insistent closeness

In an overly thorough exploration of Antigone, George Steiner dedicates over 300 pages to interpretation of Sophocles' classic text. It strikes me as appalling and somewhat ironic that, in all of his detailed attempts at complete understanding of Antigone, he dedicates a mere half a paragraph to George Eliot's deeply insightful interpretation. His brief mention of Eliot leaves readers with a sense that he understands her interpretation as too personal and not sufficiently scholarly enough for his scholarly text, "Indeed, George Eliot read the Sophoclean text as possessing an insistent closeness to her own most absolute concerns". One sentence later, and Steiner has moved on to "more academic" theories on Antigone, ignorantly overlooking the fact that Eliot's intimate connection to the text could be a more useful tool than all the hundreds of other insights, drawn from the male experience, that he so highly values in Antigones.In my opinion, Eliot should have been Steiner's primary resource for a thorough understanding of Antigone. The 'insistent closeness' that Steiner so easily disregards as an overly emotional way to analyze literature, could have served as his clearest insight into the Sophocles's main character. How can one expect to thoroughly understand a text centered around a woman, by analyzing interpretations created predominantly from male perspectives? Eliot's 1856 review of Antigone exposes textual intricacies that are largely ignored in all of Steiner's research. Her personal connection to the text is overwhelmingly apparent in her fictional work The Mill on the Floss, in which the main characters, Maggie and Tom, are modeled after Antigone and Creon. Through intertextuality, Eliot illuminates insights into Antigone that are otherwise overlooked in Steiner's Antigones.Perhaps the most riveting aspect of Eliot's Mill and 1856 review of Antigone is her reoccur ant deemphasis of the story's external circumstances. For Eliot, the immediate reality of Antigone's situation is secondary to the way in which it influences and reflects the character's more crucial inward "agon" or battle. Eliot's central theme in The Mill, which is also indicative of her understanding of Anitgone, reflects, "that struggle between elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully being brought into harmony with his inward needs" (Essays, p. 264). In this way she reestablishes Antigone's enduring relevance as a means to understand the eternal human struggle for reconciliation between personal desires, filiel obligation, and sociopolitical duty.