Antígona e Ismene: as diferentes representações da mulher na tragédia de Sófocles.

Abstract

This work analyzes the characters Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, which constitutes our research’s corpus. Therefore, our main objective is to understand the delimited roles of these two characters in the aforementioned work. To reach this goal, we discuss about the social role attributed to Greek women contemporary to Sophocles, with the purpose of establishing comparisons between Sophocles’ female fictional characters, protagonists or otherwise, and the historical women in Classical Greece. The relevance of our work is proved then by the observation that, while in the limited democracy of the polis the woman is not a citizen nor a protagonist, in Sophocles’ tragedy, despite not being socially equal to a man, is elevated to the protagonist’s condition, becoming a tragic heroine. The methodology of this research is of a basic, bibliographical and qualitative nature, and therefore involves consultation of critical and theoretical works and aims the analyses and interpretation of the aforementioned character’s actions and personality. To this end, we used Giordani (1992), Pomeroy (1995) and Martin (1998) as our main sources of historical studies, besides Aristotle (1997), Lesky (1976), Jaeger (2001), Romilly (2008) and Castro (2011), as theoretical support to our tragedy studies, and to the analyses of Sophocles’ work. Therefore, our research allowed us to understand the roles of these two Sophoclean women: Antigone is a tragic heroine, whose great deeds yield her bitter consequences; and Ismene, by refusing to act, represents that view of the fragile woman, with no rights to citizenship, as per the political, social and ideological codes of Classical Greece.