Virginia Woolf's Antigones

Abstract:This study explores Virginia Woolf's engagements with the stubborn and riveting character of Sophocles' Antigone, the most famously proto-feminist figure in Greek tragedy. As Woolf's deployments of the character occur only in The Voyage Out and The Years, two novels that are decades apart, as well as in the treatise Three Guineas, I can't claim that Antigone always remained central to Woolf's thinking with Greek antiquity, triangulated as her appearances in Woolf's writings are by those of Clytemnestra and, especially, Electra. But Woolf does turn to Antigone at significant intervals, most strikingly as an affective and metonymic hinge in both Three Guineas and The Years, which started out as a hybrid novel-essay. Although Woolf ended up pulling the two works apart, Antigone remains as a primary connective figure, suggesting the inseparability of aesthetics and politics, with clearly gendered mimetic modes in the novel serving as the inverse of feminist political resistance in the essay and vice versa. Connecting all three iterations of Antigone is the image of the cave, which serves as a sexual metaphor in the original play and in The Voyage Out, and as a mimetic, affective, and finally political metonymy in The Years and Three Guineas. Additionally pivotal is the figure of Antigone as sister outsider, which hovers in the background of The Voyage Out and serves to conjoin differently angled intertexts in The Years and Three Guineas. One pivots around a direct quotation of Antigone that emphasizes loyalty to a brother and the other makes more oblique play with the sister figure, who is treated in The Years as if she were also from Sophocles' Antigone while resonating in Three Guineas with concerns about female suffrage. In these repeated engagements with the figure of Antigone and reworkings of significant scenes in Antigone, a bold mode of reception emerges, one that is less reverent and more presciently feminist and politically disruptive than conventional treatments of Woolf's classicizing gestures tend to acknowledge.