I have concentrated on reading the Sophocles version and the
translation I have worked with is that of Hugh Lloyd Jones (Loeb Classical
Library – Harvard 1994). It is clear that the dramatist has focussed all the
serious attention on Electra in this version.
Electra seems more fleshed out than the Aeschylus incarnation taking
centre stage but also with very human flaws and ambiguities – it’s not all
black and white and this could be said of the other characters too, particularly
the pietas scenes of and libation prayer to Apollo of Clytemnestra l.634 ff.
But the paradox at
the heart of this depiction is that she is a rebel but apparently one
supporting male values. She is a transgressor but in the end all this wild
flouting of a woman’s traditional role results in nothing more than resuming
her place in the house of Atreus as a potential noble wife. Could she be both
at the same time and be a satisfying character to an ancient audience? Or is
this Sophocles playing with female emancipatory urges within the secure trope
of the male heir (Orestes) resuming the reins of control and order in the end?
The play opens with Orestes and the Old Slave arriving in
Argos in the early hours. The purpose of this interchange is to introduce the
plan of faking Orestes death in a chariot race (a significant literary and
mythic echo of the death of Myrtilus) and announcing it to the palace while he
and Pylades his faithful sidekick prepare to kill Clytemnestra and Aegsithus
while disguised as urn bearers of Orestes’ ashes. Orestes then leaves the stage
not to reappear until the end – from now on the action focusses upon Electra
and her transgressive acts of mourning and plans for revenge.
The chorus of Argive women are initially neutral and react
cautiously to Electra’s outbursts of grief countering her transgressive
outbursts by warning her that excessive mourning is inappropriate. The metre of
anapaestic dimeter lends a chanting marching even drum-like warning to their
words:
l.233-235 ‘all’oun eunoia g’audo
mater hosei tis pista
me/tik/tein s’a/tan a/ta/is
‘Well, I speak as a well-wisher
Like a mother-in-law in whom
You can have trust, telling you
Not
to create misery by means of misery’
However, they gradually warm to her cause and end up
endorsing her acts outrageous as they are. Electra justifies her excessive
mourning as an expression of respect and ‘pietas’ to the unjustly slain dead
(her father Agamemnon). She also bewails her lot as having lost her rightful
place as a noble woman in the palace of Argos.
The chorus plays an
interesting intermediary role or referee between Electra and her sister Chrysothemis
who portrays the obedient daughter willing to compromise as a survival strategy
under the new regime of the usurper Aegisthus. Her speech reveals her as an
appeaser in Electra’s eyes.
l.335 ff
‘But as things are I think that in time of trouble I must
lower my sails, and not seem to perform some deed, but do them no harm; and I
would like you to follow suit.
‘but if I am to live in freedom, I must obey those in power
in everything.’
Moreover in l.378 Chrysothemis warns Electra of Aegisthus
and Clytemnestra’s plans for her should she continue her rebellious attitude:
‘all’eksero
soi pan hoson katoid’ego
mellousi
gar s’ei tode me lekseis goun,
entaitha
pempsein entha me poth’heliou
phengos
prosopsei,’
‘Well, I
will tell you all I know!
If you do
not leave off these lamentations,
They plan
to send you to where you shall no longer see
The light
of the sun,’
Electra is having none of this appeasement and remains
resolute, almost reckless in her defiance of Aegisthus, daring him to come and
dare to do what he is planning. It transpires that Chrysothemis is on her way
to Agamemnon’s tomb to offer libations.
The libations are in fact an idea of Clytemnestra,
prompted by dreams/nightmares, in which Agamemnon returns from Hades and plants
his staff beside the hearth which grows into a fruitful bough. Fearing an
adverse portent, Clytemnestra out of guilt tries to appease the dead. Here we
see Sophocles painting a sympathetic picture of the queen trying to make amends
with an act of piety.
Next we have Electra’s confrontation with Clytemnestra
and one of the key themes at the centre of this play – that of justice and
piety or rather the conundrum where one individuals pious act can be another’s
outrage and revenge lust, and the justifications that opposing sides have for
their acts. The two sides are both with their fault lines and we have a very
blurred and ambiguous tone with Sophocles, making for a deeply fascinating
drama with issues that still burn in our psyches to this day. How much evil is
acceptable to preserve a life? The State? Is any kind of bloodshed justified
whatever the reason? Is the best course expedience and to tow the official
line? Do we trust the state to uphold justice? Or to take things into our own
hands when the need arises and is most pressing?
There is no clear winner in the ensuing war of words:
Both put their cases eloquently but with their own biases. We hear of the
‘real’ reason for Iphigenia’s sacrifice – Agamemnon had angered Artemis by
slaying a stag in her sacred grove and uttering a blasphemy to boot. It was
divinely ordered slaughter…so for Electra that makes it alright unlike
Clytemnestra’s slaying of her father, an act of lust and greed, mere human
directives as matched against those of the gods – the highest evil and
arrogance and therefore deserving of scorn and revenge. There is another interesting aspect to these
interchanges – they often have the tone of a teenage daughter railing against
the hypocrisy of her parents – subtle and endearing overtones of generation gap
which those of the audience with young grown up daughters would surely have
identified with!
This is one of the endearing fascinations of the play,
how through Sophocles imaginative and dextrous lines Electra displays so many
different emotional and psychological levels of engagement as a headstrong
young woman with the various characters, all the time holding our attention –
she mesmerises as a convincing figure burning with righteous indignation and
fury one minute, sobbing her heart out the next and finally bursting with joy
when Orestes, deus ex machine like, reveals his true identity and brings her
out of the pit of despair. She is a glittering multi-faceted jewel of young
womanhood and at one point it looks almost as if Orestes wants her to rule with
him by his side, her passions and freedom totally unrestrained…and yet…and yet
the slightly unclear ending has Orestes and Pylades marching Aegisthus off to
the hearth inside the palace to his doom…to restore male order to the house of
Argos. The chorus end with the lines:
l.1508 ff:
‘ho sperm’ Atreos, hos polla
pathon
di eleutherias molis ekselthes
tei nun hormei teleothen’
‘Seed
of Atreus, after many sufferings
you have at last emerged in
freedom,
made complete by this day’s enterprise!’
The seed of Atreus although referring to both Electra and
Orestes seems to imply a male lead in its masculine allusions. Where does this
leave Electra? Is she a transgressor merely to enable the male order to
reassert itself – to return to a subservient role and married off to a noble
suitor to continue the status quo of the palace? I think Sophocles felt that he
had to cap her freedom with Orestes finishing off the deed as if to contain the
dangerous excess of a young woman breaking the bonds of convention in her quest
for justice. Within the confines of the drama it is exciting for Sophocles to
explore the female energy unleashed in its various guises but as if to close
the lid again upon such dangerous and transgressive thoughts and deeds he must
have had the overriding impulse to contain and control such dangerous and
potentially revolutionary energy or at least channel it into safer male
agendas. So although I personally don’t
think of Electra as a ‘male order bride’…I do
think that she has been ‘disarmed’ and rendered harmless to men at the end of
the drama, for unchained, she would be too strong.
Euge!
No comments:
Post a Comment