Much has been said and written about Antigone, the tragic heroine of Sophocles who stood up against her uncle Creon for the sake of her brother Polyneices. Antigone has been looked at from a plethora of perspectives, from feminists, Marxists, psychoanalytic, and subaltern perspectives. Antigone seems inexhaustible as a character for interpretation. Most of it is because of her doomed rebellion against the decree of the king of Thebes. As Richard William points out in his article “Antigone’s Nature”:
Why does Antigone continue to fascinate? She resists. She resists domination or incorporation, categorization or explanation. She resists, for example, civil law by disregarding Creon’s edict forbidding Polyneices’ burial. She also resists traditional lines of genealogy as a child of incest. In these and other ways, Antigone resists description in the traditional terms of occidental philosophy, religion, aesthetics, ethics, and politics—in her own time and in contemporary settings. (413)
The keyword here is categorization. Antigone rejects being categorized. She rejects the traditional notions of her sex and speaks out against the masculine authority of her uncle. By challenging her uncle, the king, Antigone also places herself outside the civil law, a kind of outlaw even, for to question the king would be to question the state too.
However, most extremely and importantly, Antigone foregoes categorization due to her pedigree. She was born out of incest between her father (and brother), Oedipus, and her mother (and grandmother) Jocasta. Because of this, Antigone challenges the kinship between her and her uncle, too. As Judith Butler points out in her book Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death:
Though entangled in the terms of kinship, she is at the same time outside those norms. Her crime is confounded by the fact that the kinship line from which she descends, and which she transmits, is derived from a paternal position that is already confounded by the manifestly incestuous act that is the condition of her own existence, which makes her brother her father, which begins a narrative in which she occupies, linguistically, every kin position except “mother” and occupies them at the expense of the coherence of kinship and gender. (71–72)
Antigone’s incestual origins are not simply a byproduct of Oedipus’ actions during the events of the play Oedipus Rex, but an important continuation, or let’s say return of the strikingly mythological figure of the sphinx. In Oedipus Rex, before the gates of Thebes, perched upon a rock is the Sphinx, a creature with the face and breasts of a woman, the haunches of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the tail of a serpent. She guards the entrance to Thebes from outsiders, and if one is to enter the city, they must first answer her riddle. If answered incorrectly, she strangles the person to death. It is only Oedipus who can answer her riddle, after which she flings herself from a high place and kills herself.
The sphinx does not only have a narrative function in Oedipus Rex, just to show Oedipus’ wisdom, or as a final rite of passage to his ultimate destiny; she serves as a symbolic creature of a mixed identity. She symbolizes the breakdown of order, as can be seen in her nature. She is neither a human woman, nor a lion, nor a bird. She defies categorization. Furthermore, she stands at the gates of Thebes, neither inside the city nor outside the wilderness. She holds both life and death in her hands, depending on how you answer her riddle. As Janice Siegel states in her article “The Sphinx and Oedipus Rex”:
The sphinx, like many of the other fantastic hybrid creatures, stands as a pre-eminent threat to Greek society and human culture. As a liminal (threshold) creature, neither one thing nor the other (as a centaur is neither horse nor man, an Amazon neither woman nor warrior, a Siren neither woman nor bird), it threatens our conception of what belongs and what doesn’t, of what can be understood and what cannot, of what can be controlled and what cannot.
The nature of the riddle itself serves as an unknown entity. Riddles function to fool. They are constructed in such a way as to deceive people into considering one part of it for the whole and hence answering incorrectly. The riddle of the feet which the sphinx tries to trap Oedipus with itself is about a creature of mixed identity. The four feet in the morning suggests an animal, the two feet during the midday suggests a human being, and the three feet in the evening something outside of both human and animal. Altogether, the riddle doubles down on the symbolism represented by the sphinx. Not only that the riddle of the Sphinx hint at the riddle of Oedipus himself. As Rob Baum in his article “Oedipus’s Body and the Riddle of the Sphinx” states:
Though structurally unnecessary as plot, the Sphinx’s Riddle is not extraneous: her question provides sub-text and character background for the play… the whole saga comes out, and at last Oedipus also learns: how Laius and Jocasta had their baby tendon-strung to prevent just such an outcome, how the infant was rescued and brought up in Corinth, how he was cruelly named “Oedipus” (club-foot). Which explains the odd deep scars on his legs, about which the audience belatedly hears, with which Oedipus has lived all his life, about which even his wife has been in the dark, and which Oedipus appears to have accepted as an unanswerable riddle. (47)
Though Oedipus is able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, he is unable to understand the deeper significance of it. He is unable to connect the riddle of the feet to his own name or the condition of his feet. As Claire Catenaccio states in “Oedipus Tyrannus: The Riddle of the Feet” that “his is a willful blindness” (1) which is contrasted with the knowledge of the blind seer Tiresias. Oedipus’s answer, ‘man’ as a solution to the riddle of the feet metaphorically places the existence of human beings while categorized into a kind of unknowability, as seen in Oedipus’ lateness in knowing who was the murderer of Laius and his actual relationship with Jocasta. As Sophie Grace Chappel points out in her article “The Riddle of Oedipus” that “the riddle-like ambiguities of language in the play, in particular the language of feet, express a deeper tragic uncertainty about the identity of man” (105).
And just like how the Sphinx challenges Oedipus, Antigone too challenges Creon. In Antigone, one can see the return of the spirit of the Sphinx, or that Antigone is the Sphinx. Just like how the Sphinx had an amorphous identity due to its nature as a chimera, Antigone also has one due to her incestual birth. Just like how the Sphinx straddles somewhere between human and animal, civilization and chaos, Antigone does so as well. As Robert William in his article “Antigone’s Nature” states:
Because she embodies incest, Antigone occupies this gap between nature and culture. In doing so, she spaces and thus displaces the nature-culture distinction that grounds kinship systems, preventing the correlative passage from nature to culture. Antigone stands as an other whose otherness undoes kinship. She remains cryptic by remaining unintelligible to kinship, as its incalculable remainder that it cannot incorporate. (417)
Just like how the Sphinx puts forth a riddle to Oedipus, Antigone puts forth a puzzle to Creon. It could also be said that Antigone herself is the riddle as can be seen in Creon’s exasperation of him being defied not just by a woman but also by somebody of his own kin, his niece. And while Oedipus is able to answer it, Creon utterly fails until it is too late.
The main riddle or the primary riddle, so to speak, posed by Antigone to Creon is that of authority, especially ultimate authority. Many scholars have interpreted Antigone’s rebellion through a feminist lens of her trying to secure some power over patriarchy. This is an interpretation that Creon himself believes in, and is seen when he says:
But if we are to lose, at least let it be
at the hand of a man. If you’re going to be defeated
by a woman, who is weaker—that’s disgrace. (Sophocles 30)
And that his son Haemon has been turned against him: “The boy has sold out to a woman. He’s taken her side” (33). However, what both the scholars and Creon himself fail to notice is that Antigone is not deriving authority through her sex. She is deriving authority through the masculine domain, through the patriarchy of the god Zeus, who supersedes Creon:
Yes, for it was not Zeus who made that [Creon’s] law,
nor Justice who dwells with the gods below and rules
in the world of men and women. Your edict was clear
and strong, but not enough to suspend the unwritten,
unfailing laws of the gods who live forever
and whose rule, revealed to us so long ago,
is not for here and now but, like the gods,
forever. (20)
Creon is unable to understand. He believes that the law of the king is the law of the state and is the law of the gods as well. Just like Oedipus, his also is a willful blindness. He is unable to accept that Antigone is the one posing him this question, this riddle, when his elders and subordinates remain silent on their displeasure with their decree, if they have any. The Sphinx demands attention. She literally stands at the gates of the city so that she cannot be ignored. She will not move until she is answered. Similarly, Antigone, too, through her act of burial for her brother, demands Creon’s attention now. If he disregards her actions, it could make him look weak or nepotistic. So he must answer her properly to save the delicate situation she has put him in. However, Creon outright refuses to acknowledge her and sentences her to death. Even the warnings given by the seer Tiresias fills him up with nothing but scorn. And so, Creon loses his son and his wife because of this.
The Sphinx and Antigone represent beings of the margins. The existence of a center automatically implies the existence of a margin and vice versa. While the center is solid, the margin is fluid. It can be seen in the case of language mixing that happens between the borders of two countries. There is more code switching and code mixing that happens on the borders of the countries than towards the center. Both the Sphinx and Antigone confront the center; the Sphinx confronts the city of Thebes (when King Laius is away from the city), and Antigone confronts Creon, who, because of his kingship, is, in a manner of speaking, the state. A stark difference between the two is that the Sphinx comes to destroy the city while Antigone comes to save it. In the former case, the margin wants to destroy the center and put itself in its place as can be seen in how the Sphinx perches upon a rock outside the gates like on a throne, in the latter, Antigone is not trying to replace Creon but reminding him of his proper place in the hierarchy, which is above the ranks of men but still below the station of the gods. Oedipus is able to answer the riddle, and so Thebes becomes stabilized and gets a new king. Meanwhile, Creon is unable to answer Antigone and loses his heir, Haemon, and his wife Eurydice.
Therefore, in both plays, Sophocles uses marginal creatures to question the center. And the center requires questioning because, without it, it cannot hold. Either the center becomes too weak as in the case of Oedipus Rex where Laius is away from the city and the center loses its figurehead and hence its identity and the Sphinx comes to tyrannize it, or the center becomes the tyrant itself as seen in Antigone where Creon has placed his authority alongside that of the gods. In both cases, the center forgets its true palace, its true identity, and its true boundaries, and hence it is confronted by the margin either in the form of invasions (Sphinx) or in the form of restoration (Antigone). The center must answer the riddle of the margin. If the center does not understand the margin or refuses to even acknowledge it, then the center will start to break down, as the center’s existence is simultaneous with that of the margin.
Antigone then becomes the new Sphinx in her titular play, once again a creature of the margin confronting the center and asking riddles of it. Creon is unable to answer and tries to hide Antigone in a cave where she is to perish out of sight. However, because she represents the margin and because she dies unanswered, she takes the center with her as well in the form of Haemon and Eurydice.
Works Cited
Baum, Rob. “Oedipus’s Body and the Riddle of the Sphinx.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (2006): 45-56. https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/download/3559/3435
Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. Columbia UP, 2002.
Catenaccio, Claire. “Oedipus Tyrannus: The Riddle Of The Feet.” The Classical Outlook, vol. 89, no. 4, 2012, pp. 102–07. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43940190. Accessed 17 Feb. 2025.
Chappell, Sophie Grace. “The Riddle of Oedipus.” Philosophies 9.4 (2024): 126. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040126
Robert, William. “Antigone’s Nature.” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 2, 2010, pp. 412–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40602713. Accessed 17 Feb. 2025.
Siegel, Janice. “The Sphinx and Oedipus Rex.” Dr. J’s Illustrated Guide to the Classical World, 2001, people.hsc.edu/drjclassics/texts/Oedipus/sphinx.shtm. Accessed 24 Feb. 2025.
Sophocles. The Theban Plays of Sophocles. Yale UP, 2007.
