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This article is concerned with female oppression by examining how the three Attic tragedians show Electra’s way of representing her own conditions under Agamemnon’s usurpers. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers she describes her sufferings mainly as secondary emanation of her father’s horrifying death and Orestes’ exile, so that even the words she devotes to herself focus on the more general law of retaliation. With Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra, she becomes leading character and pays more attention to her isolation, her social degradation and to her material misery: the former dramatist still links these motives to her strenuous defence of family honour, which she embodies by her lamentation while waiting for Orestes’ return and action; the Electra put on stage by the latter one, on the contrary, looks like more resentful of her personal humiliation, obstinately maintains it and regards the matricide she actively takes part to also as a way of restoring her pride.
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This article is concerned with female oppression by examining how the three Attic tragedians show Electra’s way of representing her own conditions under Agamemnon’s usurpers. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers she describes her sufferings mainly as secondary emanation of her father’s horrifying death and Orestes’ exile, so that even the words she devotes to herself focus on the more general law of retaliation. With Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra, she becomes leading character and pays more attention to her isolation, her social degradation and to her material misery: the former dramatist still links these motives to her strenuous defence of family honour, which she embodies by her lamentation while waiting for Orestes’ return and action; the Electra put on stage by the latter one, on the contrary, looks like more resentful of her personal humiliation, obstinately maintains it and regards the matricide she actively takes part to also as a way of restoring her pride.
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