Electra

Fiction | Play | Adult

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-486

Lines 487-746

Lines 747-1359

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

The Home and Countryside

The play’s motif of the quotidian and domestic items—food, clothing, chores—is somewhat surprising in a Greek tragedy. Usually, Greek tragedies cultivate a very elevated and heroic tone, taking place in a remote mythical past and putting on stage larger-than-life figures such as heroes and gods. In the brutal, anti-heroic world of Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon dresses in rags and manages the house of a simple Farmer. The simplicity of the home becomes a symbol for the degraded values of the characters.

Electra speaks of her role in keeping the house “tidy” (76), tells Orestes of how she must “weave my clothes myself and slavelike at the loom” (307) or of how she goes to “fetch and carry water from the riverside” (309). She bickers with her husband over how “bare” (404) their house is. The play is punctuated with bits of domestic folk wisdom, often coming from the Farmer, sometimes reminiscent of the rustic didactic poetry (such as Hesiod’s Works and Days) that was popular in ancient Greece—for example, the Farmer’s statement that “A lazy man may rustle gods upon his tongue / but never makes a living if he will not work” (80-81), or:

A woman when she has to

can always find some food to set a decent table.

The house holds little, yet it is enough, I know,

to keep these strangers full of food at least one day (422-25).

This quotidian world belies the horrors of the house of Atreus, which find it before long. It will be in the countryside that Orestes murders the undefended Aegisthus, and in the Farmer’s house that Clytemnestra is killed.

Sexual Identity

Another prominent motif in the play is sex and virginity. Electra especially is concerned with considerations of sexual identity. She is clearly frustrated by her virginal and effectively unmarried state (though she is married to the Farmer, he refuses to sleep with her out of respect for her rank). She longs for a husband who is “virile and well built / whose sons would cling bold to the craggy heights of war” (949-50). Consequently, there is an undertone of sexual jealousy that tinges Electra’s hatred of her mother, whom she sees as promiscuous and sexually motivated—a view that may be justified: Clytemnestra does indeed tell Electra that “women are fools for sex” (1035), and Electra seemingly has reason to believe that Clytemnestra has been unfaithful to Aegisthus just as she has been unfaithful to Agamemnon. The complex sexual dynamics of the play magnify Electra’s resentment of her mother and contribute to the matricide in which the play culminates.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is an important symbol throughout the play. The play is full of sacrifices: Orestes’s sacrifice to the ghost of his father Agamemnon, the sacrifice at which Orestes murders Aegisthus, the sacrifice Electra uses as a pretext to lure Clytemnestra into the house where Orestes is waiting in ambush.

These sacrifices prefigure and reflect, in a perverted way, the murders in which the plot is so steeped. The murders of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra thus become a kind of sacrifice, not only to the murdered Agamemnon but to the gods themselves, who have demanded the murder—hence the oracle of Apollo to which Orestes repeatedly alludes. Clytemnestra’s murder, indeed, is explicitly likened to a sacrifice. As Electra lures her to the ambush, she speaks symbolically of sacrificial accoutrements:

The basket of grain is ready and the knife is sharp

which killed the bull, and close beside him you shall fall

stricken, to keep your bridal rites in the house of death

with him you slept beside in life (1142-44).

Later, Orestes speaks of how he “sacrificed / [his] mother” (1222-23) when he describes plunging the sword into her neck. Sacrifice thus becomes a symbol to represent the unending bloodshed of the house of Atreus.