A Blonde's Revenge: the character of Ismene in Lot Vekemans' Sister of (2005)

A Blonde's Revenge: the character of Ismene in Lot Vekemans' Sister of (2005)

Abstract

While Jean Anouilh’s rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone marks the first time the heroine’s sister is explicitly depicted as « blond » (Anouilh, 1946), the topos of Ismene’s blondness has a longer history. From the 19th century on, pictorial representations of Œdipus’ daughters have had a tendency to oppose a blonde and sensual Ismene to a brown-haired and stern Antigone. In doing so, they merely transpose into visual terms a dichotomy which already shapes the Sophoclean hypotext. In the gendered economy of Sophoclean tragedy, Ismene’s docile and conventional femininity constitutes a model of normality that sets the background against which Antigone’s tragic heroism stands out. Like Chrysothemis (whose name means “the golden one”), and for her femininity as much as for her self-effacement, Ismene can be considered as a “blonde” of the tragic corpus (Steiner, 1984). As tactless and anachronistic as it may appear, this metaphor which combines the most stereotypical femininity with flatness and self-effacement, is, in fact, remarkably suited to describe the type of femininity embodied by Sophocles’ Ismene.

The various rewritings of Antigone that have explored the character of Ismene over the last decades are all faced, to a varying degree, with this stereotyped and minoritized femininity, which they deconstruct, subvert or positively reinvest. This contribution offers an analysis of a recent example of the literary revaluation of Ismene, Sister of, a monologue by Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans (2005). Attempting to move beyond the insult or caricature which the epithet “blonde” can imply, this essay turns it into a hermeneutic tool and explores the connotations of Ismene’s “blondness” (a normed femininity, a relative and relational femininity, and a sensual femininity) as well as the ways in which Vekemans’ rewriting recaptures this feminine imaginary, while simultaneously inflecting it.

Key-words 

• tragedy
• Antigone
• Ismene
• Sophocles
• comparative literature
• contemporary theater
• femininity
• gender
• monologue
• heroism