The Less Spectacular Sister

      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.