Maybe when you were in high school you
read Sophocles’ Antigone. The drama,
for a large part, is grounded in conflicts that may arise within a family, and
how other members of the family (who are not directly involved) need to
cautiously navigate these tensions. In the play, the famous king Oedipus has
been removed from his throne, leaving his two sons as potential heirs. The
brothers are unable to agree on who should inherit the crown, to the extent
that they go to war over the matter and in fact kill each other in single
combat. When the new king (no relation) forbids the burial of the brother he
considers a usurper, Oedipus’ daughters Antigone and Ismene are left in the
difficult position of being unable to complete their family obligations in the
form of burial rites, and they disagree over how to handle the issue. Antigone
takes the bolder course, which is why the play is named after her: she buries
her brother illegally, openly declares the fact, and challenges the new king to
punish her. (He does punish her, as it turns out, not with mere execution but
by burial alive.)
But I don’t want to talk about Antigone
today (if you want to know more about her, ask any high school English teacher).
I’m more interested in Ismene. Of the two sisters, she’s the more compliant, or
the more risk-averse. She’s in a very difficult situation: all the members of
her family are bold and rash and committed to disastrous courses of action, but
Ismene never wanted to get into any trouble. She never herself would have
started an internecine war or angrily defied the king’s orders in the name of
justice. In a way she’s cast as the ideal, conventional Greek woman, someone
who would spent most of her time at home and not form strong opinions. She
would have been better suited for a non-royal family; no doubt she would have
been happier if she could have spent her life surrounded by people who don’t
need to kill each other to make a point.
Unfortunately for her, she’s been born
into a royal family full of strong personalities, and she suffers for it. At
the beginning of Antigone, Antigone
asks Ismene to collaborate with her in burying their brother. When Ismene tells
Antigone, in cautious terms, that Antigone is courting a death wish, Antigone
says ‘Fine, I’ll do it without you.’ Later Antigone returns, she’s apprehended,
she admits to everything, she’s condemned to death. Ismene’s future looks
pretty bleak at this point. She’s stigmatized from the start as a child of
incest (her parents are Oedipus and Jocasta), and therefore unable to contract
the marriage she might have expected. By now, most of her family is either dead
(her brothers, Jocasta) or disgraced (Oedipus), and now her last sibling has
been condemned to execution. In despair, Ismene offers to be executed alongside
Antigone, but, because of their earlier disagreement, Antigone rejects this
offer and says that Ismene is unworthy to die at her side. Antigone considers
it virtuous to have honored religious observances even in the face of the king’s
prohibition, and thinks Ismene a coward for failing to do so. In the end,
Antigone dies alone, and Ismene will live the rest of her life in poverty and
disgrace.
Ismene in this play represents an
interesting character type that recurs frequently in literature with strong
willed women. Although Greek culture prescribed that women should be modest,
retiring, obedient, and so forth, classical literature often features women who
reject these ideals and demand a more active role in life. Antigone presents
herself as a champion of religious right, bravely defying a sacrilegious king.
Ismene doesn’t like defiance. She exists as a mouthpiece of conventional
opinions, to create a contrast with Antigone’s unconventionality. In my
opinion, it’s not until she offers to die with Antigone that she comes into her
own as a personality, and even then her attempt at solidarity is coldly
rejected.
Ismene’s not the only woman in myth who
pales in comparison to a more famous sister. Classical literature is full of
conventional-minded sisters who serve to provide context for how outlandish
their sisters’ ideas are. In the Aeneid, Dido
is famous for her frenzied, all-consuming love for Aeneas, but when she
discusses the matter with her sister, her sister only speaks of how sensible
and mutually beneficial it would be to marry Aeneas, entirely missing the fact
that Dido was practically drooling on Aeneas’ chest when they ate dinner
together. Later, when Dido despairs of her failed love affair and decides to
commit suicide, she feeds her sister a plausible story about wanting to destroy
everything that will remind her of her ex-lover, and her sister never guesses
that Dido means to destroy herself too. She doesn’t even have the imagination
to realize how unconventional and problematic her sister’s desires are.
Is it a bad role, to be the less
spectacular sister? Well, much of it depends on whose sister you are. Ismene
was left destitute and futureless, but there are better possibilities. Medea
had her own adventures--as a princess of Colchis, she betrayed her family, ran
off with a visiting hero, and went on a tour of all the exotic sights of the world
before she settled into a series of powerful roles (both condoned and
condemned) in Greece. Meanwhile in Colchis, her sister Chalciope served as
Medea’s confidante until Medea left town, at which point Chalciope was
forgotten. Presumably she lived an ordinary life with marriage, children, and
very little power. The core of it is that the sister’s fate is far overshadowed
by the heroine’s, and most of the audience doesn’t worry about the sister’s
future when so little is at stake. While the heroines shine out with their
impossible desires and brash plans, the sisters embody the life that the
heroines are simply unable to lead: a quiet marriage, with lots of time spent
on domestic work. They often signify female success, in a highly restrictive
sense, and not the sort of success that a daring heroine like Medea or Antigone
would ever want.
