Abstract

In the preface to the 1853 first edition of his poems, Matthew Arnold claimed that it was no longer possible to be interested in the quarrel staged in Antigone. He found the conflict between a sister’s duty to bury her brother and a king’s insistence on obedience to the laws of the state passé.1 Living in an age in which souls mattered more than bodies, and in a time when mass graves filled with murdered and mutilated bodies were not part of the landscape, it was possible to find this fuss over an unburied, rotting body a bit overdone. Not living in an age in which dehumanization took the form of destroying bodily integrity, he could miss the fact that the stakes of the play concerned the..