"I’ve been out walking, Nurse. It was beautiful. Everything was grey. Now, you have no idea, already it is all pink and yellow and green. It’s turned into a postcard. You have to get up earlier, Nurse, if you want to see the world without colour."
These are Antigone’s opening lines in the play - and only the second line spoken by any character on stage after the Chorus has introduced them to the audience and set context. It reveals a glimpse of Antigone’s central concern in an oblique way. Returning to the palace at the crack of dawn after attempting to bury Polynices, the greyness she talks about reflects the plainness of her logic - it is not influenced by the multitude of concerns about utility, gender, or politics that are central to how nearly every other character views the burial. Her decision-making is straightforward, even hasty, from certain vantages, as we will see in the rest of the play.
"Oh! How proper! How nice! You are the daughter of a king! You take such trouble; you take such trouble to bring them up! They’re all the same. You, however, were never like the others, never primping in front of the mirror, wearing lipstick, waiting for someone to notice you. How many times did I say to myself, 'My Lord, this girl, if only she were more of a flirt! Always wearing the same dress, hair always a mess. The boys will only have eyes for Ismene, with her curls and her ribbons, they’ll leave this one on my hands forever.' And now, you see, you were just like your sister, only worse, a hypocrite! Who is it? Some street rat, I suppose, hmm? Some boy you can’t bring home to your family and say, 'Here he is. I love him, I want to marry him.' Is that it, hmm, is that it? Answer me, you shameless…!"
...
"And she says, 'yes!' Lord, have mercy! When she was a baby, I promised her poor mother that I would make an honest woman out of her, and look! But this story’s not over, my child, I’m only your nurse, and you treat me like an old fool, that’s fine! But your uncle, your uncle Creon, will hear about this. I promise you that!"
In the play, we see that the Nurse is the closest thing the girls, Antigone and Ismene, have to a parent figure. However, the Nurse, by virtue of her position as a member of the household staff, holds only so much influence on their thoughts or actions. They are, after all, princesses. That is the subtle but important dynamic that makes these lines interesting.
Here, despite knowing Antigone closely all her life, despite being once concerned by Antigone’s stubborn lack of interest in the pursuit of frolic or attention of the opposite sex, the Nurse still - with startling readiness - assumes that she has been out with a boy, rather than to stage any sort of rebellion against what was done to her brother. This could be for two reasons. Firstly, the time that Antigone spent with her brothers - as Ismene and Creon later point out - was limited. The Nurse could simply have assumed that neither of the brothers left much of a mark on Antigone for her to undertake such a risk to honour them.
Secondly, this could be part of the infantilisation of Antigone that recurs throughout the play. Antigone, in this sense, is a case study in the obligation of ‘performative girlhood’ imposed upon women, wherein a presumption of lack of knowledge on their part leads to them being viewed as less-than-capable of exercising agency. Therefore, this rendezvous with a boy - subject to her basal desires as a woman - might be the farthest extent of action and agency that the Nurse thinks Antigone is capable of exercising. This erases her ability to make an informed decision - therefore, making way for greater suspicion around the quality of decisions she makes, consequently erasing her epistemic authority and moral clarity as juvenile confusion.
Lastly, the Nurse’s concern about letting Jocasta (Antigone's mother) down by not having kept a closer eye on Antigone - and her threat to complain to Creon about Antigone’s presumed dalliance - exhibit the kind of moral expectation placed on a woman. Her whole idea of morality ultimately boils down to her purity in a romantic or sexual sense. This is further highlighted by Ismene later on when she defends why the sisters specifically have no business defying Creon’s decree.
"Don’t cry, please, Nanny.
Come on now, my sweet, old, red apple. You remember when I used to rub your cheeks to make them shine? My old, shrivelled apple. Don’t send your tears streaming down all those little wrinkles, not for stupid things like this - for nothing. I am pure, I have no other fiancé, I swear to you. I can even swear, if you want, that I will never have a lover other than him…Save your tears; you may need them again later, Nanny. When you cry like that, I become a little girl again… And I can’t be a little girl today."
This interaction is a rare peek into the maturity that Antigone carries as a character, despite her age and how she is presented on stage. She acknowledges the almost-parental authority of the Nurse and attempts to cajole her. At the same time, we notice a subtle strain of authority in her tone. She alleviates the Nurse’s concerns about her purity and foreshadows the rest of the plot with remarkable restraint. This restraint is what gives us the strongest taste of her moral clarity early on - and if we let it brew in our reading enough, this is exactly what lets us truly feel Antigone’s frustration with Creon’s repeated insistence in our bones as the play progresses.
Towards the end of the line, Anouilh also gives Antigone a chance to show herself as the young woman she is, with a whole lot of life ahead of her that she is willfully gambling. It (“I can’t be a little girl today”) is an immensely tender and haunting closing of the matter.
The Nurse, however, does not budge from her parental lens. This contrast deepens the tension between Antigone’s youthful agency and the limits of it as seen by an ‘adult’.
"He will have us put to death."
This line is the first clear assertion of why Ismene wants to stay away from Antigone’s idea of giving Polynices a burial. It is important for a few interesting reasons.
Firstly, it draws a clear binary between the two sisters and their choices. It makes their differences not merely a matter of preferences in fashion or socialisation, but rather shows how they are fundamentally opposite people.
Secondly, both sisters want to live, but the terms on which they are willing to live are starkly different. This gives scope for a Heideggerian reading where Antigone is trying to live authentically (authentic Being-towards-Death) - or perish in the process - whereas Ismene is bothered about reconciling her place in society (Being-toward-the-world fallen into das Man).
Where Antigone feels that, despite her great love for life, she would forgo it in favour of her moral clarity, Ismene tries to hold on to the very last straw that keeps her ‘alive’. Antigone’s nonchalant acceptance of death is a great example of how Anouilh’s plays, written during the Vichy regime, explore the ending of life as a legitimate and ethical option. In contrast, Ismene both shows and warns the audience about the tragic possibility of letting our moral clarity be sidelined by a refusal to accept the temporal nature of life and the reality of death.
"I am not the king, I don’t have to set an example… Anything that comes into her head, little Antigone, the stubborn one, the naughty one, the wicked one…, and then they shove her in a corner or throw her in a pit. And she deserves it. She didn’t have to disobey!"
Here, Antigone is speaking to many truths in one go. She boldly and clearly asserts how she is allowed to make her own authentic choices rather than be influenced by das-Man or the responsibilities placed upon a crown.
This is fascinating when we connect it to the Theban plays - where Creon dismisses Oedipus’s suspicion of him wanting the throne of Thebes by saying that he has no reason to want the Crown as he already enjoys the privileges of a prince with none of the responsibilities that come with it. This makes us see that Creon and Antigone are not opposites - rather, the issue arises from Creon’s forfeit of his individual self when he assumes the throne.
These lines also show us how the underdog or the rebel is often held accountable (“She didn’t have to disobey”) even for the violence placed on them. This means that they are doubly vulnerable as they have to accept, resist, and proceed on the terms of their oppressor.
"They’ll jeer at us. They’ll grab us with a thousand arms, a thousand eyes will stare at us with one look. They’ll spit in our faces. We’ll be dragged in a cart through their hatred, through their stench and their laughter, to be tortured. The guards will be there, with their idiot faces, their bloated necks spilling over their starched collars, their rough clean hands, their beefy eyes - and we’ll know that we can scream all we want, try all we want to make them understand, but they’re like slaves and do everything they’re told, without caring if it’s right or wrong… And we will suffer. We’ll feel the pain rising, until we can’t stand it any more, it has to stop, but it won’t stop, it will go on and on, rising and rising, like a piercing scream!... Oh, I can’t, I can’t…"
These lines place Ismene clearly as a Daesin (who is not independent of her context in the world) who has fallen to das Man (conforming to the social order), where her stance stems not from anything she believes but merely from trying to avoid discomfort for her current position. She sees herself only in how others define her. It is also worth noting that her tone is clearly condescending, and this stems from a fear of losing her social stature that is central to her identity. In Kierkegaardian terms, this leads her to Despair, where the self has lost itself by identifying entirely with the external world. This is why Antigone uses her authoritative voice to assert herself as an individual; Ismene’s authoritative voice or stance comes from her social position. She sees herself as distinct from the crowd, ironically. Therefore sees the consequences of her actions - even if she ever chooses to act - as something that will drag her to a commoner’s role. For her, the fear of being handled that way is far more of a concern than thinking about the ethics of someone else’s burial. This is a trait we will see Ismene exhibiting throughout the play.
In wartime France, although Anouilh refrained from making the play just a political allegory, Ismene’s stance would echo through the audience because they had to make the conscious choice of either defying the authority or just leaving for greener pastures elsewhere in the firm belief that it is someone else’s problem to solve.
"Don’t want to live…
Who was the first one out of bed every morning, just to feel the cold air on her bare skin? Who was always the last one into bed, only when she couldn’t fight off sleep a minute longer, just to live a few more moments of the night? Who cried, even when she was very little, thinking how many little animals there were, how many blades of grass in the meadows, and how she could never know all of them?"
These lines form Antigone’s reply to Ismene’s statement that she doesn’t “want to die.” Antigone points to what living meant to her on her terms. Unsurprisingly, she is not pointing to her social life, relations, or responsibilities. She does not invoke her future with her betrothed or family. Once again, the purpose she finds is centred on her experience of the world, not the social roles that are part of it.
This line also makes it evident that Antigone does not choose death or defiance for its own sake. Her negotiation is between authenticity and inauthentic living. As she points out later, “I either want all of it now or I want nothing.” It is merely incidental, then, that death and defiance are what that choice translates to in Creon’s Thebes. It is not the rebellion that drives her but the refusal to live in bad faith.
"Antigone, I’m begging you! It’s right for men to believe in ideas and die for them. You’re a girl."
This line provides a sharp glimpse into gendering in Antigone, and how Antigone, by contrast, functions as an androgynous protagonist by virtue of her refusal to give up her ‘womanhood’ for ‘performative girlhood’. Let’s break this down further.
Firstly, Ismene’s belief that these are manly concerns - “to believe in ideas and die for them” - could be both an actual patriarchal belief or a convenient cover for her actions. This is a beautiful tension that Anouilh presents. On the one hand, Ismene is very much a product of her social circumstances, where a girl - especially a princess - is expected to be beautiful, marry, and have children. This is the role of her gender. In that context, ideas and dying for them are clearly unrelated to her. It is beyond her scope of work, and she has her plate full with responsibilities of her own that she would have to abandon to pick up this fight.
On the other hand, Ismene - who has placed her ‘self’ in the idea of her social standing and defines herself in relation to what her society thinks - has to feign as much epistemic distance (ignorance) as possible from matters like ideas and political defiance. This is precisely because both knowledge and agency are harmful to her position. She is safe only because she knows less, and the lesser she appears to know, the safer her social standing is for the time being. This is the basic tenet of performative girlhood.
Coming to Antigone, she asserts her knowledge and acts accordingly, thereby asserting her agency. This makes her an individual in her own right - but since she defies the gendered expectation of performative girlhood placed on her, and continues to desire certain gendered experiences (like being ‘a real wife’ and having ‘our little boy’ in her conversations with Haemon), she is neither a woman by definition, nor a man by choice. This breaks her away from another layer of societal roles. However, her seemingly erratic behaviour is just her authentic position. Where Ismene’s actions are held together by her gendered role, Antigone’s actions are actually consistent with her anchoring in being true to herself, irrespective of what ‘-ism’ it puts her in, in that moment. She is consistently not defined by any singular, externally-dictated set of choices. This makes it clear that there is a method to her madness.
