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This essay examines Simone de Beauvoir's reading of Antigone in "Moral Idealism and Political Realism." I argue that Beauvoir's reading of the play is inadequate because it does not take into account the constraints Antigone faces as a woman in her time and place. I offer a reading that accounts for gender in ways that Beauvoir might have done later in her career.
In high school and college classrooms around the world, as well as in some of the most influential, notably Hegel's, scholarly endeavours into the text, Sophocles's Antigone is read as a story of conflicting orders of value, of radical division and of opposition between family and state, woman and man, ethics and politics, religion and law. Read in such a manner, with Creon and Antigone standing on opposing sides of what seems to be a fruitless and irreconcilable debate, both characters take on a quality of madness, foolishness, blindness, and fanaticism. Such is the reading offered by Simone de Beauvoir in her essay, "Moral Idealism and Political Realism," which uses Antigone to set up the long-standing clash between ethics and politics embodied in the roles of Antigone and Creon.What Beauvoir is ultimately aiming at, however, is less a thorough reading of the play than a reading of the political divisions and competing value systems of post-WWII France. She uses Antigone and Creon to dissect the commitments of the political players of her own time, when France had ousted the Vichy government and was trying its collaborators, when the revolutionary Left could no longer turn its head from the abuses of Communist Russia, and when the pacifistic Left had been proven reprehensible in its quietism. It is the tension between these political and ethical positions that Beauvoir sees played out through Antigone and Creon-the "moral idealist" and the "political realist."
Instead of a story of division, I suggest here that Antigone's is actually a tale of unification, one that exemplifies a very different relationship between ethics and politics than either Hegel or Beauvoir imagines. As opposed to exemplifying irreconcilable values and divisions between political and ethical commitments, the play, I suggest, is about the falsity and failure of such oppositions and about the impossibility of maintaining them. It is, as I see...