Fascism on Stage: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone

Abstract This chapter analyses Jean Anouilh's Antigone and the controversy of the Nazi appropriation of Greek mythology. It uses the particular history of the play to highlight the ethical complexity of reception and its relationship to feminism. Antigone has long been recalled to vocalise the most powerful of personal and social politics. Alongside Antigone's noble and famous history of valiant confrontation runs another, decidedly less salubrious, narrative. Antigone's symbolic value has also been used to justify the most pernicious element of Nazism, the ideology of racial purity and superiority; she has stood for an anti-democratic and autocratic monarchism. Indeed, she has been depicted as the epitome of the fascist heroine, even as few, if any, are concerned with Antigone's lapse into fascism. The history of Anouilh's Antigone throws into stark relief the potentially complicated or dual nature of ‘reception studies’ and their relationship to feminism and classical mythology. Ultimately, its reception history has prevailed.