Antigone Analysis: Challenging Feminine Norms

The 'feminine' behavior is nothing more than social agreements, implied protocols that are incorporated by women, which determine their experiences by becoming part of society. Nature does not define women, it only establishes physiological characteristics that are not decisive, neither in acting nor in the assessments of the female focus. The approach of women, which Beauvoir gives us, contradicts the Hegelian postulates about the feminine ethical essence, represented in Antigone, a woman who fulfills her ethical duty in protecting her family, a duty to be sustained in her natural condition of being a woman.

Despite Hegel's postulates, Antigone contradicts this cultural mandate of femininity, namely submission, by not obeying Creon's order, which prohibited the burial of Antigone's brother for treason to the city. Antigone ignores the order issued by Creon that prohibits burying Polynices’s body becoming an active subject who faces the power of the man who rules to fulfill his will, with what she considers correct, breaking into her uncle's male power.

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With this transgression of the masculine mandate of the city, with this offense of the social order, he affirms the inauthenticity of the feminine. The order, as such, must be permanently monitored to ensure compliance and must imply a penalty in case of being violated. Quite contradictory situation, because if femininity is 'natural', there should be no lack of such naturalness on the part of women, there should be no transgressions to femininity. By the way, it should not be forced, nor mandatory, precisely because it is natural.

But, as Beauvoir tells us, nature has never determined the behavior of the human being, but custom and habit:

But a society is not a species: the species realizes itself as existence in a society; it transcends itself toward the world and the future; its customs cannot be deduced from biology; individuals are never left to their nature; they obey this second nature, that is, customs in which the desires and fears that express their ontological attitude are reflected. It is not as a body subjected to taboos and laws that the subject gains consciousness of and accomplishes himself. (70)

Women do not behave according to “the feminine” by a call from nature, human beings behave according to a feminine or masculine gender, because we are part of a society based on power structures that establish roles for men and women, a society that determines valuations around male and female subjects, thus establishing the supposed “essentiality” of each sex, naturalizing it. The crime of Antigone triggers a central conflict of the tragedy, with the antagonism between Creon “the masculine” and Antigone “the feminine”, a confrontation of forces takes place, in which both fight to fulfill their objectives. According to Beauvoir, this conflict between the masculine and the feminine has been present in different ways throughout universal history and will continue to occur.

The Allegory of the cave is a very famous story for its metaphorical way of seeing life in the face of society, that time is reflected from ignorance to beyond knowledge. It is the most popular among philosophers, specifically reflecting the exact life in a matter of vision to what has been of many people including today. The act of liberation from the chains would be the acts of rebellion that we usually call revolutions, or changes in paradigm. Of course, it is not easy to rebel, since the rest of the social dynamic goes in the opposite direction. In this case it would not be a social revolution, but an individual and personal one. On the other hand, liberation means seeing many of the more internalized beliefs falter, which produces uncertainty and anxiety. To make this state disappear, it is necessary to continue advancing in the sense of discovering new knowledge. It is not possible to remain without doing anything, according to Plato.

This story is correlatedly similar to Antigone because her conflict with King Creon, faced with the unfair decisions of the kings, the unwritten laws of the gods, common sense, reason, respect, humanism can always be invoked. We will be a prosperous and fair society if we are free. What I find most to be missing in the world in which we work to make it more fair is a lack of true freedom, that respects the other, that confronts the most powerful, such as Antigone, if there is a manifest injustice or a lie that is transformed into false truth. It helps us to reflect and observe that, many times, we are not wrong if we go against the current, against the opinions that they want to impose on us without letting us think. Thought is the number one enemy of power, freedom is achieved, nobody gives it away. Antigone and the prisoner who manages to escape and see reality, are two examples that show us that it does not matter if you have to go contrary to what is 'correct,' you have to fight for what your feelings tells you.