To determine whether Antigone in Sophocles' tragedy Antigone and whether Olivia and a modern descendant of her family in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust are "heroic," one must define a working definition of heroic. In Aristotle's Poetics, the philosopher maintains that the "tragic hero" is one whose action "consists of a chain of events set in motion by the hero, through his 'error of frailty' (hamartia), resulting in a reversal (peripeteia) of his fortunes, a 'change by which the action veers round to its opposite' leading him to a recognition (anagnorisis), 'a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune' and striking 'pity and fear' into the audience" (Guidelines 3). In contrast, the modern view of a hero is an individual who engages in self-sacrificing behavior that demands significant courage. In this sense, from the tragic definition of the heroic, only Antigone is a hero, but using the modern sense of the concept all three women count as heroes.
Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, a tragic hero brought to his fall by hubris. Sophocles' tragedy Antigone focuses on the battle between King Creon, who replaced Oedipus as ruler of Thebes, and Antigone. Creon has declared that, as an enemy of the state, Antigone's brother Polyneices shall not be buried. This outrageous Antigone's moral sense and she defies Creon's law and buries her brother. Antigone meets one of the qualifications for the tragic hero in that she is of noble birth. When she tells her sister Ismene that Creon has condemned to death anyone who buries Polyneices, she says to her: "Thou knowest it now; and thou wilt soon show whether thou art nobly bred, or the base daughter of a noble line" (Sophocles 442 BCE).
In Heat and Dust, neither Olivia nor her granddaughter narrator are of noble birth but they are of the upper classes. They are heroi...