Woman's Third Face: A Psycho/Social Reconsideration of Sophocles' Antigone

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The heroine of Sophocles’ Antigone has been evaluated over the years almost exclusively in terms of her conflict with Creon, which is usually taken to represent a more universal opposition between the interests and values of the polis and those of the family or kinship group in fifth-century Athens. This approach has yielded numerous excellent studies that have significantly furthered our understanding of the often differing interests of these two groups in Sophocles’ day and the playwright’s concern with them. But to view Antigone exclusively in terms of this social conflict is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. In the first place, it tends to reproduce the narrow official viewpoint of the male polis, to whom Antigone’s contempt for the decree of Creon would have been most important and most threatening. Moreover, the positive results of evaluating the emotional dynamics within the family of Oedipus itself, i.e., of a less civic and more personal approach toward Antigone, her siblings, and her uncle, are largely foregone by such criticism, despite what seems to me to be an additional, universal concern of Sophoclean drama with exploring family relationships from the perspectives of both male and female characters. In addition, although definition of Antigone’s kinship group