The Possibility of Unmanly Resistance: Ismene's Cunning

The Antigone begins with the unburied corpse of Polyneices.Footnote ¹⁴ After the death of his father Oedipus, Polyneices fights his brother Eteocles for dominion over Thebes and their mutual death leaves their uncle Creon to be king and to decide on their burials. Creon decrees Eteocles a friend and defender of Thebes, while he deems Polyneices a traitor who must be left as carrion for the dogs and birds in the hills outside of Thebes. Burying Polyneices is a crime punishable by death.

By the close of Antigone, Polyneices has been buried, three times in all. The first burial is done hastily and covertly and is unobserved. The second burial has a different flavor altogether: Antigone acts in broad daylight, she is observed and arrested by Creon's sentries, and she makes a more thorough job of it, covering the body with dust and pouring a triple stream of libations. With this second, open burial, the tragic plot unfolds. Antigone is sentenced to a slow death by starvation in a nearby cavern. Ismene attempts to join her sister in death by admitting that she too is responsible, but Antigone rebuffs her. After a bruising dispute with the prophet Teiresias, a fearful Creon decides that he has made an error of judgment and reverses course, ordering his men to bury (for what is the third time) and entomb Polyneices and to free Antigone. Creon and his men are too late to save Antigone, who hanged herself, and they are unable to stop Creon's son, Haemon, from killing himself at Antigone's side. The last to fall is Creon's wife, Eurydice, who commits suicide after hearing of her son's death.

To reconsider the idea that Ismene was responsible for the first burial, it makes sense to begin, as the play does, with the conversation between the two sisters about the necessity of administering burial rites. Adamant that Polyneices must be buried and stressing the absolutist nature of Ismene's familial obligation, Antigone attempts to convince her sister to join her. Antigone orients herself in relation to the family, especially her dead family, and the question of whether to bury Polyneices is not truly a question for her. It must be done. Thus, the main problem Antigone confronts is not whether but how. She turns to Ismene, meeting her outside the palace gates and reminding her of their singular bond as sisters and of their common tragic lineage.Footnote ¹⁵

Ismene's first reaction is to help Antigone, stating, “If things are as you say, poor sister, how can I better them? how loose or tie the knot?” (39–40).Footnote ¹⁶ But, as becomes evident, Ismene is clearly of two minds. While she recognizes Antigone's desire to honor Polyneices, she refuses Antigone, emphasizing that, as women, the sisters are forced to yield to the unjust commands of men. What is more, she suggests that secrecy, silence, and deceit are the instruments available to the sisters to resist injustice. She urges Antigone to adopt a course of discretion and prudence that makes use of silence, anonymity, and a vow to protect one another. “At least give no one warning of this act,” she asks Antigone, “you keep it hidden, and I'll do the same” (84–85). It is important to note that Ismene not only suggests violating Creon's decree in secret, she also unhesitatingly offers to assist Antigone in this duplicity. Ismene is willing to offer Antigone what she would not give her before: her assistance. And a crucial change is in the method of the action. Ismene's desire for concealment may not just be a temporary preference in the given situation but rather intrinsic to her character. Creon later describes her in similar terms. Ismene, he says, is “lurking like a viper in the house, who sucked me dry” (531–33); she “possesses sly intent” of “secret plotters” (493–94).Footnote ¹⁷ As Creon presents it, Ismene shares Antigone's destructive desires, though she slithers through the dark, often undetected. Antigone's response to Ismene is unequivocal, assertive, and vociferous, just like the form of resistance that she favors: “Dear God! Denounce me. I shall hate you more if silent, not proclaiming this to all” (86–87). She wants no part in subterfuge.

As she parts with Antigone, Ismene knows two things: Antigone is determined to administer the burial rites in an unambiguous, frank way, and Creon will kill anyone found responsible. To borrow from Ismene's own formulation, she is confronted with a knot that must be either loosened or tied differently. Antigone's demands pull in one direction, while Creon's yank in the other, straining the discord between them and making the knot of their conflict seem insoluble. As the daughter of Oedipus, Ismene is perhaps better equipped than most to solve this riddle. Is it possible to do the seemingly impossible—to honor her dead brother, to obey Creon's decree, and to thwart Antigone's seemingly suicidal mission?

If we assume that Ismene attempts to solve this puzzle, her answer lies in easing up on the demands of each of these components: honoring the dead does not require a full burial but an adequate one; obeying Creon requires only the appearance of compliance, not true obedience; and stopping Antigone only requires administering burial rites with greater speed and stealth.Footnote ¹⁸ Ismene could have accomplished these more modest demands by burying Polyneices in secret and informing Antigone that their shared burden had been fulfilled.Footnote ¹⁹ Ismene has the opportunity to commit the deed; there is nothing in the sequence of events that obstructs her. She has no alibi and no witnesses to place her elsewhere. If we read the text this way, Antigone goes to Polyneices's corpse in broad daylight for the first time to do the deed as it should be done. Thus, her dramatic, breathtaking burial is not only an overt act of defiance to Creon's authority; it is also a disavowal of Ismene's compromising and (in Antigone's view) compromised actions.

Though her motives to refrain from acting are certainly strong, Ismene also has several inducements for acting, the first of which is protecting her sister and directing suspicion elsewhere.Footnote ²⁰ Ismene also may have been impelled to act out of piety.Footnote ²¹ According to Athenian custom, two actions were required for the successful transition of the soul to the netherworld: the administration of burial rites and the fulfillment of the eniausia, the annual commemorative visits to the tomb. Without these actions by the living, the deceased would remain ataphoi, the unburied dead, who, Euripides explained in the Suppliants, were denied entrance to Hades and doomed to remain tethered to the earth.Footnote ²² In the Antigone, the requirements of eniausia are especially noteworthy because they demand something that, if both sisters act recklessly, Polyneices may lack: a living relative. As Antigone reveals in the opening dialogue of the play, she fully expects to die. “For me, the doer, death is best” (72). And, yet, if Polyneices's soul is to remain at rest in the tomb that is constructed for him by the play's end (1200–1205), it may be that one of his sisters needs to decide that death is not best.

There may be good reason to take Ismene at her word: “I did the deed” (536–37). After Antigone is caught, this is, of course, what Ismene says—“I did the deed.”Footnote ²³ It may be that Ismene speaks the truth; her declaration is an admission of blame. But what are we to make of the oddly deferential addendum of Ismene's statement: “I did the deed, if she agrees I did. I am accessory and share the blame”? Ismene's addendum has been read as an indication of her timorous, compliant, and prevaricating nature: she confesses out of affection and respect, but lacks the fortitude to carry it through to the end. But this reading overlooks the significance of Ismene's entrance in which she, weeping like a sister, “mourns, with clouded brow and bloodied cheeks, tears on her lovely face” (528–30). In the Greek it is unclear if Ismene mourns for her brother, for her sister, or for both of her siblings. If she mourns for her sister, then she does so in advance of her death.Footnote ²⁴ If Ismene mourns her brother, she is openly violating the second element of Creon's decree that none may weep for or bewail the death of Polyneices (while she is on the verge of admitting that she violated the first element that none may bury or entomb him). Either way, these are not the actions of a compliant or indecisive young woman. From the moment she steps into Creon's presence, Ismene makes it perfectly plain where her loyalties lie and, given the political significance of her wordless gesture, it is less surprising that she attempts to share in the blame for the crime. If Ismene is responsible for the first burial, her entrance effectively unites her “offstage” and “onstage” personas; she appears to us here fully for the first time.

In contrast to the wrath that she incites in Creon (531–35), Ismene is deferential and solicitous to Antigone. Taking into account Ismene's second entrance and her admission of responsibility, Ismene's addendum may refer to the sisters' initial disagreement over the tactics of the disempowered. Will Antigone now agree to the legitimacy or efficacy of a subterranean form of resistance and will she now admit to a plurality of opposition? Read in this way, Ismene's addendum broaches this issue again, giving Antigone one more chance to see that covert resistance is resistance nonetheless. In making her case to Antigone, Ismene stresses their commonality, begging Antigone, “don't fence me out from honor, from death with you, and honor done the dead” (544–45). Though they adopted divergent approaches, Ismene defends her weaker action, noting that her decision was not made in silence and that “the blame is equal for us both” (558).

Antigone rejects Ismene, and this refusal is even harsher than her dismissive words at the close of the first scene (93–97). But here again, the possibility of Ismene's secret action adds an intriguing and unexpected layer of meaning to their exchange—that is, of cruelty in the name of kindness.Footnote ²⁵ When Creon suspects Ismene (489–96), Antigone directs his attention immediately back to her and the imminent prospect of punishment: “Do you want more than my arrest and death?” she asks, indicating that her crime and death are enough (497). More explicit still, she urges Creon to kill her immediately and incites his wrath toward her by once again making the implicit claim that she is his equal and his enemy (499–507).

In addition to affirming a valorous standard of resistance, it may be that Antigone is heroic in another sense, one that can be missed if we overlook the prospect of Ismene's shared responsibility. Antigone may sacrifice herself not only for her dead brother but also for her living sister. From Antigone's capture until her death sentence, Creon assumes that both sisters are responsible, but Antigone successfully convinces him that this is not the case. Thus, if we understand that Ismene attempts to save Antigone by administering the burial rites before her sister does, this action is mirrored by Antigone's efforts to preserve Ismene. Though fiercely at odds and seemingly unable to act in concert, neither sister seems to want the other to die.

The possibility of Ismene's secret burial makes sense of two incongruities in Antigone, one concerning character and the second concerning plot.Footnote ²⁶ Everything that is revealed about Antigone's character in the first scene suggests that, at her core, Antigone is antithetically disposed to dissembling or perfunctory efforts. Antigone possesses a clear, absolutist, and disciplinary notion of how her opposition must take place, an ideal revealed in full when, after being spared an immediate death for her crimes, she takes her own life. And yet, the first burial of the corpse reveals none of this perfection, control, and discipline. It is haphazard, and, though technically complete, it is devoid of the pomp and spectacle of the second burial. It appears to be the work of a compromiser rather than an absolutist.Footnote ²⁷ If Antigone is responsible for the first burial, why does she vary her approach so radically the second time?Footnote ²⁸

In terms of plot, there are questions as well. If Antigone conducts the first burial, it is unclear why she returns to the corpse.Footnote ²⁹ The first burial fulfilled the necessary requirements. The “ritual [was] complete” (247). Given this, what compels Antigone to act to excess, to rebury the buried?Footnote ³⁰ There is a similarly nagging question why Sophocles brings Ismene back into the action of the play a second time (531–581). In their first dialogue Sophocles masterfully establishes that the two sisters are like “two swords whose sharpness, gleam, and power we must experience in order to apprehend something of the lightening that flashes when they strike,” as Heidegger poetically puts it.Footnote ³¹ If Ismene is primarily a foil to Antigone, this relationship is established in their first exchange; there is no obvious reason why it needs to be reestablished. Odder still, their final exchange undercuts Ismene's role as a contrasting character and instead reveals that the relationship between the sisters is more complex and multifaceted. Why, then, does Ismene reappear? What is at stake for Sophocles in adding this complexity to Ismene's character?

There is, of course, another possibility raised in the play that is worth considering: a god is responsible. The guard hints at the idea of divine intervention when he describes the first burial as a supernatural accomplishment (249–59) and his intimation is picked up on by the chorus, who address the issue directly to Creon and identify a path of honorable retreat for him (279). If a god is protecting the body, then for Creon to alter his decree may be sensible and pious as opposed to inconsistent and fearful.Footnote ³² But Creon rejects the notion of miraculous burial in no uncertain terms.

While Creon's certitude is not dispositive evidence—over the course of the play he proves to be wrong about much—there is good reason to be suspicious of the guard's account. A comic, sly figure that readily bickers with the king, the guard is, by his own admission, intent on extricating himself from the charge of complicity or dereliction of duty (238–40, 264–68). When Creon calls him a “quibbling rascal through and through,” he doesn't disagree, perhaps because he knows that his banter provides fertile ground for self-preserving intimations, evasions, half-truths, and exaggerations (320).Footnote ³³ Indeed, looked at carefully, the guard's narrative suggests problems with the idea of divine intervention. By his own account, none of the other guards believed that a god was responsible, but rather they lay blame squarely in the human realm (they accuse each other, 260–64). The guard also says that the burial was “enough to turn the curse,” an odd statement to make if a deity were responsible (255). Humans need to avoid the curse of the unburied dead, not gods.Footnote ³⁴ Another question is raised later in the play when Antigone, on the way to her tomb, asks, “Why, in my misery, look to the gods for help? Can I call any of them my ally?” (921–22). Bereft of any indication from the gods and doubtful about their intent, Antigone longs for a sign of approval. If a god buried and protected her brother's corpse, it seems strange that Antigone would want for divine allies or wonder at the absence of divine intervention.

Two Archetypes of Weakness

The issue of the first burial cannot, it seems to me, be answered definitively. It may be that Ismene, with viperlike stealth (531), attempts to solve her own sphinxless riddle by hurriedly casting a few handfuls of dirt over her brother's corpse, an act she admits to only after her sister is caught (536–37). If so, this Ismene bears resemblance to Sophocles' later depiction of her in Oedipus at Colonus where she is a politically savvy young woman devoted to her family. As her magnificent entrance on horseback suggests, the Ismene of the Coloneus is a figure of action (312–321). Ismene decides to leave Thebes, alone, on an arduous journey in search of her father and sister in order to bring them crucial political, familial, and religious news (361–85, 389–90). This exploit is followed by another. After Oedipus unwittingly trespasses on the Furies' domain, he requests the help of one of his daughters to make the necessary expiation. While Antigone is silent, Ismene steps forward without hesitation and declares: “I'll go and do it” (502).

The Ismene of the Antigone may well not possess the same pluck. It is entirely possible that this time she hangs back. In this case, Creon's description of her as a viper fits in another sense: she is like a viper that waits too long to strike and is preempted by another. Exploring the possibility of Ismene's covert resistance—without arriving at a conclusive answer—is valuable nonetheless. Though not decisive, the argument is useful because it engenders a shift in perspective on the play and on Ismene. It throws often-overlooked portions of the action into high relief, such as Ismene's second entrance, mourning as a sister in front of Creon (528–30). It focuses attention on the Ismene-Antigone dyad. It also suggests a view of Ismene as an intriguing, layered character, which provides insight into a general type of political subjectivity: the unheroic weak.

The first insight that Ismene's character points to is a comparative sensitivity to political context and power dynamics. For Ismene, the political specifics of the situation matter. Ismene speaks of the war between Polyneices and Eteocles from the first (11–16). Concerned with political consequences, Ismene also stresses that to bury Polyneices is to violate a prohibition of the city and to risk death (59, 78–79). Ever aware of the implications of the context for herself and others, Ismene says she is apprehensive for her sister (82), and she reveals that Antigone and Haemon are betrothed (568). Antigone, in contrast, is comparatively blind to context and her awareness of power relations seems muted. Antigone makes no mention of the war throughout the play. Indeed, if we had only Antigone's lines, three crucial facts about the context would be unclear: we would not know why Polyneices died, nor that he was killed while attacking Thebes, nor that he and Eteocles killed each other. Ismene reveals these facts. Because the unheroic resister is more like a fox than a lion, she or he must be a consequentialist who is both keenly attuned to surroundings and, of course, the presence of traps. Thus, unheroic resistance involves waiting and watching. It necessitates a willingness to sit patiently on the cusp of action, as well as the fortitude to bear the consequences (and perhaps the guilt) of inaction. It is a disposition that can translate into action, but need not.

The contextual fact at the forefront of Ismene's mind—and, one suspects, that of unheroic disobedients more generally—is the political inequality of the larger group of which she is a part. In the prologue Ismene encourages Antigone to step back and take a more expansive view of the situation and the lot of women. In a statement that has troubled feminists, Ismene draws attention to one pertinent contextual fact that Antigone has seemingly neglected:

Ismene reminds Antigone that women are forced, by violence, to yield to the unjust commands of men, and she draws a sharp distinction between the situation of men and that of women, suggesting that, because women are unequal, their lot is distinct. Prudent action for women must work within the constraints of their position, recognizing, first, that the male authorities possess formal power; second, that they wield violence; and, third, that they demand displays of obedience from women. To do otherwise, she says, is to “hunt the impossible” (107, Grene translation).

This passage highlights a second general characteristic of the unheroic weak: they are attentive to the inequality of the disempowered. Consider how Ismene implicitly contrasts the lot of women with that of Theban men, and in particular with the merciless and cruel war between Polyneices and Eteocles. This war and the long, cold shadow it casts over the sisters underscore Ismene's point that, as women, their lives are governed by the violence of men. Moreover, the war reinforces her argument that, as members of an accursed family, the sisters are the recipients of misfortunes that they did not create (49–60).Footnote ³⁶ But there is another aspect of the war that is especially pertinent to Ismene's argument that the lot of women is distinct from that of men. Polyneices battled Eteocles as a man—that is, frankly and aggressively on the battlefield, as an equal. Faced with what he understood to be an unjust decree, Polyneices gathered his forces, declared war, and forthrightly marched across the hills to attack Thebes. Eteocles defended Thebes in much the same way, with the plain and unambiguous methods of brute force. They fought as equals and as men and died that way as well. Much in the same way as her brothers, Antigone acts in response to an unjust decree, girds herself for battle, and prepares for death. Antigone does not directly respond to Ismene's statement on the lot of women, and what her character says about gender is subject to much debate.Footnote ³⁷ Antigone's actions are less ambiguous; she fights as if she were a man and as if she were an equal of men.Footnote ³⁸ In so doing, Antigone transgresses the foundational boundaries of gender and politics and calls these limits into question.Footnote ³⁹ More firmly rooted in the power dynamics of her situation, Ismene accuses Antigone of making a category mistake, of seeing unalike things as alike.

A third general insight concerns intent. For the heroic weak, the intent of the political actor all but disappears on the bloody battlefield of conflict, as action, wounds, and a tallying up of victories take precedence. But to the unheroic disobedient the purpose, will, or inclination of the actor are crucial, both as a basis of judgment and as a mechanism of identification. It is by her intent that we know the unheroic disobedient. Inwardness and individual conscience—as best as they can be identified and observed—are paramount. Here again, the sisters articulate this fundamental disagreement. As Antigone sees it, so long as Ismene's internal disposition remains internal, that is, unmanifested in action, it is immaterial. Ismene faced a choice: she could either honor the dead by joining Antigone or she could honor Creon. Locked into the binary logic of obedience and resistance, Antigone does not think it possible to do both.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Antigone, the appearance of honoring Creon is honoring Creon and a façade of obedience is obedience. There is no difference between the visible and the actual; they are one and the same. And speech alone—that is, the voicing of one's intent, future purpose, or suffering—does not suffice for action. To put this in religious terms, Ismene could choose to ally herself wholly with the dead and the gods of the underworld or she could choose to honor the city and preserve the living. There is no middle ground. And for Antigone, an outward show of honoring life—no matter how complicated the truth or complex the intentions—is tantamount to honoring life only. Thus, she tells Ismene, “you chose to live when I chose death” (55) and “you live. My life died long ago. And that has made me fit to help the dead” (559–60). The action—preservation of life or forfeiture of it—is what matters to Antigone.

In directing his punishment wholly at Antigone, Creon sanctions her binary logic of obedience and resistance, of friends and enemies, and of piety and irreverence. This is an unexpected point of concurrence, to be sure. The scene ends with Creon, urged on by the chorus, issuing Antigone's death sentence. All the violence that Creon can muster is arrayed against Antigone; the antagonism between them is palpable. Yet, for all their antipathy, Creon's punishment of Antigone—and his concurrent lack of interest in the shades of complicity represented by Ismene—reaffirms Antigone's twofold notion of resistance and obligation. For both Creon and Antigone, the landscape between friends and enemies is barren. What is crucial is the poles themselves: obedience, duty, responsibility, and honor, on one hand, and opposition, traitorousness, and irreverence, on the other. What gets coded as obligation or resistance depends on how the objects of duty are defined.Footnote ⁴¹ Despite this crucial difference, their understanding of the way that obligation and resistance operate oddly mirrors one another. Obligation exists or it does not; resistance is either present or absent. There is no middle ground, no point in between.

Ismene's resourcefulness, her flexibility, and her opportunistic disposition also suggest a fourth, more ubiquitous characteristic of unheroic disobedients who, lacking access to normal political channels, must improvise with what is available. Recall Ismene's initial response to Antigone: “If things are as you say, poor sister, how can I better them? how loose or tie the knot?” Ismene's approach is conciliatory, and she sees multiple avenues of action: a conflict can be eased by loosening the constraints, or it can be changed by constructing a new arrangement altogether. Though she may be aware of another alternative—that is, directly cutting the “knot” of the conflict—she does not mention it.

This resourcefulness is underscored in Ismene's second entrance, in which she mourns like a sister with tears and scored cheeks. Though speechless, Ismene communicates her fidelity to her family and symbolically challenges Creon's power. In this entrance, Ismene manipulates traditional feminine roles—what Linda Zerilli has referred to as “proper femininity”—into a weapon.Footnote ⁴² Appearing before Creon, Ismene uses what she has at hand: the long-standing role of women in mourning and burial, and the traditional Homeric mourning practices in which the bereaved, often women, expressed their sorrow through self-laceration and wailing.Footnote ⁴³ Ismene performs this traditional Homeric role. Her bloodied cheeks and tears are silent signs that she is an obedient and compliant woman who knows her proper place in her social and political world. Her silence may also imply traditional or conventional femininity.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet because this form of Homeric mourning is illegal and opposes Creon's power, Ismene's mourning is also not at all obedient, compliant, traditional, or indicative of proper femininity.Footnote ⁴⁵ Her actions threaten the social and political order; she exceeds her role as a woman. The meaning of Ismene's troubled demeanor, her weeping, and her scored cheeks is doubled, revealing that she is docile and defiant, pious and irreverent, and a figure of proper femininity and chaotic femininity.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ismene's entrance directs attention to the terrain between each of these binary poles, rather than at the extremities of the poles themselves. It also points to the inventiveness of the unheroic weak and the capacity to spontaneously use the available materials to stitch together something novel and unexpected.

The fifth and final general characteristic suggested by the Antigone is that the weak tend to long for something that they cannot have: perfect and absolute unity in collective action. Sophocles introduces this theme from the start, using Antigone's first lines to express her wish for an extreme form of cohesion with Ismene. As the play opens, Antigone addresses Ismene with a highly unusual phrase, koinon autadelphon Ismenēs kara—literally, “my very own sister's common head of Ismene.”Footnote ⁴⁷Koinon, “common,” emphasizes what is shared with others, what unifies a group, or what is not private.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the context of Antigone's opening lines, koinon identifies what is shared between the sisters and what unites them in partnership—that is, the fact that they are siblings, autadelphon. To be more specific, they are the same (autos), sisters who come from one womb (adelphos is related to delphus, “womb”).Footnote ⁴⁹ The last word of Antigone's opening greeting, kara, “head,” is the most formal mode of address in Greek tragedy, and it can be translated more fully as a metaphorical head or top. For instance, kara is used to address Oedipus as king.Footnote ⁵⁰

At first glance, this opening greeting suggests an admirable hope for solidarity and sorority. But given the incestuous history of the royal line of Thebes, there is reason to suspect an ominous side to Antigone's longing for unity. Ismene and Antigone are the daughters and half-sisters of Oedipus, the daughters and granddaughters of Jocasta, and the sisters and nieces of Polyneices. They are sisters and nieces to one another.Footnote ⁵¹ The incest of their family tree implies a tendency toward too much sharing and an unhealthy or unnatural closeness. As Seth Benardete notes, Antigone asserts that Ismene's head is “nothing but a sister's” and thus reveals her “virtual identification” with Ismene.Footnote ⁵² George Steiner echoes this point, observing that Antigone's “prolusion strives to compact, to ‘ingest,’ Ismene into herself.” With koinon autadelphon kara, Antigone demands “a ‘single-headed’ unison.”Footnote ⁵³

Thinking more generally about this desire for oneness, it is not difficult to understand its appeal to those who are excluded from full participation in public life or who are in some way “outside” of politics. Recall Locke circling back to the phrase “one body politic” and its various iterations—a “community [of] one body,” “the power to act as one body,” and “the act of the whole”—in the Two Treatises. Echoing the homogeneity at the heart of Rousseau's general will, American Whigs on the verge of the Revolution assumed that the people were a divinely ordained, single, organic unit: “for God hath so tempered the body that there should be no Schism in the body, but that the Members should have the same care for one another.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thomas Paine characteristically put the motivation plainly in Common Sense—“It is not in numbers, but in unity that our great strength lies”—and clarified the potency of this wish when the enemy was represented by the single body of a monarch.

But Antigone ultimately raises questions about an ideal that implicitly suggests a phalanx of undifferentiated hoplites or oarsmen at sea (541). Antigone's vision of an undivided sisterhood of resistance proves illusory; it is followed by harsh words, heated clashes, and an inability to act in concert. Through the conflict between Antigone and Ismene, the play suggests that collective action among the weak is not a naturalized or uncomplicated process that can either be merely assumed or wished for. Moreover, it implies that the politically dispossessed are a pluralistic and varied lot. It may also point to the poisonous nature of the ideal of unity and oneness among resisters. This standard has the paradoxical effect of tearing Ismene and Antigone apart in the name of bringing them together.

Insights into Weakness: Antigone's Offering

With their motivational cocktail of fear, conflict avoidance, and pragmatism, their internalized vulnerability, and their penchant for subterfuge, the weak evoke a range of reactions. Sounding a common theme of disparagement, Beelzebub observes in Paradise Lost, “To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering.” Christianity has argued most forcefully for the redemptive quality of weakness, urging that it is better to receive a wrong than to do one and promising that the weak will triumph. “Strength is made perfect in weakness,” as Corinthians has it. As vivid as these assessments are, they reveal little about the role of the weak in politics. What do the politically weak look like? How do they behave? With his ethnographic study of Malaysian peasants facing the destruction of their livelihood through a so-called green revolution in the 1970s, James C. Scott's Weapons of the Weak directs attention to these questions and develops a portrait of political weakness in a particular context. Tipping his hat to Balzac's pillaging Tossards in Les Paysans and Brecht's opportunistic and delusory Schweyk (Schweyk in the Second World War), Scott illuminates a banal form of peasant resistance based on steady, low-profile actions that are ad hoc, involve little coordination, and shun open confrontations with authority.

Ismene provides another portrait of weakness, one that allows us, by focusing on her character, to open up interpretive space both inside the play and outside of it to examine the politics of the vulnerable and the dispossessed. Though certainly no peasant, Ismene is aligned with the weak because, as a woman, she is formally excluded from politics, and, lacking membership or representation through a kurios, a male guardian, she is the object of a government power from which there is no redress. Moreover, Ismene identifies with the weak, seeing herself as living in the shadow of unjust decrees and brute force, and she gestures to the depths of such an existence when she notes that greater injustices than Creon's decree may very well await them. We “must hear these orders,” she tells Antigone, “or any that may be worse” (64). While Antigone seems unable to comprehend an injustice more painful than Creon's decree, Ismene is clearheaded about the multitude of sufferings of political exiles. She loves life despite its cruelties and thus tends toward the survival mechanisms that Scott evocatively describes in Weapons of the Weak.

And Ismene reveals a survival skill of the weak that Scott does not mention—forgiveness—when she states, “I shall ask of them beneath the earth forgiveness, for in these things I am forced” (65–66). Given her less exacting nature, Ismene willingly requests forgiveness for choices in which she lacks meaningful choice and, one suspects, she extends forgiveness to others in a similar situation (witness her equanimity toward Antigone). Moreover, she affords forgiveness to herself, foremost by giving up any claim to the unreasonable and impossible standards that her sister willingly embraces (90).

Antigone extends and complicates our understanding of weakness by revealing a complex, rich, and dynamic relationship between those who lack formal political power. The play depicts one character that fully accepts her weakness and works within its limitations as well as a character that rejects powerlessness and refuses the weapons of the weak. Illuminating the desires and psychology of both kinds of weakness, the play provides an understanding of the impulses that propel both the unheroic weak and the heroic weak to pursue their distinct courses of action. Moreover, the play brings these two forms of opposition into dialogue, or, more accurately, into a splintering and sputtering exchange that is marked as much by what is left unsaid as by what is spoken.

The tragedy to this reading is that collective action among the weak is a fraught affair and unlikely to succeed. Offering a disheartening assessment of the possibility of collective action by outsiders to politics, the play evinces skepticism that the unheroic weak and the heroic weak will be able to see past their differences long enough to join forces. By their final exchange, Ismene and Antigone's relationship is in tatters, destroyed by hurled insults, charges of mockery, and declarations of hatred. Though they are similarly situated, the sisters do not act in concert or accomplish anything together throughout the play because divergent tactics, principles, values, and worldviews are wedged between them. While the invocation of koinon autadelphon kara at the beginning of the play raises the hope that they will join forces, this optimism is dashed over the course of the play. At Antigone's end, Ismene and Antigone are separated by a boundary that, as the play itself underscores, is of the utmost importance: the border between life and death. The ever-widening chasm that opens up between Ismene and Antigone suggests, first, that a compromise between the disempowered about means is as crucial to collective action among the politically dispossessed as a general agreement about ends. Shared objectives, sisterly affection, and a common royal lineage are not enough to bridge the divide between the unheroic weak and the heroic weak. A discussion of means, which Ismene and Antigone never have, seems necessary to concerted action.

The breach between the sisters at the play's close emphasizes, second, the folly of the standard of absolute unity and cohesion contained in koinon autadelphon kara. By virtue of their vulnerability and lack of resources, the weak are prone to see the virtue of collective action and implicitly understand strength in numbers. The goal of acting in concert is, however, a distinct aim from the ideal of cohesion. Antigone exposes the gap between these two conceptions of collective action and illuminates the devastating consequences of an aspiration of self-sameness, homogeneity, and lockstep unity. As Ismene herself might put it, to seek oneness among the weak is to hunt the impossible.

Placed in the context of the failure of collective action between the sisters, the virtues and vices of both heroic and unheroic resistance are thrown into sharp relief. The heroic resistant has a righteous spirit, charisma and dynamism, a sharp tongue, and a love of spectacle that invariably draws the eye to them. It is impossible not to watch the heroic resister, who seems too perfect for this world and thus doomed to be expelled from it. And it is important to note the virtues of plain, unequivocal confrontations with authority that attempt to undermine the power or the legitimacy of unjust political leaders or their policies symbolically. Heroic resistance functions like a historical marker of dissent that can be seen and observed throughout time. Heroic acts of resistance may also make a public claim of equality for an excluded group that can be especially meaningful to future generations struggling for inclusion, membership, and legal rights. Heroic, “onstage” resistance leaves still another kind of historical marker: it denotes a point in history in which piety, principles, morality, and honor supplanted self-preservation, utilitarian calculations, and pragmatism.

And yet the costs of foredoomed failure can be high. The would-be martyr must sever ties with her community in order to make a claim for that community.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Antigone clarifies this counterintuitive proposition through Antigone's strange and contradictory approach to her family. Antigone's public and vocal adherence to her familial commitment to Polyneices—and the courting of death that it implies—means that she must cleave ties with her current family, Ismene, and her future family that would be created by her union with Haemon. In one of the cruelest lines of the play, Antigone proclaims on the way to her death chamber, “Look, leaders of Thebes, I am the last of your royal line” (940–41).Footnote ⁵⁶ Though technically untrue, the line reveals a chilly truth that Antigone is alone and has been alone since deciding on public, confrontational tactics. Her death makes her metaphysical solitude manifest. This sundering of communal ties is particularly painful because it is Antigone's surviving family, in particular Ismene, who will bear the long-term consequences of her dramatic disobedience. In broadcasting her opposition, Antigone exposes what was hidden and encourages antagonism toward this once shrouded foe, Ismene. Though certainly harrowing and grievous, Antigone's suicide exempts her from the unpleasant fate of living under a constant gaze of suspicion and surveillance and it relieves her of the unceasing fear of a life lived on borrowed time. This is Ismene's fate.

Ismene's future distress underscores another proclivity of overt defiance: it tends to be followed by violence and suffering. Sophocles underscores this point in the bold and broad strokes of tragedy in which death is piled upon death and mourning is compounded by suffering and wretchedness. Though it offers an extreme example of this suffering, Antigone touches on an actuality of the heroic resistance of the martyr. Valuing principle over life, the martyr risks death and pain (both her own and the suffering of others). Ismene's approach of underhanded resistance and false compliance, in contrast, might well have mitigated the use of brute force and curbed the scope of distress. Antigone gives Creon a target for his ire and violence. But Ismene occludes this target. To put this point somewhat differently, Ismene's underhanded tactics are more in line with a commitment to nonviolence because they attempt to dodge government violence altogether. Though not responsible for the brute force that Creon directs at her, Antigone does not attempt to avoid violence, death, or suffering. Ismene, who possesses a pragmatic love for life and an instinctual avoidance of pain, does.

How might Sophocles' Antigone have ended if Ismene's approach had succeeded? One can only speculate. But it seems plausible that Sophocles' play would be slightly less brimming with woe, destruction, and violence. Its emphasis might instead be on the power of the powerless, cunning, and on silent acts that take place when no one is looking.