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Abstract
In 1936, Simone Weil described Sophocles's Antigone to French factory workers as “the story of a human being who, all alone, without any backing, dares to be in opposition to her own country, to the laws of that country, to the head of its government, and who is, naturally, soon put to death.” Weil's insistence on Antigone as a civilian protester, rather than Hegel's model of feminine domestic virtue, recurs throughout writing of the fascist period. From Virginia Woolf and Louis MacNeice in the British Isles, to Marguerite Yourcenar and Jean Anouilh in France, Antigone came to embody the brave political resistance of the individual. By 1950, Hegel's influential reading of the play as presenting two rightful but irreconcilable claims seemed ready to collapse: “as for Creon,” the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray told a BBC radio audience after the war, “it was of course preposterous of Hegel to suggest that that he was as much in the right as Antigone and that our sympathies should be evenly divided.” This partisan reading of Antigone grew in strength in the post-war period, inspiring feminist, pacifist, and post-colonial engagements with the play.
