For Aristotle, Poetics: Can you say what actions in Sophocles’ Antigone might lead, in Aristotle’s view, to the catharsis of the play’s audience?
What will be an ideal response?
When catharsis is applied to drama, it is not the tragic hero who undergoes catharsis, but the audience. The audience’s experience of catharsis is an experience of change, just as change always accompanies understanding. In the theater, what moves the audience to change is its experience of the universality of the human condition—what it is that makes us human, our weaknesses as well as our strengths.
There are a number of actions in Antigone that could lead to an audience’s catharsis. In the opening scene, Antigone defends her right to bury her brother, and this willful act, which she then performs in defiance of Creon’s authority, leads to the tragedy that follows. Antigone herself is blindly dedicated to her duty to honor her family, and her actions in the play have been the subject of endless debate. Some readers think that she is far too hard on Ismene, and certainly a Greek audience would have found her defiance of male authority shocking. Nevertheless, her strength of conviction seems to many—especially modern audiences—wholly admirable.
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