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How Does Hegel Present Antigone

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Past Antigone
The Victorian period further divided men and women by establishing a sharper, stronger line between the duties of the two sexes and what was appropriate for them. Women were further oppressed by the lack of education offered to them that didn’t only involve becoming a proper wife and mother. One sphere of education that was pervasively thought of as masculine and therefore, reserved for men, was classical education. In America, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that women were taught Latin and Greek, and only half of the schools offered to them also offered this type of education. Antigone was, therefore, first introduced to men. However, “It was not Thebes, the subject of the play, but Athens, the home playwright, that …show more content…

While Hegel recognizes Antigone’s actions as being autonomous, he also sees her as “[Upholding] the law of the gods in her insistence on carrying out the funeral rites; she is further allied with the sphere of kinship, womankind and nature, whilst Creon’s stance derives from concerns with governing the state.” (Beaney, 4). Hegel, therefore, while also noting that Antigone possesses a will of her own rather than simply being subject to her biology and instinct to act in accordance to God and family as the American writers thought, he still recognizes that these instincts of subjection to God and family is inherently female. While citizenship is not discussed in Antigone and is not something Antigone would have possessed in Hellas, Victorian Antigone in America was referred to as a ‘maiden' rather than a “citizen”, “and as maiden she embodied essential womanly qualities more than universal qualities of citizenship.” (Winterer, 78). However, by Hegel being “able to articulate what he saw (according to popular interpretations of his work) as the historical conflict challenging Greek ethical life at the time, namely …show more content…

Marriage was often characterized as a journey toward life as it drastically changed a woman’s, but was also associated to femininity due to the female pursuit for it. The previous quote, then, recognizes that, by connecting death to marriage, Antigone also connects death to femininity. De Quincey approves of the idea “that death is an act epitomised by femininity” (Beaney, 5) by writing that women can die grandly just as well as men can, though this is the only thing women can do that is equal to men. Hölderlin’s translation also suggests that her death is connected to female submissiveness suggested by Antigone’s final lines: ‘Welch eine/ Gebühr’ ich leide von gebührigen Männern/ Die ich gefangen in Gottesfurcht bin’ – ‘what a/ charge I suffer from men to whom charges are due/ I being trapped in reverence for the gods (769) Words such as ‘charge’, ‘suffer’, ‘trapped’ belong to the lexis of victimhood” (Beaney,

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