The Politics of Pathos: Electra and Antigone in the Polis

Electra and Antigone, mourning and bereaved maidens, are Sophocles’ surviving unmarried heroines, and their similarities are made the more remarkable by the fact that the plays Electra and Antigone are seldom compared to each other. The similarities of Sophocles’ two plays about heroines whose family conflicts led them to extreme acts, characters forced to balance the claims of the dead against those of the living (Electra) or against those of the “law” (Antigone), are almost never examined.¹ Both protagonists are princesses in turbulent states where, the king having died violently, the rule has been taken by a tyrant. Yet the politics of Electra are neglected; indeed, many would say that politics are virtually irrelevant to the play (an irrelevance certainly implied by the lack of attention paid them in critical writing). When politics are mentioned with respect to Electra, they are generally confined to Orestes and the political implications of his situation and acts. By contrast, Antigone is the locus classicus for a study of the political in Greek tragedy, and Hegel’s reading established a model for its political interpretation which still dominates the interpretative discourse.² Antigone’s situation is perhaps more easily recognized as political for many reasons: her position as “the last descendant of her kingly line” (941); the Chorus of men, citizens who are a civic voice commenting on her actions; and her actions themselves, notably, the burial of her brother in defiance of the “law.” Yet the parallels between Antigone and Electra are startling: parallels not only openly political but of other sorts as well.

To clarify some aspects of the nature of “pathos” in Ancient Greek, unlike its English derivative “pathetic,” “pathos” can be paradoxically active; while the noun is derived from the verb “to suffer,” suffering can be more than passivity in Greek literature. The “Hymn to Zeus” in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is an extended prayer in which the Chorus speculates about the nature of the universe’s supreme god and states that Zeus has laid it down for mortals that pathei mathos (learning comes through suffering). Suffering in the Agamemnon (177) is the catalyst for knowledge. And the last word of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (1093), spoken by Prometheus himself, is paschô: “Behold me, how unjustly I suffer.” Although Prometheus’s sufferings are terrible, he has chosen them as an act of resistance to Zeus’s tyranny, and this last line is a defiant assertion of his suffering as rebellion. As I hope to show here, pathos can be political. One aspect of my title therefore applies to the acts of mourning by Electra and Antigone as political acts engendered by their suffering. They are bereaved, so their pathos is quite real; yet their position and, perhaps more importantly, their acting in direct opposition to a tyrant make their actions necessarily political ones.

In the critical tradition, however, where women’s mourning tends to lose its active political dimension, female resistance becomes reinscribed as pathos in the modern sense of passivity (an inevitably gendered passivity). To take the most familiar example, Antigone’s burial of her brother and defiance of Creon are self-evidently political actions, yet these are all too often assimilated to a binary opposition that assigns political importance to the male (Creon) while relegating Antigone to the seemingly apolitical space of the family. Her resistance and defiance are domesticated; her pathos, or active suffering, is reinscribed as pathetic, as a passive and sentimental lens through which to view her actions. Similarly, Electra’s agency, made to disappear in the shadow of Orestes, is misread as the passive conduit of male activity.

Both Antigone and Electra are (to use a psychological term not native to the fifth century) obsessed with the violent deaths in their families. In Electra’s case, it is of course the death of her father, Agamemnon, and those she wishes to contrive for her mother and her kinsman Aegisthus which occupy her thoughts. Antigone comes from a family far richer in death, at least within recent generations; on her exit from the world of the...