Antigona Furiosa Analysis

As the novelist Haruki Murakami wrote, “Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts” (12). A work of literature is imperfect in the sense that it is more or less related to and restricted by the social context in which it is written and is a memory-carrier of its own culture. Sophocles’ Attic tragedy Antigone carries memories of sociopolitical concerns over the future development and fertility of the city Athens. Similarly, Antigona Furiosa by Griselda Gambaro, which is one of its adaptations, or, creative rewritings, responds to the genocidal Dirty War in Argentina. Both plays center around the eponymous heroine’s desire to bury her brother’s body regardless of the prohibition of the law. Specifically, in Antigona Furiosa, the heroine, Antigona, metonymically represents Madres de la Plaza de Mayo who aims to recover the bodies of their children inhumanely executed during the Dirty War. Many of their bodies were lost and have not been returned. In fact, differing from Sophocles’ Antigone, …show more content…
In the original Antigone, this line is uttered by Creon’s son Haemon who aims to persuade his father to “learn from others when they speak good sense” and listen to others’ good counsels (217). To compare, this same line is instead uttered by Antígona. This self-conscious citation is a parody and demonstration of the sarcasm of power politics of the military regime. Besides, from the perspective of feminism, the fact that this “masterly saying” is uttered by a female figure is significant in that it inverts traditional gender ideology of women in the minds of those in the audience and alludes to the fact that it is the Madres who emerge from their traditional family roles and constitute the primary social actors in the national