Electra

Euripides’s Electra is an ambivalent figure. She is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and the sister of Orestes. When the tragedy was performed, she was probably played by the actor known as the Protagonist, or “First Actor.” From the beginning of the play, Electra revels in playing the victim, boasting as she goes about her domestic chores, “I chose this slavery myself / to demonstrate to the gods Aegisthus’ outrageousness” (57-58), calls attention to her “body wasted and dry” (239) and her head “razor-cropped like a victim of the Scythians” (241), and laments lyrically of her and her family’s misfortunes.

There is something consistently performative about Electra’s grief, which is always self-directed above all else. Indeed, when Electra confronts her mother it is not the murder of her father or the exile of her brother that she throws in her face, but her own suffering:

You threw me out of home like a war captive;

and with my home destroyed, then I too was destroyed,

as they are too—left dark, lonely, and fatherless. (1008-10)

Underlying Electra’s resentment of her mother is a deep-seated sexual jealousy that on several occasions even becomes explicit. On multiple occasions Electra laments her married-in-name-only (and virginal) state—the Farmer never touches her, respecting her superior rank—while contrasting her unchaste mother, who “breeds new children in Aegisthus’ bed” (62), or who: