Trauma & Art

Part six

“The separation of “private speaking” from “public speaking” is a man-made construct. It stripped the emotional from the rational, the heart from the head. It elevated individuality over connectivity instead of honoring both.” Elizabeth Lesser

For this final myth related post I will draw on Elizabeth Lesser’s book, Cassandra Speaks. It also includes a new drawing and some non-myth related resources.

More and more women and people in general are becoming aware of feelings of constriction, grief and oppression and of ways of doing things differently, of a need to change some of the old stories.  Lesser writes at the beginning of her book: “All I know is that in my early thirties I became acutely aware of the feelings of constriction, heartache, and anger that had been brewing in me since I was a girl. Slowly, the desire to do something to change the story became stronger than my fear of speaking up.” She speculates that this waking up was probably the result of the wave of women gathering their strength all around the world, her meditation practice, which was giving her a strong backbone and a way of regarding herself and others with calm curiosity, and her first attempts at being in therapy that were helping her unravel the stories that had shaped her. Through these processes she realised that “just the way it is” was actually just a story with ancient roots; a story that begged to be revisited and revamped.

The book is comprised of three parts: origin stories, power stories and a brave new ending. In the first part of the book Lesser explores the origin tales that have shaped our Western thinking and beyond. She goes back to Adam and Eve and other Bible parables, the Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and other well known stories. Many of these stories have endured and have been passed on from one generation to the next, often unexamined. We’re often oblivious to how these old stories shape us and how entrenched they are in our contemporary cultures.  Lesser describes how she had absorbed those stories as if they were about humankind, but of course, stories created only by men are really stories about men, not the whole human race. She goes on to explore what could have been and what could change now if women are also the story tellers. She points out how becoming familiar with our culture’s origin stories and tracing their influence is a good way to take stock of our own lives and personal narratives and claim our own voice.

In the book Lesser focuses on stories from Western cultures, including Adam and Eve, and Pandora and Cassandra from Greek myths. She describes how when she started tracing their influence she felt their tentacles everywhere. Another thing she realised was that many of the stories impart the same themes of men as superior and morally pure and women as the ones to bring about suffering. If we didn’t know that these stories uphold the status quo, then the blaming of women for all the strife and pain in the world would seem irrational or our desperate attempt to make meaning of our human experience and existential fears through simplistic explanations. Referring to Adam and Eve she writes: “God curses them. He curses the woman with painful childbirth and subservience to her husband. He curses the husband with constant toil. He curses both of them with illness, old age, and death, and he exiles them from the Garden of Eden. Everything after that goes downhill. All because of Eve’s curiosity and defiance, and Adam’s submission to Eve’s sin. The Fall.|”

However, Lesser mentions that other readings of the story suggest that the death God spoke of was not literal death, but rather the death of the child-self, the unconscious self, the fearful self who chooses the safe status quo and never fulfills his or her potential. Lesser writes: “The way I see it, Eve is humankind’s first grown-up. The “temptation” she succumbs to is the most fundamental human yearning— to know oneself, to find one’s own path, and to courageously engage with the big world beyond the garden of childhood. To grow up is to admit that life is challenging and that we are responsible for our own behavior and for the well-being of one another. In psychological terms, the urge to grow up is called individuation, and in mythological terms it is called the hero’s journey— the inner calling to push off from the shore of mother and father, to test limits, to know your worth, to speak your truth, to claim authentic selfhood.”

The origin story from ancient Greece by the poet Hesiod seems to have definitely informed the Adam and Eve story. According to Hesiod, (cited in Lesser) Zeus, the king of the gods, said to Prometheus: “You stole the fire and outwitted my thinking; but it will be a great sorrow to you, and to men who come after. As the price of fire, I will give them an evil, and all men shall fondle this, their evil, close to their hearts, and take delight in it.” This evil was Pandora, the first woman. One of the many gifts she received from the Gods was curiosity. Zeus married Pandora off to Prometheus’s brother and as a wedding gift, gave her a large storage jar with the warning that she must never open it. But like Eve her curiosity got the better of her, and Pandora lifted the lid. Zeus had trapped in the jar the spirit of every kind of suffering that released would plague mankind forever: toil, sickness, famine, jealousy, hatred, war, and the cycle of birth and death. And because of Pandora’s curiosity suffering was humankind’s fate. So, curiosity is viewed as something dangerous that brings about all kinds of bad things. This message is pervasive in our society and often in educational contexts. We are all inquisitive and eager to learn about the world as young children, and then slowly and steadily this is dampened or crushed.

These myths still affect our modern consciousness despite the knowledge we have accumulated and the advances we have made in so many areas. Lesser claims that those who tell the tales are human beings with all sorts of motivations, strong opinions, an ego to stoke, a system to uphold.  Hesiod she writes: “interpreted old myths and folk tales from the oral tradition, changing many of them to reflect the issues of his times and to protect the privilege of the ruling, patriarchal class.” She notes that in versions that predate Hesiod’s storytelling, Pandora was not a punishment but rather a gift. Pandora means “all-giving.” Earlier versions of the spoken myth, pieced together from the artwork on pottery,  paint Pandora as an embodiment of the fertility of the earth, a healer and life giver. Also, there are other versions of the story that suggest that Pandora discovered the opened jar and she held back Elpis, which means hope in Greek, to help humans withstand the trials of mortal existence. Lesser writes: “it’s time to tell stories where no one is to blame for the human predicament and all of us are responsible for forging a hopeful path forward.”

Another Greek myth examined in the book is the story of Cassandra because her story resonates with our times. Cassandra could see clearly, but she was disbelieved, disregarded and gaslighted. Lesser writes: “Gaslight is one of my favorite new verbs to enter the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The word also was one of the winners of the American Dialect Society’s 2016 Word of the Year. I like the simplicity of their definition – “Gaslight: to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity….. Cassandra’s curse is an ancient example of gaslighting, and it is relived on a daily basis by women around the world….  You can go all the way back to texts from ancient Egypt, Persia, and Greece for the earliest examples of gaslighting….. Millions of women throughout time have been discredited, ignored, disrespected, and made to suffer for telling uncomfortable, inconvenient truths. But this time, under the words of pain, I could sense a new wind gathering strength.”

In the book there is a chapter about the writer’s trip to France, where she had the opportunity to visit sites with cave paintings. Up until recently it was assumed that the artists were men, but research conducted by Dean Snow, the archaeologist who analyzed the handprints of the Cro-Magnon artists, suggests that many of the handprints in caves belong to women. That means that at least some of the first story tellers were women. Lesser writes that in those caves she got a visceral experience of how history is often a distorted window into the past, the perspective of those with the power to tell it, and was reminded of the opportunity we have to participate in changing the narrative. Snow (cited in Lesser) says that the question he gets most often is why these ancient artists left handprints at all. “a pretty good hypothesis is that this is somebody saying, ‘This is mine, I did this.” Lesser concludes “It is time for women to change that story, to leave our handprints, to say, “This is mine, I did this.”

She also wonders why the fullness of our ancestors’ consciousness stayed behind in the caves and asks questions like:

Why has the focus been on our inherited violent and warlike nature? What about the stories of the earliest human urge to care for each other, to parent, to cook and nurse, to love and create? Why were those so-called soft storylines overlooked and not told alongside the warrior stories? Why were they not held up as critical aspects of the human journey through time? Why have those stories stayed in the caves— and not just those prehistoric caves but in the forgotten rooms of every era?

The second part of the book discusses power and women. Lesser says that as time went by she realised that to change the story of power in her world she had to dredge up her personal power, her inner strength, inherent dignity, and self-worth, but layers of self-doubt, unexplored and unexpressed anger, and a slew of other problems like the problem of likability – being nice, agreeable, and likable all the time – were covering her authentic power. She writes: “Women and power . . . what a conundrum. This is what I was thinking about sitting in the quiet house, bunching together the socks. Somewhere in the back of my mind I sensed the presence of millions of other women who were experiencing similar issues and were equally unsettled by those two words. Women and power. The words were like the socks: mismatched. They were a koan looking for an answer.”

She describes her own Pandora’s moment when she opened a box of books from her sons’ college years while cleaning out. As she read through the box she says she encountered the DNA of patriarchal power. From The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, who championed leadership that shunned morality and empathy and Sun Tzu, who In The Art of War, claims that fear, deception, arrogance, attack, annihilation are the strategies of power to Aristotle, the Selected Essays by Karl Marx; The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Plato, Plutarch, Augustine and Saint Paul, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and many others.  She writes: “Talk about Pandora’s Box, I said to myself. This was the dangerous box! I pulled out another book. It was a big one, with a bold red cover. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene….That was the end of my cleaning project and the beginning of a deep dive into the story of power.…..”

Throughout the book she explores how if women had also been the protagonists and narrators of societies’ teaching tales “swords in stones and bombs bursting in air would have been no more laudatory than educating children and tending the garden. Acts like rape and pillage, violence and brute force would have never been associated with the “hero’s journey.” The culture would not only revere the strong and silent type; it would also be cool to be talkative, brave to cry, noble to feel and relate.” This single story of power and the excess of one value system and the exclusion of others have created a lot of suffering and injustice, and as Lesser says, we do not only need stories empowering all those who have been left out of the story, but also stories with different values and new ways of being and dealing with problems.

Lesser also reminds us that even though women have not being part of this story it doesn’t mean that they have not often colluded with the story line, and also, even though experience and research show that women have honed more caring and collaborative instincts; nurture relationships and connectivity;  are less likely to use violence to deal with conflict, all people harbor within them a full range of human impulses and reactions, urges to manipulate or dominate, to be selfish and unkind, to unfairly blame or shame, to walk over others to get what they want. That’s why she believes it is critical to be self-aware and this brings me to the last part of the book where there is a chapter in which she introduces a term she has come up with –‘innervism’. She defines innervism as “love of oneself. It is the realization that healing the self and healing the world go hand in hand…. Sometimes the very evils we want to fight in the world, the broken behaviors we blame on others, are also alive in us and in need of our attention, our kindness, our understanding, our healing.”

She believes that when examining women and power both innervism and activism need to be taken into account. Innervism because women as a collective carry oppression and pain in their bodies and psyches so healing within is necessary, and activism because there is so much that needs to be addressed out in the world. Lesser explains why she uses these terms: “I use the word activism to describe ….. anything you do to serve a cause greater than yourself. Your activism might look like joining a political campaign, a social-justice movement, the school board, the local fire department. Or being a foster parent, or a therapist, or someone who picks up litter on the side of a road. Activism is “love made visible,” as Kahlil Gibran wrote. Love of people, animals, trees, community, country, land, planet.” She says that what inspires her about Pauli Murray is her insistence that anyone can be a change agent in the sense that one does not have to join an organization or proclaim allegiance to a party or a philosophy because any person with a typewriter constitutes a movement. Lesser writes: “I say that one person with her own voice— written, spoken, cried, yelled, sung— can change the story. Every day, in big and small ways, we can do this….” She also adds that there is not only power in knowing the old stories and becoming aware of what we value and what we don’t, but also offering alternatives and creating new scripts to replace the ones holding us all back.

Resources:

1. Two brief TED talks by Steven Hayes, PhD, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is summarily about acceptance of unwanted experiences that are out of our control and the commitment to live a life according to our values. The purpose of ACT is to increase our psychological flexibility, developing mindfulness, with a full focus on the present and acting according to our value system. It distinguishes six basic processes of psychological inflexibility: cognitive attachment, experiential avoidance, obsession with the past or the future, hyper self-identification as content, loss of contact with our values ​​and lack of action, and six processes of psychological flexibility: acceptance, cognitive detachment, contact with the present moment, self as a framework, values ​​and committed action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79_gmO5ppg     &        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSHpBRLJrQ

2. A recent episode of the Being Well podcast where Rick and Forest Hanson define scarcity and abundance, the reasons we are predisposed towards scarcity from an evolutionary perspective, and also, scarcity at the cultural level. The fact that they included a critique of promoting an “abundance mindset” was refreshing. They talked about how and when to relax, expand and orient to a sense of abundance, abundance in objectively difficult times, abundance of future time, and the sense of wonder in considering the abundance of the universe and the awe this can arise in us.

https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-creating-an-abundance-mindset/

Part four

Myths and the power of stories

“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind” …. “Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.” Rebecca Solnit

“Protest involves the taking up of space.” Helen Morales

In this post I will be drawing from Helen Morales’ book, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths, which through the examination of several myths touches upon all the important issues that we are facing today, and probably have dealt with to some extent since antiquity. I will inevitably touch upon a few themes only within the space if this piece.

I believe that myths and fairy tales give us new ways of looking at and understanding the world. In particular, Greek and Roman mythology have been broadly influential in Western culture and beyond.  Greek and Roman myths explore love, citizenship,  leadership, freedom, justice, ethics, moral dilemmas, politics, war, revenge and punishment,  abuse of power, relational violence and human weaknesses. Through the characters and events in the myths people can reflect on their local politics, difficult moral dilemmas and dynamics in relationships. Morales claims that “being able to explore questions such as what makes good leadership and how to resist state fascism allows audiences to reflect on those issues in relation to particular, local events, at one remove.” Myths, she says, enlarge people and literary characters when they overlay them with attributes and accomplishments from the figures in ancient myths.

To engage in any conversation, whether that be around art, politics, ethics, law, justice, philosophy, religion,  history, health, gender or the environment, will probably involve, to some degree or other, engaging with ideas from ancient Greece and Rome. Ideas from classical antiquity have influenced declarations, constitutions, professional guidelines, trades union movements, gay rights and political and economic theories, but as Morales writes they have also been used to justify “fascism, slavery, white supremacy, and misogyny.” She writes: “Ancient Greeks and Romans have given us a rich and influential inheritance of mythology, philosophy, architecture, theater, and politics. We do not need to hide the destructive aspects of these legacies, nor do we need to use antiquity to perpetrate myths of European and Western superiority to appreciate the value of ancient Greece and Rome.”

Critical evaluation of myths and ideas from antiquity does not deny the value of Greek and Roman inheritance. I’d like to highlight this because sometimes my posts, and maybe even the simple act of posting art and written material, are met with some pushback, even more so because I live in a small community. I am aware that these recent posts to do with classic antiquity and Greek mythology might trigger some resistance in some people or get misinterpreted. But I believe that myths and stories can be powerful in awakening us and that reading them critically, engaging in a new conversation, and using them creatively and artistically can be productive and empowering for society at large. The book mentioned above demonstrates the role that ancient myth plays in our cultural hardwiring, but also shows us how these stories from antiquity can be used to bring about change. And in any case, myths have always been read selectively, re-created, adapted, since antiquity, when as Morales says the different versions of myths operated collectively as a kind of long-running conversation. If we want to create a more respectful, peaceful and inclusive world we need to learn about the stories that define our social realities, reflect on and interact with them to reach new understandings and perhaps write different endings. Morales writes: “we’re due for a fresh understanding of how ancient Greek and Roman myths, and their characters, can be claimed and defined by all of us who want to resist the current movement toward greater patriarchal control and who are working to make this a more equal, empathetic, and enlightened world.”

As I mentioned the book covers many issues, but I will only discuss or refer to a few topics. I’ll begin with dieting and dress code and the policing of girls mostly through control of the way they dress and eat. Morales writes that “girls’ safety, school dress codes, and dieting, as well as dealing with a changing political climate in which their freedoms were being curtailed and environmental protections reversed— are all underpinned by cultural narratives. One of the planks in this ideological scaffolding is classical mythology. Part of being empowered and fighting back involves understanding these myths and their cultural impact and turning them to our own advantage.” She claims that some of our beliefs in relation to school dress codes and the policing of women’s dress more generally go back to antiquity, and to ignore this history blinds us to how entrenched some violent social structures really are. She writes: “The first step toward understanding, and therefore doing something to prevent, misogyny is to recognize how and where it is culturally hardwired.” She explains that misogyny isn’t just an attitude toward women that individual men and women may hold; instead it functions to enforce and police women’s subordination against the backdrop of other intersecting systems of oppression and vulnerability, dominance and disadvantage. One of the main ways in which misogyny does this is by differentiating between “good women” and foreign or “bad women” and punishing the supposedly “bad women.”

The topic of policing women’s dress it is not just a contemporary practice, but has a long history. Morales writes: “Ancient Greek and Roman regulations are a small, but foundational, part of the long history of dress codes. At its beginning are the gunaikonomoi, the “women controllers,” of ancient Greece. Gunaikonomoi (Γυναικονόμοι) were city officials, elected to office, whose responsibility was to ensure that women dressed and behaved appropriately. Controlling adornment, dress, behavior and order were inextricably linked.  In most cities, respectable women were not allowed out in public much; they spent their time in the women’s quarters of their homes. Slaves and poor women would have been forced to venture out to get water or work….. by and large, the only time that respectable women went out in public in ancient Greece was for religious festivals and events like funerals and weddings. …. Women who had committed adultery were not allowed to participate in Athenian festivals or to enter temples, and it might have been the job of the gunaikonomos to keep records of women who had been found guilty of committing adultery and to enforce the law excluding them from public religious life….”

Morales refers to sources like the Andania inscription that suggests that the gunaikonomos would tear the clothing that violated the dress code and dedicate it to the gods, and to other sources that suggest that girls and women who broke the dress code were given fines, notices of their transgressions were posted on a white board on a plane tree in a public area, and also, put under a kind of house arrest, exiled from the few areas of public life they had access to. Shaming was part of the penalty. Plutarch also describes restrictions placed upon women in Athens by the lawmaker Solon. For instance, he writes: “Women’s behavior at funerals was regulated; public displays of grief that were too passionate and prolonged were outlawed.” Another example is the Oppian Law, introduced in 216 BCE as an emergency measure, during wartime. to curb the increasing visibility and independence of Roman women, but there was pressure to repeal the law. The women of Rome protested for days blocking access to government buildings. Morales writes: “The mass demonstrations were extraordinary— it was not socially sanctioned for women to assemble in public and protest— and they were successful: the Oppian Law was repealed in 195 BCE”.

In reference to school dress codes, whether it is about an adult bending over to check attire fit, or measuring blouse straps or skirt length, Morales says that they are about more than dress: they are a means of shaming and enforcing patriarchal control. Reading this chapter took me back to my early teen years. I know first hand what it feels like to have the length of your skirt measured in the midst of a crowd of students, whose skirts are actually no longer than yours and then have the hem of your new school uniform taken out because the skirt is a centimeter above the knee instead of reaching the middle of the knee. At school I had tried to laugh it off, but deep inside it hurt. I knew I had broken no rules. My mother had it made adhering to the school regulations. Mostly I remember having to walk home with the hem of my skirt half undone and feeling both anger rise in me and the powerlessness of the situation, wondering why she had to rip the hem in front of everyone else instead of talking with me in private. Turning to history and ancient stories helps us become aware of patterns and connections across time and contexts, and see how systems and structures work, and hopefully, resist these old practices or stories and do something to change the world by changing the narratives.

Another chapter in the book is dedicated to body size, stories of practices of measuring students in college campuses and comparing them with Venus de Milo [the statue missing two arms that was found on the Greek island Milos], dieting and the diet culture, which according to Morales sometimes misquotes or relies heavily on Hippocrates, who she writes: “may seem like a surprising authority for modern health writers. Medicine has come a long way since the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.” She is also critical of how other parts of Hippocrates’ work is ignored, like for instance, his advise against restrictive diets for healthy people (breaking such a diet was a risk to one’s health)” and concludes that Hippocrates’s outlook was considerably more complicated and varied than what is usually quoted. She also makes reference to the Hippocratic oath sworn by all physicians, which states “I remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings” (my [Morales’] emphasis) and to abide by the maxim “first do no harm” (this is not, as is often thought, in the oath itself, but an equivalent sentiment is found in Hippocrates’s Epidemics).” Finally, she suggests that Aristotle’s call to eat until satiety and to reflect on the reasons for overeating is a better and kinder prescription for human happiness and health.

Morales links women’s oppression, racism and the politics of “fat”. She writes that “fat” was part of a trend in the 18th and 19th centuries, in theories and popular culture, which linked fatness to blackness and thinness to whiteness. She cites sources that suggest that fat phobia in relation to black women, for instance, did not stem from medical concerns about health, but with the association among fatness, blackness, stupidity, and savagery. At the same time, an association grew among thinness, whiteness, intelligence, and civilization. Morales believes that these images have been used to degrade black women and discipline white women, She also situates herself in the story. She describes how she was put on a diet when she was ten years old and was allowed one thousand calories per day, plus a bag of Maltesers chocolates as a treat every evening. She concludes: “My story is not unusual.”

Myths also contain difficult topics like sexual violence. Morales says “some of these myths invite us to empathize with the women who are assaulted, and they show insight into the psychology of sexual assault and the effects of trauma on the victims of the assault.” I would add that some fairy tales also describe the effects of this kind of violence, and it is really interesting to see this depth of insight into trauma responses way before trauma theories and scientific research were developed.  For instance, Morales refers to Ovid who depicts women who are attacked leaving their bodies and turning into trees or bushes or clumps of reeds. She writes: “I read these as imaginative dramatizations of the paralysis and dissociation caused by trauma. Daphne’s response to Apollo’s assault— she is unable to run or speak and a “heavy numbness seizes her limbs”— captures what happens to victims of sexual assault. Dissociation allows the person under attack to avoid experiencing the assault. Our medical vocabulary terms this involuntary temporary paralysis tonic immobility. The feeling of leaving one’s body and being alienated from it are well documented, as are their longer-lasting effects.” Other myths describe the effects of this kind of trauma on other women like Persephone’s mother, Ceres, who was so overcome by grief that she plunged the world into famine. And there are myths that speak of the silencing and the telling, as well as, the strength found in support from others. Morales writes: “They are perceptive about the psychology of trauma, highlight victims’ strength and strategies of survival, and guide our attention toward aspects of the experience of sexual assault that are sometimes overlooked. They also offer hints of women’s empathy toward one another and the empowerment possible through those seemingly tiny moments of solidarity:”

I’d like to add that often in myths and other artistic creations there is a subtext. Across time and space during oppressive regimes artists and writers have used metaphors or stories to talk about things they couldn’t otherwise articulate without severe consequences. Morales writes: “it’s important to remember when and why he [Ovid] was writing about sexual violence. It was during the reign of the emperor Augustus, which was an oppressive and authoritarian regime, at least for a subversive writer like Ovid. There is a subtext to many of Ovid’s stories about rape.” She claims that Ovid took the association between the gods and the emperor and used it to reveal the authoritarian, controlling side of Augustus. So, rather than focusing on positive aspects of Jupiter and Apollo, Ovid represents them as imposing their power upon unwilling victims and by association suggests that Augustus is autocratic and abusive. She writes: “It is an effective technique. It gives Ovid an out: he avoids direct criticism of an emperor who was prone to exiling his opponents (and who did, eventually, exile Ovid) but allowed readers at the time to join up the dots….”

As I have mentioned the book raises questions about many topics and associated myths, which are not mentioned in this post. Issues to do with racism, gender, the trans experience, environmental destruction, culture and the small or non-existent representation of women’s art, especially Black women, in museums, About museums Morales writes: “but museums are not uncomplicated spaces of display: facing repeated accusations of theft, unethical acquisition and display of objects, and cultural appropriation, museums are at the forefront of the question of who owns culture….. Museums do not just display culture; they create it. Curators are in privileged positions to decide what to include and what to exclude and which artists and whose myths count….”

In the last part of this post I will discuss Antigone’s myth, which in Sophocles’ version does not end well for anyone. It is a layered drama with multiple themes, personality types and ethical dilemmas. The myth of Antigone, as told by the great Greek playwright Sophocles, is one of the most well known of the Greek myths and one most frequently taught at school. My own nine page school essay on this drama, which I wrote when I was seventeen, has somehow survived and is still with me. As I re-read it while writing this post I felt tenderness for this much younger me. Rick Hanson says that we need to embrace and say thank you to the myriads younger versions of ourself that have brought us thus far. My teenage self made me smile even though I was tempted to judge her mild disinterest in paragraphs, crossing out words instead of erasing them and other minor mistakes. The essay is informed by a feminist viewpoint and an empathic understanding for all the characters, even Creon, who my younger self concludes might be the most tragic figure of all. Antigone’s courage and endurance seem to have certainly made an impression on her, but she also empathizes with and understands Ismene’s stance. Morales writes that the story of Antigone is “one of the most meaningful for feminism and for revolutionary politics.  She has become an icon of resistance. Of pitting personal conviction against state law. Of speaking truth to power. Antigone insists on burying her brother Polynices, who has been killed while fighting against her city, Thebes, even though her uncle Creon, who is ruler of Thebes, expressly forbids the burial and will impose the death penalty for her defiance. Antigone, just a child of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, stands up to a powerful adult, even when her sister won’t and when the citizens of Thebes are too afraid to do so. Antigone also challenges male authority, in the face of Creon’s insistence that women are inferior to men and that men should rule over them. She is vulnerable and terrorized, but she breaks the law anyway……She risks everything for a cause that she believes in and refuses to be cowed either by powerful politicians or by what anyone else thinks. The spirit of Antigone lives on in any women who does this in any small or big way….” Some contemporary young Antigones mentioned in the book are young girls like Greta Thunberg, who went on strike from school to protest outside the parliament or Malala Yousafzai, who campaigned for the rights of girls to be educated, even though it was dangerous to break the law.

Antigone breaks the law even though she is aware of the consequences when she alone buries her brother who is an enemy of the state and defies her uncle Creon, the king of Thebes, who orders that she be buried alive in a tomb. When Creon has a change of heart after the wise old man Teiresias tells him that his actions have been immoral, it is too late. Antigone has hung herself inside the cave and Haemon, who is Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, kills himself, which then leads his mother Queen Eurydice to commit suicide. Death all around. Morales notes that there’s a strand of nihilism in Sophocle’s play that we would do well to reject. She writes: “Creon is left a broken man, but at what cost? As a script for successful activism, this story leaves quite a bit to be desired.” She also points to themes like Antigone’s lack of support and her single-mindedness, which can breed extremism and can be destructive.

Sophocle’s Antigone is one version of this myth, but myths have throughout time been re-imagined and re-told. Artists and writers have sometimes changed the stories, and in doing so Morales says they have subverted the myths (false ideas and beliefs) too. She writes: “the creative adaptations of myth— the stories, videos, images, and novels that present radically different perspectives— are more than individual contestations: they amount to a formidable cultural trend. This was always the case: rewriting myth from different perspectives goes back to antiquity……The Antigone myth is a good example of this. Euripides’s play about Antigone, which no longer survives, almost certainly revised Sophocles’s tragedy and allowed Antigone and Haemon to get married and have a baby son. Scholars’ educated guesses, based on later summaries of the play, envisage wildly different endings for Antigone and her family. Perhaps Creon tracked them down, recognized them, and had them killed. Perhaps the hero Hercules intervened, and they all lived happily after, an ending that would have allowed Antigone to rebel against Creon’s authoritarianism and to have a future. Even more shocking is the likelihood that in Euripides’s version of the myth Haemon helped Antigone to bury her brother. She did not act alone. The possibility of Antigone taking collaborative action is also raised in an exquisite modern adaptation of the myth…..”

So at the end of this longish post I’d like to say that stories matter. Stories have been used to disempower and malign, but they can also be used to inspire and liberate, to build empathy and compassion, to repair and restore respect. The re-reading and re-imagining of old stories can be transformative.

** Helen Morales holds the Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, taught previously at the University of Cambridge, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in DC.