be able to identify misogyny–– more likely thanks to TikTok than to any successful educational program–– but they must also be helped to find the locus of sexism in their own reading, and as a product of their own socialization, if they are to open themselves up to Antigone’s mess and be able to root for her. And that, of course, is my job as their teacher.
Unlikable women in fiction “accept the consequences of their choices,” Gay’s essay concludes, “and those consequences have become stories worth reading.” This rings true for me today, in the spring of 2023, amidst the coverage of Stormy Daniels’ case against Donald Trump. Indeed, Daniels is an Antigone figure for me. She’s got baggage: Antigone’s was her notorious dad Oedipus; Daniels’s is the epithet “porn star” attached to every reportage about her. The Times prefers to boil down the story to a handful of choice words: “hush money to a porn star.” I’m not sure which part of the phrase is more sexist: “porn star” (one of my very smart friends aptly pointed out that “if we are referring to people by their former jobs, let’s call DT a ‘failed casino owner’”) or “hush money,” a term suitable for seedy melodramas but that has no place in a story of a politician using a money and power to make sure a woman can’t tell the world who he really is.
Perhaps that is why Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi, in her cover story for New York Magazine this month, reframed the narrative, titling her piece: “How Stormy Daniels Sees it Ending: The Long Afterlife of a Forgettable Fling with a Reality Television Personality.” In it, she lets Daniels’ voice guide the narrative, which is one of successively terrifying threats from what would be on TV, but aren’t in real life, comically sinister figures. In a parking lot in Vegas one day, while buckling her daughter into a carseat, Daniels is accosted by one such figure, who comes up behind her and threatens her with a line right out of The Sopranos or Breaking Bad: “Beautiful little girl you got there… it’d really be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
“The closer Trump got to the White House, the more Daniels feared for her life,” Nuzzi writes.
“Going public, she came to believe, would protect her and her family. At least if something tragic happened — a single-car crash, an ‘overdose,’ a gas-leak explosion — there would be a record of her accusations. There would be cause for suspicion. Without that, it would be much easier for a woman perceived as a potential optics problem for a potential president to just up and disappear.”
Is this the story of some “hush money”? To a “porn star”? Even with the rhetorical gestures at Nuzzi’s disposal for reframing this story –– the “forgettable fling” and the “reality TV personality” of it all –– the scales don’t feel balanced. Maybe rhetoric isn’t enough to take down a powerful man, but it certainly can recast the stakes of the situation, as the New York Times should undoubtedly be aware.
Notorious, scandalous, messy: as we scrolled through story after story about the “porn star” this month, the media piled on reasons for this not to be a story about a courageous woman, but instead one about an entertainer vying for the same dirty limelight as the body-guarded man threatening her: a rich white man who, a decade before his presidential bid, promised her a producer job on his show in exchange for sex and then never delivered–– finding, as it were, other fields to plow. Is Stormy Daniels being extra?
A decade old now, Gay’s essay about unlikable women characters remains essential reading for young adult readers, in part because as young adults, they’re less likely to be equipped with an analysis of power suited to their own time and place. Sexism, racism, classism: these things are often (hopefully, rightfully) encountered only in history class, as sets of ideologies and institutions that produced, past tense, oppression. A prompt like How does sexism operate in Antigone? seems to apply a feminist lens, and yet no feminist lens is complete without an accompanying question about how sexism operates in their own world, now, today. Where I went wrong as a teacher was to assume that they’d have that lens on their own world: that is, that Stormy Daniels could even be on their radar as a figure with heroic traits akin to Antigone’s.
In 2018, Jill Filipovic wrote an opinion for the Times called “Stormy Daniels, Feminist Hero.” In it, she applauds Daniels’ bravery and encourages us to keep listening to her –– not just because her individual drama matters, but because her drama is our collective drama. “The usual rules don’t seem to apply to Mr. Trump. And under the usual rules, a woman who so thoroughly breaks norms of female decorum and political propriety would be shamed into silence,” she writes.
“Which is why there is so much power in the fact that Ms. Daniels does not believe her job or her involvement with Mr. Trump or the payoff is her shame to carry. She wants him held accountable, and the justice system is actually stepping in. She is refusing to slink away, despite being paid to do exactly that in a pattern we’ve seen too many times from influential men seeking to maintain their dominance and avoid responsibility.”
By 2018, readers may have gotten a little wiser to the mirage of unlikability, thanks in part to writers like Roxane Gay and Filipovic. Daniels is accepting “the consequences of [her] choices, and those consequences have become stories worth reading.” What makes Daniels a good character is that publicly, she speaks without shame. What makes her an admirable person, maybe even a hero, is that she is using her platform to put the brunt of the shame, responsibility, and accountability where it belongs: on the people abusing their power.
I did not teach about Stormy Daniels alongside Antigone, but I should have. Slut-shaming is an idiom familiar to today’s young adults (again, thanks to the 21st century feminists). How else might I have familiarized sexism for them, familiarized its totalizing dimensions? Maybe I should’ve started with that concept of cool. Cool is, of course, the opposite of extra, and thus inscribed in a tidy binary that maps nicely onto other constructed binaries that rule over us, including male/female. It would be hard to imagine a “cool” Antigone, for coolness requires a certain level of pretense, of sarcasm, of detachment. Antigone is not any of these things. She is bereaved. She is fed up. She’s furious at her sister Ismene –– furious at how cool she seems to be, given the circumstances. (In Deraspe’s 2019 film adaptation Antigone, Ismene is figured as a cool older sister studying to be a hairstylist; she is often messing with Antigone’s frizzy ponytail, trying to femme her up.) Antigone is too shattered for cool. She’s heartsick, both personally and politically. These are not attractive, fun, cool states of being. She is a mess, but her mess is as real as they come, and as high stakes, too.
So then does Antigone in adaptation offer the possibility to introduce students to the ways uncool, unlikable, extra people fight for their humanity and dignity? One of the adaptations we read, and which I’ve written about before, is Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire, set in the 2010s and exploring rising Islamophobia in Britain. Antigone is Aneeka, a British-Pakistani law student whose Muslim devotion is not antithetical to her outspokenness, nor her sexiness. Kreon is also a first-gen Pakistani Muslim man named Karamat Lone, whose political beginnings as an activist and organizer turn into a meteoric rise in the ranks of British politics, until, midway through the novel, he’s appointed the (conveniently brown and Muslim) British equivalent of the Homeland Security secretary, encouraging Muslims not to wear visible signs of their faith and to assimilate to British culture.
How does his power feel different? How does his sexism become part of a larger web of isms, such as in the scene when he asks his son Eamonn, who has just told his father about Aneeka’s practice of daily prayer and fasting at Ramadan, whether she has any “problem with––”, then opens his palms as if they are legs: “sex”?
How does “treason” look different in the context of immigration? How does it feel different when the Polyneikes in question is also a first-gen Pakistani Muslim, one who’s vulnerable to the rhetoric of other young men in his community who’ve found meaning in an imagined return home to join the Islamic State? Why do young men join insurgent military operations? Might they have reasons, indefensible in their methods but comprehensible in the context of the history of British imperialism: the view that understands why Pakistan, why Islamophobia, exists at all?
Literature cannot provide all of the facts needed to answer a question as big as that last one. It can, if successful, raise the questions, raise the right questions, given the context. After teaching this unit, I’m not sure if Antigone the play raises the right questions on its own. I’m not even sure the retellings of Antigone that I taught can manage to raise those questions on their own––not without attention to historical context. And not without contemporary connections. Antigone, Hamlet: these were not always considered elitist stories, but it’s true that in telling the stories of the children of kings, they made themselves easily appropriated by the aristocrats that invented (and continue to insist upon) “Western culture.” Can we redeem the radical core of these decontextualized documents?
Sophocles’ characters in adaptation, like his original, have a chance to reclaim their humanity from systems of oppressive law, from jingoistic and sexist political and media discourse, from rape culture (Kreon’s comment about ‘fields to plow’ an antecedent of the dehumanizing verb for intercourse, “to plow”).
But as a play inevitably marked by the elitism of the modifier “ancient Greek,” readers may experience a disconnect. Contemporary stories about staying human in the face of dehumanizing forces shouldn’t heroize the people living in the castle (or Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, or Hollywood), nor is the goal of my class to instill empathy for elites. I think it might be OK to dismiss Sophocles’ Antigone as the bourgeois celebrity daughter of the most notorious king of all time, cursed in life and thus fixated on the underworld as a place to finally stop living with all the baggage of her family’s situation. But it’s also possible that the bones of this story have yielded up at least a couple of adaptations fit for our consideration, where context lends Antigone’s extraness, her drama, a chilling resonance.
Can I blame my students for struggling to see Antigone as a believable character? I think maybe I’m to blame here: for forgetting how hard it is for us to recognize heroes when they’re women, and for neglecting to explain to my students that we have Antigones in our headlines, turning their pain and abuse into a subversive and formidable form of power with the potential to destroy a rotten king.
Sources referenced:
Roxane Gay, "Not Here To Make Friends,” in Bad Feminist, 2014.
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Robert Bragg.
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, 2017.
Olivia Nuzzi, “How Stormy Daniels Sees it Ending: The Long Afterlife of a Forgettable Fling with a Reality Television Personality,” New York Magazine, April 2023.
Jill Filipovic, “Stormy Daniels, Feminist Hero,” New York Times, August 2018.
(Note: The Hamlet comment in the first few paragraphs is also a nod to a novel I just devoured, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Hammad’s protagonist, a British-Palestinian actress visiting family in Haifa, Israel, gets persuaded into joining the cast of a Hamlet set to be performed in Arabic in the West Bank. More on that book in another post.)
