Post by msheil9 on Oct 4, 2011 15:45:09 GMT -5
Sophocles uses bridal imagery in Antigone's final speech to further illustrate the theme of doubleness in the play --and in life. In scene IV, Antigone descends into the cave in which she will die and professes: “O tomb, vaulted bride-bed in eternal rock, soon I shall be with my own again” (241). Antigone is alive but has always belonged to the dead, Creon has buried a living body in the ground while keeping a dead one above it, and finally a death, an ending, where a marriage, a beginning, should be is taking place. The scene implies that Antigone is to become the bride of death, a clear reversal of the rightful way of things. This use of irony further demonstrates the perversion of the natural order by Oedipus’s family—his marriage to his mother, the killing of his father, Creon’s tyrannous reign, and brother killing brother.