Electra

Fiction | Play | Adult

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-486

Lines 487-746

Lines 747-1359

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Difference Between Justice and Revenge

Euripides’s Electra explores the consequences of seeking justice through revenge, challenging the notion—taken for granted by several of the characters—that justice and revenge are one and the same.

At least initially, Electra and Orestes view their revenge on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra as just, asking the gods to grant them victory, “if our claim to victory is just” (675). Electra especially, driven by her unwavering loyalty to her father Agamemnon and hatred for her mother Clytemnestra, is resolute in demanding blood for blood: The only way justice can be carried out, in her view, is for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to die. Electra says as much to Clytemnestra:

If murder judges and calls for murder, I will kill

you—and your son Orestes will kill you—for Father.

If the first death was just, the second too is just (1094-96).

Electra and Orestes are not the only ones who seem to view the matter this way. The Old Man, helping Electra and Orestes form their plot against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, asks the gods to “grant them at last avenging justice for their father” (676). The Chorus proclaims on a few occasions that any revenge that falls upon Clytemnestra and Aegisthus will be just, “a judgment of death” sent by “the sons of heaven” (483-84), and musing as Clytemnestra dies that:

Justice is given down by god soon or late;

you suffer terribly now, you acted terribly then,

cruel woman, against your husband (1169-71).

However, as the play progresses this equation of justice with revenge is increasingly challenged and called into question. Revenge begins to be reconstrued as something destructive. Electra's obsession with revenge consumes her, and as a result she fails to consider the potential ramifications of her actions. Even when Orestes has doubts about their mission and recoils at the thought of murdering his own mother, Electra bullies him into proceeding as planned. Only when Clytemnestra lies dead does Electra recognize the horror of her revenge, and the audience witnesses the devastating effects of revenge on both avenger and avenged. Clytemnestra’s death may have been just—she murdered her own husband Agamemnon after all—but Electra and Orestes “have not worked in justice” (1244) when they killed her.

The themes of justice and revenge are interwoven with destiny or fate, what the Greeks called moira. If justice, as the Chorus reflects, has “enormous power” (958), it is in part because destiny has a role in ensuring that justice eventually comes about, one way or another (and not necessarily through just means). Clytemnestra and Aegisthus committed murder, and for this they must face justice sooner or later. This is ordained by destiny—and by the gods. Indeed, it is Apollo’s oracle, mentioned a few times in the play, that told Orestes he must kill his father’s killers. In turn, since Orestes is now guilty of matricide, he too must face the consequences as a murderer: His exile and eventual trial in Athens, however, make it clear that what Orestes will face is procedural justice instead of the anarchic vengeance he and Electra have engaged in. It is only through this turn to procedural justice, the play suggests, that this cycle of familial violence can now come to an end.

Familial Relationships and Obligations

The play is also interested in familial dynamics, specifically in how familial relationship and obligations are navigated and how such relationships and obligations are impacted by betrayal, loss, and grief.

Loyalty and duty are especially important aspects of familial relationships in the play, in particular the loyalty that children feel (or do not feel) toward their parents. Electra feels a strong loyalty to her late father Agamemnon. Agamemnon’s death at the hands of Clytemnestra produces an ambiguous situation in which Electra’s loyalty to her father forces her to become disloyal to her own mother. Indeed, Electra unambiguously puts her loyalties to her father before her loyalties to her mother. She calls herself “Agamemnon’s child” (115) even as she is “formed in the flesh of Clytemnestra / Tyndareus’ hellish daughter” (116-17). Later, Clytemnestra acknowledges that:

from birth you always have adored you father.

This is part of life. Some children always love

the male; some turn more closely to their mother than to him (1102-04).

Orestes, Electra’s brother, shares Electra’s attitude, though on the whole he is less extreme than she is. When he first comes on stage he tells of how he offered sacrifice at his father’s tomb, and no sooner is he reunited with Electra than he enlists her help in plotting revenge for their father’s death—revenge that involves murdering their own mother.

Sibling relationships also play a crucial role in the play. When Orestes is reunited with Electra, he tells her that he is her “sole defender and friend” (581). Orestes is extremely reliant on the older Electra as he puts his revenge into effect, and when he hesitates it is Electra who urges him to go through with the murder of their mother. It is also together that Electra and Orestes finally come to terms—albeit too late—with their strained and ambivalent relationship with their mother. They recall how Clytemnestra pleaded with them as they attacked her, how she exposed the breasts with which she fed them as babies, and at last are able to mourn for the woman whom—in Electra’s words—they “loved and could not love” (1231).

Finally, after the deed is done, Orestes also realizes that he is tainted by the crime of matricide, and that he does not feel the sense of triumph or relief he was expecting—instead, he feels unnerved by what he has done, guilt-stricken at the thought that he killed his mother. The guilt that floods both Orestes and Electra afterward suggests that their sense of familial bonds—even toward their hated mother—remain stronger and more resilient than they had expected.

The Relationship Between Social Status and Honor

In Euripides’s day, the “nature versus nurture” debate was in full swing: Philosophers, scientists, and even historians fiercely argued about where honor and virtue came from, whether it was something genetic or something that came from one’s birth. Euripides himself took on these popular questions in a few of his works, and in Electra the relationship between social status and honor is explored above all through the character of the Farmer.

The Farmer, though not necessarily from the lowest classes—he claims that his birth is good enough, though of course he is not noble—is poor and lives a simple life. This does not prevent him, however, from being an honorable man. When Aegisthus marries him to Electra, hoping to neutralize her as a threat by such a marriage, the Farmer treats her with respect and does not even consummate their marriage, believing that doing so would dishonor her: “I would feel ugly taking the daughter of a wealthy man / and violating her. I was not bred to such an honor” (45-46). If the Farmer is “one of nature’s gentlemen” (262) it is in part because he knows his place in the social hierarchy. The Farmer also displays traditional values such as hospitality, offering food and shelter to the “strangers” Orestes and Pylades when they come to Argos.

The comparison between the honorable but poor Farmer and the royal but morally ambiguous Electra and Orestes is first suggested, in fact, by Orestes himself. Impressed by the Farmer’s honorable behavior, he reflects:

At times I have seen descendants of the noblest family

quite worthless, while poor fathers had outstanding sons;

inside the souls of wealthy men bleak famine lives

while minds of stature struggle trapped in starving bodies.

How then can man distinguish man, what test can he use?

[…]

Can you not come to understand, you empty-minded,

opinion-stuffed people, to judge a man by how

he lives with others: manners are nobility’s touchstone? (369-85).

The Farmer, indeed, behaves with more honor than any of the murderous royal characters of the play (Electra, Orestes, Clytemnestra)—one thinks of the Old Man’s remark that “often a noble face hides filthy ways” (551). Despite this, and despite Orestes’s bold words, he is still treated as no more than a humble Farmer. Electra defends his honor and does not deny that he is “decent by nature” (261), but this does not stop her from treating him as her inferior and sending him rudely to run errands for her. Perhaps it is no accident that the Farmer disappears from the play by the time the more “noble” characters begin their conspiracy. Indeed, the brutal murders of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are condemned at the end of the play as a miscarriage of justice, with Electra and Orestes being punished for their sins and their lack of honor.