Suspending Spheres, Suspending Disbelief: Hegel’s Antigone, Craik’s Crimea, Woolf’s Three Guineas

Abstract

This chapter examines the capacity of suspended spheres to help figure otherwise mysterious acts of political, intellectual, historical denial. Building on Bonnie Honig's critique of current democratic theory's willingness to accept what she terms the “Antigone effect,” it considers what histories of evasion might help explain current democratic theorists' apparent willingness to keep positioning Antigone as heroic figure for femininity's relations to the State, without ever asking about Antigone's slaves. The chapter analyzes two texts,G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, as well as Dinah Mulock Craik's Crimean War poems, to identify forms of analysis that might help expose and denaturalize the allure of suspending spheres, the satisfactions of continuing to pretend that race plays no role within the maintenance of even the most abstract “State-free zones.” Finally, it shows how sentimental poetry can be employed to articulate the workings of a spatialized trope of separate spheres.