Antigone’s agency
goes far beyond than any other other characters in the play. After she finds
out her brother, Polyneices has been killed and didn't have a proper burial, Antigone
decides to defy the law and bury her brother because that would've been the
wishes of the gods. We can see how Antigone’s agency takes place in this scene because
not only she decides to take action about his brother’s death and bury him,
but she acts against the law and does what she believes is right. She portrays
herself as a strong woman who acts from instinct and often takes action for
anything that the Gods would think is wrong and she also doesn't care about
what others think. She believes in the divine principle above and against the
power and authority. She fights for the people she loves and she is willing to
go against everybody if she has to, in order to protect her loved ones and to
honor her brother. She does what was needed to be done and after she buries her
brother, she hopes that after she dies, her family would be reunited again in
heaven. She tried to convince her sister to support her and help her bury their brother, but her sister wanted to stay out of trouble with the law and instead
of helping her, she warned Antigone that fighting the man was a losing battle.
But Antigone was brave enough and went
on with her plans and she says she’s willing to do it alone, and wouldn't mind
dying in order to secure Polyneices's rightful burial. This is another example
of how Antigone’s agency takes place in the play because she shows that she is
willing to die if she has to in order to defend what she believes is right and
she is willing to fight the man in order to bury her brother. And eventually
when her uncle and ruler of Thebes, Creon found out what she did, she didn't deny that she committed the crime. She explains that while she knew it was against Creon’s law, her actions were in line with
her obligations to justice and the gods, so Creon puts her in jail and then vows
to execute her. At this moment she starts questioning herself and her agency
starts to question itself, because Antigone feels that her actions had no
meaning and she starts to questions whether or not she did the right thing. It
seems that she was ashamed of her family because of the fact that she comes
from an incest family and she wanted to cover her family’s faults by doing
something that would make her seem as a good person, which was burying her
brother. She also mentions the fact that she never experienced marriage, which
is something she always wanted, but since her fiancé had killed himself and the
fact that she’s imprisoned, she will never experience that. At this point all
her beliefs and standards were thrown away and she no longer had a reason to
keep living anyway. After everything she stood up for, she decided to kill
herself.
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