Antigone's Other Choice Analysis

Danyelle Caldwell

Professor Coleman

ENGL 1302

27 March 23

Antigone’s Other Choice By Sarah Iles Johnston The play “Antigone” written by playwright Sophocles is a Greek Mythology about a woman named Antigone who was immured into a cave after giving one of her brothers, Polyneices, who died at the battle for The Throne of Thebes, did not receive a proper burial.

This was against a law that was created by Antigone’s uncle, Creon. Her uncle then ordered her to be executed. Which led her to take her own life.

In the essay “Antigone’s Other Choice,” the author focuses on the choice that Antigone made to hang herself and the cultural context of suicide by hanging. Prior to reading Sarah’s article, I had interpreted the play as it is more about

She also goes on to tell about the gods who were like, “ Iphigenia being sacrificed to Artemis, Polyxena being sacrificed to Achilles ghost, and, Macaria being sacrificed to Persephone”, as a Greek Tragedy it was pretty normal to sacrifice humans, especially virgins. With the sacrifice of virgins, Nicole Loraux, a French historian of classical Athens, found that sacrificing virgins symbolized the loss of virginity. Because the Greeks had a different way of thinking, sacrificial deaths to them meant that defloration was invoked not because of the blood being produced but because they thought there was a connection between the throat and vagina. “In tragedies the loss of a sacrificial victim’s virginity, they were portrayed as “marrying death” (Johnston,

This is when Sarah goes into her theory of Antigone, the only virgin to hang herself. Sarah then kinda argues about maybe Sophocles should have given her more options like bringing a knife or some poison, but she moves on with a question, “What does a hanging virgin mean ?”. She then answers the question with “hanging virgins are very common in stories, while also following a pattern”, but to go into detail about what she means by this is that a virgin hangs herself when they're not able to live her life like they want to, especially a life as woman, with not being able to marry for her own or bear children on her own. Avoiding a fate that they don't want to suffer through that's not their control. Now with the pattern that happens, after a virgin hangs herself, it becomes a thing where other virgins begin to hang themselves in the same