Post by bvanderschaaf9 on Sept 27, 2011 21:32:02 GMT -5
Sophocles reinforces the classical Greek view of women as fickle through Antigone’s inability to lay the blame for her punishment at any one person’s or entity’s feet. As Antigone confers with the common man, she compares her imminent death to that of Niobe. The fact that Antigone feels, “The loneliness of her death,” a death caused by the gods’ murdering of her children, demonstrates Antigone’s perhaps unconscious feeling that the gods were the source of the disaster. In her next reply to the chorus, Antigone gives no mention of the gods, but instead places the blame at Creon’s feet by claiming that she was, “denied all pity” and “unjustly judged.” Antigone’s stance at that point is more strongly directed and is a contradiction of her previous blaming of the gods. Antigone’s capriciousness is again apparent when she calls Oedipus’s crime the “infection of all our family” which has stricken “from the grave,” pointing to Oedipus as the source of her woe. Antigone changes position one last time when she flat-out admits that her death is her own fault, “since it was [her] hand/ That washed him clean and poured the ritual wine.” The hand, as a common symbol connected to guilt and fault, cements the direction of her blame, at that point, as inwards. Although Antigone seemingly accepts her role in her death towards the end of the scene, her dialogue throughout the entire scene confirms her fickle nature, which Sophocles would have us believe is a trait shared by all women.