Why Honor Matters by Sommers Tamler

Author:Sommers, Tamler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

The Virtues of Revenge

Electra: Remembrance and Sacrifice

When it comes to twisted revenge stories, Quentin Tarantino has nothing on whoever dreamed up the family from the House of Atreus. The lineage begins with King Tantalus, who decided to cook his own son as a test for the gods. His grandson Atreus topped that by chopping up, cooking, and serving all three of his nephews to their father, his brother, Thyestes. (Thyestes had slept with Atreus’s wife.) Our story, though, begins with Agamemnon, Atreus’s son. Drawn into the Trojan War, Agamemnon is forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to get favorable winds for his ships. After many years, he returns home in triumph. His wife, Clytemnestra, murders him in his bathtub with a little help from her lover Aegisthus: revenge for killing their daughter.

Or was it? Many characters in the story express doubts about Clytemnestra’s motives for killing Agamemnon. In most versions of the myth, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon had two other children—Orestes and Electra—along with the slain Iphigenia. At the time of Agamemnon’s murder, Orestes is a small boy, but the lover, Aegisthus, fears that he’ll become a threat to his new kingdom later in life. Fortunately, a loyal servant saves Orestes from Aegisthus’s wrath and takes the child into exile. Agamemnon’s daughter Electra stays on the island with her mother and stepfather, horrified by the duplicity of her mother. She grieves loudly and publicly for her father. In Sophocles’s play Electra—the version of the myth that I’ll focus on here—Clytemnestra tries to convince Electra of her righteousness: “Tell me why he sacrificed her? Why? Was it to save the Greeks?… The dead girl, if she could speak, would take my part.” But Electra doesn’t buy it. “Take a close look at yourself,” Electra replies. “See if you are merely offering an excuse. Tell me why, if you could, why you are committing an act beyond shame—sleeping with the murderer with whom you killed my father. And you are making children with him. But you drive out your legitimate children.… Will you argue that this too is done to pay for your daughter’s death?” So Clytemnestra kicks her out of the palace and threatens to send her to live in a cave if she doesn’t quit her public mourning.

After a few years, Electra decides to avenge her father by killing her mother and stepfather. But with Orestes banished, she has little hope of infiltrating the palace and performing the act. Sophocles’s play begins with Electra pacing, miserable, seething with grief and rage. The chorus implores her not to waste her life in sadness and anger. Electra replies that she has no choice. “My sorrow has no natural limit,” she tells them. “Come, is it natural to forget the dead? In what man is that an instinct? I seek no honor in forgetting.… For if he that is dead is earth and nothing. If he lies there neglected, and they pay nothing back, no death for death, then justice, shame, and piety are dead for all of mankind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.