Antigone v. Heat and Dust
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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
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ncountered by the narrator in contemporary times. Both Olivia and the narrator are pitted against this clash of cultures and values, but it is a choice they make of their free will. The narrator is on a quest to find out about Olivia as much as a quest to discover herself. Both women rejected the culture and values of their native land for those of India. All she has is Olivia's letters, "I have laid Olivia's letters out on my little desk and work on them and this journal throughout the morning" (Jhabvala 48). What the narrator ultimately discovers is that she wishes to remain in this complex and different culture like Olivia. However, the best one can do is perhaps merge with the culture not become of it. We see this expressed in the way that wandering Westerners come to India in search of some higher answer that is not forthcoming. Symbolically, this is expressed when an English boy, Chid, has a scene with an emotional Indian woman, "Ritu began to scream the way she had done that night. Chid opened his eyes, looked at her, then shut them again and went on chanting. They both got louder-like communicants of two rival sects, each trying to prove the superiority of his faith by outshouting the other" (Jhabvala 81).
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Approximate Word count = 2103
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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