Electra is a killer with no blood on her hands.  She is the heroine of three Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers,  Sophocles’s Electra, and Euripides’s Electra. Euripides’s version is messy, unpolished, and practically unknown. But his dark characterization of Electra is unique: he portrays her as  a spoiled young woman, furious over losing princess status, banished from the palace by her mother’s lover and second husband, Aegisthus, who is afraid of a coup by Clytemnestra’s children.

 Euripides is fascinated by the psychology of wicked women:  there is Medea the witch, and of course Phaedra, the would-be adulteress. Some think the wickedest woman of all is Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, who killed her husband Agamemnon and his concubine, Cassandra, on their return  from the Trojan War. It was a revenge killing: the appalling Agamemnon had murdered their oldest daughter Iphigenia when a seer said this evil deed would bring  favorable winds for sailing to Troy.

Clytemnestra fascinated  the Romans as much as the Greeks.  In Satire VI, the  Roman poet Juvenal inveighs against  Euripides’ evil heroines, especially Clytemnestra. He writes,

Every neighborhood will have a Clytemnestra.  There is only one difference;  Clytemnestra clumsily held a two-edged axe in her hands; the new Clytemnestras use a small  amount of a toad’s lung for poison.

Euripides is many-faceted, brilliant even at his worst, and the conception of the play is fascinating. His Electra is a fierce, sulky, class-conscious, angry young woman.  Though she is obsessed  with her father’s murder, she is also furious about having been “married” off to  a  mountain farmer who is so  kind and respectful that he has never touched her.  But Electra shows little kindness to him. At one point she tells him that he is of “small” worth.

Nor does Electra honor the gods much. She is not pleased with them.   And yet she doesn’t have to pay the price so often demanded in tragedy,  death and dishonor.

Electra complains:

No god hears the cries of the ill-fated,/ nor of my long-ago ruined father. /Alas, my exiled brother, who, now ruined,/the son of a famous father, lives in another land,/ unhappily wandering in slave quarters./ I myself live in the home of a laborer on a cliff,/ pining in my soul, / exiled from my father’s house. / My mother lives married / to another husband and shares a bloody bed .

After the laments of Electra and the chorus, there is action. Her brother Orestes breaks his exile and returns with his friend Pylades: Apollo has ordered him to clean up the House of Atreus (their violent family) with revenge killings. Electra is so excited that she plans matricide.

First Orestes kills Aegisthus while he is sacrificing to the gods -surely such a killing is blasphemy. Blood-stained Orestes is proud of this murder but even he has qualms about matricide. Electra invites her mother to the cottage, claiming she has just given birth.   Clytemnestra and Electra talk about the past, but Electra does not accept Clytemnestra’s regrets and explanations.

This scene reminds me a bit of dialogue in Doris Lessing’s novels. Her heroines, especially Martha Quest in the Children of Violence series, struggle to love their mothers. Is Euripides’s Electra the Martha Quest of Greek tragedy? And isn’t she also a child of violence?

Clytemnestra only too well understands her daughter’s bond with Agamemnon.”O child, by nature from birth you always loved your father, and this is still so.”

Matricide is the greatest of sins in the eyes of Euripides. Electra urges Orestes to go ahead when he tries to renege on his promise. And Orestes immediately regrets the killing. He laments: Clytemnestra is the woman who gave him birth, she bared her breast when he was killing her, he saw her pubic hair. Electra regrets, too. She regrets never having been able to love her mother. But she also wonders what kind of marriage she can make now, since she and Orestes must go into exile. Orestes says Pylades must marry Electra. And so this tragedy also has a bizarre marriage plot, if not a happy ending.

The translations from Euripides and Juvenal are mine.