The House of Oedipus and its significance in Antigone

Sophocles’ Antigone is one of the most widely read and frequently performed Greek tragedies today, as it was in antiquity. The play’s reflections on the clashes between state and family, public and private, law and custom, authority and freedom, male and female have captured the imagination of generations of readers and scholars since antiquity. These themes are as relevant today as they were when the play was composed, and debate surrounding them has never subsided. For all their richness, however, discussions surrounding this complex tragedy have all too often reduced the play to the judgement of two personalities, Antigone and Creon. 

Thinking about the clashes and the dilemmas that unfold in the Antigone while reading the play as a mere text is very different from engaging with it as the performative entity that it was conceived to be. In Greek theatre – as in all theatre – it is not only the words of the characters that should be understood to produce meaning; equally significant is the meaning produced through performance. The meaning conveyed by the symbolic characterisation of the spaces in which chorus and characters move and with which interact, and the ways that the images they use are mapped on the theatrical space cannot be conveyed through text alone. All these performative elements offer a deeper, richer and more refined meaning to characters’ words, and significantly enhance the complexity of the play. 

The dramatic action of Antigone takes place in front of the Schematic reconstruction of the space of the theatre of Dionysus at the time of the production of Sophocles’ Antigone. A wooden stage-building of considerable dimensions formed the backdrop of every play. palace of Thebes, the house of the royal Theban family, the Labdacids, the most famous member of which was Oedipus. In performance, the house (represented by the theatre’s stage-building, the skene; see figure) does not function as a mere backdrop, nor is it a space with a representational function only. Rather, it is something which carries a much richer symbolic meaning, a space that evokes the tragic history of the Labdacid family and serves to haunt the characters from the beginning to the end. It is a space that hides terrible memories of murder, incest, self-mutilation and suicide in its darkness, and reflects the history of a family that is plagued by inescapable flaws and their terrible consequences. 

And as if the stage presence of this space, with its significant dimensions, is not impactful enough, the characters and the chorus refer to it repeatedly, serving to bring it to life in the minds of the audience. 

Furthermore, in the play the house is spoken of as a space that conceals a power which the Greeks understood as having both a psychological dimension and a powerful association with the supernatural: namely, an Erinys/Fury, a Curse: 

From ancient times I see the troubles of the dead

of the Labdacid house falling hard upon one another, 

nor does one generation release another, 

but some one of the gods shatters them, 

and they have no means of deliverance. 

For lately the light spread out above the last root in the house of Oedipus; 

it too is mown down by the bloody chopper of the infernal gods, 

folly in speech and the Erinys of the mind. (Soph. Antigone 594-604) 

These words are part of the song that the chorus performs at the first climactic scene of the play, immediately after the clash between Creon and Antigone, which results in the latter being sentenced to be buried alive, and the house-arrest of the two sisters. Albeit shifting and convoluted, the imagery of this passage constructs an extraordinarily rich picture of the Labdacid house and the destructive force that plagues it. The song reflects on what the audience had earlier on through the alarmed words of Ismene and the chorus members, namely the details of the family’s history. The most shocking part of it, is of course, the story of Oedipus, Antigone’s father. Once a powerful king and hailed as saviour of Thebes, Oedipus discovered that he had in fact murdered his father Laius, slept with his mother Jocasta and had children with her. At the realisation of these unwitting crimes, Jocasta killed herself in the house, with Oedipus subsequently taking his own life (in this play). But the wheels for the tragic events had been set in motion a generation earlier, with Laius’ falling out of favour with the divine and bringing a ‘Curse’ upon the family. This lasting effect of the Curse can be seen as late as the recent mutual killing of Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, who turned on each other over the rule of Thebes. 

What was this Curse, however, that caused so many members of the family such tragic suffering? Was it something that operated independently of the characters? Were the characters, including Oedipus, just passive victims of it? Not exactly: a force like a Curse in Greek tragedy operates both on a psychological and on a supernatural level, and these are not mutually exclusive. 

In tragic texts, Curses are usually attributed to families and are physically located in the house of those families. In this sense, the dark interior space of the Labdacid palace looms large in the background. In this way, the psychopathology of a family, that inner power that pervades its members generation after generation and both pushes them to their actions, but also ensures the punishments they suffer, is captured by that highly significant space – the house. The best examples of this dramatic effect are two works of Aeschylus, the Oresteia and the (now incompletely surviving) trilogy which contained the Seven Against Thebes and which drew on the same mythic cycle as Sophocles’ Antigone. In both of these works, the house has a huge significance and it is important that in composing Antigone, Sophocles has drawn on, and alluded to, both. In these trilogies, the power of the Curse/Fury pervades both the house and the characters’ minds. Aeschylean dramaturgy makes the interiors of house and the inner world of the characters mirror each other in more ways than one. Thus, the house’s constant looming presence in the background and the characters’ interaction with it serve to inform the way that we understand the characters. 

What does this mean for Antigone and the eponymous heroine? It is no secret that in the play it is not only Creon’s tyrannical behaviour that is disturbing, but also, as generations of scholars have pointed out, Antigone’s own behaviour, which tends to excess. Her aims are noble, but her manner and the degree of her passion betray something deeply problematic. For all that we sympathise with the heroine, and for all that we see that her aims are noble, we cannot easily escape suggestions – including the choral reflections above – that a destructive power dwells inside her. 

Understanding the importance of the house that looms in the background, the space that contains a most disturbing family history, can help us to shift our criteria from psychological realism (which does not really do justice to this play, and nor does it do to any Greek tragedy) to something more complex and more subtle. In many ways, the house embodies the very spirit of the Labdacid family, their psychopathology, the metaphorical and supernatural curse that pervades them, and tragically, drives them to destruction even when their aims are noble.

Note by the set design team:

In this production, the house of the Labdacids has been rendered as an oppressive space that weighs heavily over the members of the family, trapping them (both metaphorically and physically) in an ever perpetuating cycle of loss and death. Furthermore, its shape evokes a tomb, playing on, and accentuating, the irony that Antigone is sent to an offstage tomb to die. The real deadly space, however, that looms in the play is the spatial heart of the family that they so tragically try to preserve, but also so tragically drive to destruction – the house.