The story of how Orestes returned from exile to avenge his father’s death by killing his mother Clytemnestra and her paramour-become-husband Aegisthus was already celebrated in the Odyssey more than two hundred years before Sophocles. There is, however, no Electra there, and it is most likely that she was put on the mythical map by Aeschylus in the second play of his Oresteia trilogy of 458 bc.1 This was regarded as his masterpiece and clearly continued to be very well known after his death. Electra is, however, secondary to Orestes in Aeschylus; she drops out of the play after the first half, and plays no direct part in the killings or their aftermath. Sophocles is very different. In Euripides’ Electra, which we also have, she and Orestes are together most of the time, and have more or less equal roles:2 in Sophocles she is by herself the central role.
Electra is, in fact, the only surviving Sophocles play which is dominated by a woman character throughout.3 There are, of course, other powerful female roles—Iocasta, Antigone, Deianeira—but only Electra is on-stage and the centre of attention for almost the entire play. The prologue introduces her brother, Orestes, but he is then off-stage for a thousand lines, while Electra remains there throughout. On one level the play may be seen as a study in the shifting sequence of emotions and states of mind that she goes through as the story develops, a ‘roller-coaster’ of impulses and responses.
In the first two-fifths of the play (lines 86–660) she starts from unflagging grief and resentment, tinged with disappointment about Orestes, and then moves through disdain for her sister, then argumentative confrontation with her mother, mixed with disgust at her sexual relationship with Aegisthus. In the next two-fifths (lines 661–1230) the news (false) of the death of Orestes produces immediate defiance out of her grief; and, provoked by her sister’s resignation, she determines to face her own death in order to carry through revenge single-handed. Next, with the urn of Orestes’ ashes (false) she reaches a new depth of grief. Her lament over the urn (1126–70) is generally regarded as the high spot, the most moving and memorable scene, of the play. Rather as the tragedy as a whole persuades the audience to experience the story as though it were real, so Electra—in a sort of ‘play within a play’—persuades the audience temporarily that Orestes is dead, even though he is standing there.
In the last fifth of the play (lines 1230–1510) Electra is abruptly swept to the opposite extreme of overwhelming joy and jubilation. And in the final revenge sequence there is a complex overlapping sequence of emotions. She holds a grimly sardonic dialogue with her mother’s death-cries, showing no trace of any softening or regret; then she plays cat-and-mouse with the hoodwinked Aegisthus. Finally she urges Orestes that he must not allow Aegisthus any chance to employ his argumentative talents (further on this dialogue see p. 134 below). Her last words show no softening or relaxation whatsoever (1487–90):
No, kill him quick.
And after killing him, consign him to the buriers
who are right for him, well out of sight from us.4
For me this is the only way for him
to make amends for all his past of wrongs.
It is revealing to trace the way that these emotional responses are embodied in theatrical enactment through the use of stage space. In Electra it is far more than a mere convention that the action is set outside the doors of the background building—‘this, the palace of the dynasty of Pelops, rich in blood’, as it is described at the start (10). It is crucial to Electra’s stand that she displays her defiance in public, discrediting the ruling regime, as she vigorously denounces her father’s killers. She sees herself when she is indoors as a mere prisoner, a menial, while out in the light of day she can be a thorn in Aegisthus’ side. It transpires that he even has plans to shut her away, princess though she may be, in a subterranean cavern (378 ff.). Everything is changed, though, by the news of Orestes’ death. Now she vows that she will never go into the house again, even if it means death (817–21):
This I declare: I never more shall share
a roof with them, not ever. I shall lie down friendless
by this doorway here, and waste my life away.
If any of those people there inside
becomes incensed by this, then let them kill me.
When her sister Chrysothemis goes tamely indoors, Electra reiterates that she will never follow her in (1052). This theme of exclusion from the house gives extra power to her address to the urn, which she regards as the dead Orestes’ home, almost as if Hades were inside it. She sent him away from the palace at Mycene, she laments, only to receive him back in the urn (1165–7):
So now please let me in,
receive me into this, your home,
the nothing-me into your nothing-place,
so I may dwell with you below for all of time.
Once the truth emerges, everything is changed, of course, and Electra does eventually go inside at line 1383 with full confidence. But this is only shortly before the final revenge, and soon she re-emerges with the task of looking out for the approach of Aegisthus. Once he arrives, she manipulates him until he is fully in the trap, and then urges Orestes to get on with killing him quickly—her last lines in the play (quoted above). She goes inside with the others at the end, but by then the future significance of the house has been put in question. Has it seen the last of the troubles of the dynasty of Pelops, or are there more to come? This question is inextricably tied up with the entire ethical interpretation of the play
The rights and wrongs of Sophocles’ Electra, and the responses to characters and situations which are indivisible from such ethical issues, have produced a fundamental split among critics. While there may be gradations and variations, there has been fundamentally a division between two ‘schools’, those who find that the play supports and endorses the justice of the claims of Orestes and Electra, and those who find that those claims are seriously flawed, or even condemned.
The former school might be called ‘purifiers’, and they maintain that this is a play of righteous revenge; that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus get what they deserve; and that the children will, as they and the chorus hope, resettle their heritage and live there happily ever after. For them the end of the play finally puts an end to the blood-stained and treacherous history of the royal dynasty.5 The other school, the ‘contaminators’, find the claims of Orestes and Electra riddled with flaws, stained by warning signals that this is far from the end of the dynasty’s troubles. They detect cracks in the arguments deployed by the pair in their defence; and they point to the recurrent allusions to the Erinyes (‘Furies’, see the note on lines 110–12), who in the Aeschylean version pursued Orestes after the matricide. But their case rests above all on the final scenes of the play, which will be discussed more fully below.
The whole tendency of critical, cultural, and political thought in the last thirty years and more has run against simple stances on matters of power and authority in favour of complication, subversion, and irony. This means that the purifying position has become increasingly less acceptable, and it would now be generally agreed to be untenably naïve. This still leaves the extent and degree of contamination open to discriminating gradation. Thus, although some contaminators find discoloration from the start, there is little during the first five hundred lines of the play that can be claimed to be clearly detrimental against Orestes or Electra. Her utterly uncompromising concentration on revenge for her father might be regarded as obsessive according to some modern values, but it is presented as loyally filial.
It is in the scene with her mother Clytemnestra (516–659) that cracks in Electra’s casing of bravery and virtue begin to emerge. Neither of them comes out well from their contest of arguments, and both have weaknesses exposed. Thus, Electra effectively attacks Clytemnestra’s claim that her sole motive was to punish Agamemnon for his sacrifice of Iphigeneia by pointing to her conspiratorial adultery with Aegisthus. On the other hand Electra’s defence of her father for the sacrifice is far from cogent. And when she warns her mother (lines 580–3) that the ‘rule’ of calling for death in payment for death will rebound on her, this must then apply to herself as well. And there is the recurrent motif of ‘like mother, like daughter’, which reflects on Electra as badly as it does on Clytemnestra. Electra herself does not deny the faults that she has learned from her (605–9):
And so denounce me, if you like, to one and all
as bad . . . or as foul-mouthed,
or utterly without a sense of shame.
Because, if I’ve been born with talents
in exploits like these, then I do justice to the traits
I have inherited from you.
The emergence of this element of inherited corruption had already been given some ominous preparation in the choral song immediately before the Clytemnestra scene. After a pair of stanzas that are implicitly in favour of Electra’s stand, a final stanza at lines 503–15 suddenly and unexpectedly goes back three generations to Pelops, the founder of the dynasty that includes both Electra and Aegisthus (for more details see note on 503–15). Pelops had won his wife by deceitfully killing her father; and he had then repaid his agent, the charioteer Myrtilus, by killing him too. Since that time, the chorus sing (513–15):
this house has never been safe
free of calamitous strife.
So an idea is planted here. It is not, however, followed through in the central scenes of the play, and only re-surfaces towards the end. Again it is the chorus who raise the disquieting note. At lines 1397 ff. Electra is outside keeping guard while Clytemnestra is killed indoors. The mother’s plea to Orestes for pity rings out, and Electra dismisses it with scorn, but the chorus’ response in lines 1413–14 is ambivalent. Soon after, when Electra has urged Orestes ‘Be strong: strike twice as hard!’, the chorus have a snatch of more ominous lyric about how the dead are drinking the blood of their killers, which starts with the words ‘The curses now begin their work . . .’ (1416). The ‘curses’ are plural; this is not an end to them, but a continuation. This is only one hint of the underside, and from here on the whole situation becomes much darker. Once Aegisthus has fallen into the trap and realizes that he is facing his killer, Electra warns her brother not to let him talk—and her alarm is fully justified by what Aegisthus does manage to say in the last twenty lines.
When Orestes tells him to get inside, Aegisthus asks why, if this killing is such a good thing, it needs to be done ‘in the dark’. Orestes’ response that he wants to kill him where he had killed his father does not totally cancel out the allusion to darkness. And then Aegisthus comes out with a truly chilling question (1497–8):
Is it inevitable that this house should witness
all the horrors of the dynasty of Pelops,
both those present and to come?
Not only does he recall that this is the house of Pelops ‘rich in blood’, but he stirs up the idea that its troubles are both present and future. Orestes does not—and perhaps cannot—challenge this threat of the future; instead he simply validates the present. When this invocation of what is yet to come intrudes so near the end of the play, the purifying interpretation surely becomes impossible to maintain without qualification. At the very least there is a shadow of contamination cast over the ‘triumph’ of Orestes and Electra.
While the extent and emphasis of the ‘contamination’ in the rest of the play is open to debate, what seems clear beyond reasonable question is that there is a cluster of disquieting factors during the final Aegisthus scene. And even more telling than the question about ‘the horrors . . . to come’ is the way that the play ends with Aegisthus still alive, not yet killed by Orestes. This ‘unfinished death’ is unique in surviving Greek tragedy, and it must have struck audiences as very strange. Elsewhere death scenes within the time-span of the narrative are always completed, and are nearly always followed by some kind of revelation or aftermath, often lamentation with or without justification or recrimination.
The most obvious comparison and contrast is with Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where after the killings Orestes stands over the bodies and justifies his act, only to be pursued by the gathering Erinyes. There is then the whole third play of the trilogy which manages to reach some kind of resolution from the impasse. In Euripides’ Electra both the killings are completed well before the end of the play. First, the body of Aegisthus is brought on and reviled by Electra; and then, after the killing of their mother, there is protracted remorse felt by the two children, so grim that not even Castor and Pollux, as ‘gods from the machine’, can impose a happy ending.
So what is the significance of the way that the death of Aegisthus is not completed before the ending of the play? It seems to me that the answer to this must be that the question of aftermath is also left unfinished, unanswered. Will Orestes and Electra succeed in occupying their ancestral heritage in peace? Or will there be future horrors for the dynasty of Pelops? Are there Erinyes waiting to pounce, as in Aeschylus? Will there be future unspecified trials and tribulations? Purifiers have tried to push the answers one way and contaminators the other. But what the play itself does is to postpone any answer. The future remains uncertain and the audience is left in suspense.
This punishment should fall upon all those
who want to act outside the laws: yes, death.
Then criminality would not be rife.
It is, however, pretty hard to defend them as authentic—see note on 1505–7.