Can’t you just picture the texts shooting back and forth between Electra and Orestes?
Electra: when r u coming?
Orestes: dunno
Electra: Aegi is a dick.😭
Orestes: lol. what did he do now?
Electra: makes me serve his meals!!! slaps my ass too. sooo grooosss!!!!🤢🤮
Orestes: what did mom do??
Electra: nothing! You know she definitely killed dad.
Orestes: I know.
Electra: Best idea ever: let’s kill them! promise me you’ll visit help me kill them.
Orestes: 👍
As a parent, I feel disturbed with this text. As a parent, I’m also disturbed on how this mother and step-father are treating their kids. I feel just all around disturbed.
So let’s just slim this down a bit, make it compact:
Once upon a time….in Mycenae (or Argos). There was a ruling family.
King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra, daughters Iphigenia, Electra, Laodike, and Chrysothemis and son Orestes.
Agamemnon, killed a daughter for good breezes to sail the army to Troy, and after a 10 year siege, burns the city.
He returns to Mycenae with his concubine.
Clytemnestra, upset about her daughter’s death, not so much about the concubine, kills Agamemnon.
She marries Aegithus, an usurper for the throne, who she’s been having an affair with…probably for 10 years.
Electra sneaks baby Orestes out of the country.
Clytemnestra and Aegithus are now Queen and King.
They enslave Electra and Chrysothemis. The girls shall never marry and only rarely leave the house.
Electra complains a lot and gets on Clytemnestra’s nerves.
After a few years, Orestes returns. He kills his mom and step-dad and becomes king.
They all live happily ever after.
So, I’m having some trouble finding a deeper meaning of justices and truth and law, that I can see in other Sophocles’s plays, such as Oedipus, Antigone, and Ajax. I don’t feel the tragedy elements that define tragedy: harmartia, anagnorisis, and peripeteia. I can see us exploring the terrible conditions we find Electra in, but in this play I care about her and her family as little as I care about the Kardashians. Let them all die as far as I’m concerned and maybe put in an Attic form of democracy while we’re at it.
Some questions that come to light in this family struggle:
Agamemnon, as king, is he above the law? Apparently so. He kills his daughter, it’s good for the army, good for the state, and we keep on going.
Affairs of the heart:
Watch out for those terrible women. They will grab power, a strong man, and tear you to shreds when you walk through the door back from the war. Woman should not have power.
Killing your mother:
That’s okay, especially when she’s acting like a wicked step-mother from Cinderella.
Killing your step-father:
See above. Definitely, okay to kill.
Child abuse:
For girls, it’s okay. Let’s just protect the boys at this point.
Girls:
Good for marriage and making babies.
The gods:
Ahh, yes, if the gods will tell you what to do, you should do it, even if it is just from an oracle and it says to kill off your family. It’s still okay.
Do you get the feeling that Charles Manson would fit well into this family?