Is Antigone a tragic hero?

You know how to identify an epic hero, but a tragic hero had a very different journey. Aristotle in Poetics described a tragic hero as having the following traits:

• A tragic hero is a noble, grand, "better than the average" (but still believable and lifelike) person who we can all look up to as a model of virtue. They unerringly WANT to do the right thing, but...

• A tragic hero isn't perfect. He or she contains a fatal flaw, a hamartia, which leads a hero to take things just a little too far. The most common (but certainly not the only) hamartia is hubris or excessive pride and over-confidence.

• Anyway, this flaw leads to a major disaster (peripeteia) which results in both the hero and society being somehow damaged. And the disaster IS at least partially, the hero's own fault, and he or she knows it. This is the anagnorisis... the point at which every tragic hero goes, "Crap, I can't believe I caused that." No lightening bolt or villian lurking in the corner or piece of bad luck brought the whole world tumbling--the hero did. However....

• The punishment really goes overboard! A tragic hero gets our sympathy because he or she is a genuinely good person who wanted to do good things, but the consequences for screwing up make us cringe (think Oedipus jabbing out his own eyes... ewwwwwwwwwwww).

• The last one is a little harder to define because Aristotle talked about the response in the reader. Back in the day, theater wasn't about just entertainment--Greeks saw it as a way to allow people to feel and release negative feelings, a little like the world's biggest group therapy session. He believed the final and true mark of an tragic hero was the ability to evoke a catharsis--a washing away of negative emotions. To him, a character only qualified if he aroused so much pity and fear and dread that the audience got totally wrapped up in the character, and then, as the character was punished and accepted the punishment and sometimes even tried to still help despite being punished, the audience could release those negative emotions and walk away feeling sympathy. Pity and fear are gone.

Okay, so now you have the basics, so is Antigone a tragic hero?

Pick a side, any side, but make sure you can defend yourself. You will include four paragraphs. You have a couple of different patterns you can use.

1. The basic pattern...

2. In the second pattern, three paragraphs are the same, but the rebuttal is different.

Audience: Your teacher
Format: Handwritten (no typing allowed)
Style: Full style analysis required (Basic and Higher-level)!
Length: Two pages maximum
Presentation: Neat, in pen, one side of the paper

Logical Evidence and Fallacies
Structure of an Argument Paper
Ms. Cannaday's Grammar Page
Style Analysis
Purdue OWL on grammar, punctuation, and spelling
Grammar Slammer

"R E S P E C T—Find out what it means to me," sang one famous singer. Through the years, women have had to fight for respect, and that fight goes back to the days of Homer and Greek gods and epic poems. In The Odyssey, women don't have the same power as men, but women aren't as powerless as they appear. A careful reader should see that women in Greek tragedy influence the world.

Many women in the book wield far more power than the average character. At first, Penelope may seem like a simple housewife, but she is a woman running a kingdom all alone. Her husband is missing, her son is too young for anyone to take him seriously, and her father-in-law has turned to plowing fields all day long. Despite the lack of male leadership, the wineskins keep appearing, servants prepare food, shepherds bring animals to the palace for slaughter, and all of the encroaching suitors are fed. A woman leads this well-run kingdom, and she does it while actively tricking the men who want to marry her. Even more significantly, the goddesses hold far more power over Odyessus' life than the gods. Mythology places Zeus and Poseidon at the top of the food chain as far as gods are concerned; however, Poseidon's anger can't overcome Athena's protection of Odysseus as her favored hero. A woman hides Odysseus' identity when he comes home to his palace, a woman goes to Zeus to argue for freeing Odysseus, a woman fishes him out of the ocean, and a woman escorts him into city of the Phaeacians. Clearly, women do have power.

Now some people think the punishments that women suffer prove their lack of power. Um, NO! Odysseus and Telemachos do unfairly punish the unfaithful servants. After all, strangling them for having affairs would be like capital punishment for shoplifting from Walmart. Telemachos even hates that they have feelings and desires and hopes of their own. However, Telemachos' anger focuses on the fact that, as slaves, they should have served their mistress above all else. He accuses them of forgetting their place and sinning against his family, who took them in and taught them their skills. In fact their punishment, as harsh as it was, seemed fairly similar to the rude beggar who got his jaw broken by Odysseus for breaking the rules of hospitality. Unlike the suitors who died quickly by the sword, he was crippled and thrown out, and in this time period, that's as good as a death sentence--a slow, agonizing, brutal death sentence. This story doesn't show women disrespected for their gender; it shows slaves disrespected for their lack of choice.

So, clearly women do have power in this story. They know what R E S P E C T means—it means influencing the world and saving Odysseus' arrogant behind over and over again. Rather than looking for sexism here, maybe girls should read this story and realize that any can change the world—gender is not an obstacle.