May

3

On Clytaemnestra

May 3, 2007 |

It’s been a while since college, but I’d still very much like to get this book, along with a huge chunk of time to really read it: Reclaiming Klytemnestra.

Klytemnestera, Klaitemnestra, Clytemnestra, Clytaemnestra (my preferred spelling), whatever, is still the most fascinating literary character I’ve encountered to this day. She’s an almost archetypical badass–she ruled a nation while its king was out getting his men slaughtered for a decade at Troy, she kept her lover/accomplice-of-convenience under her thumb but around for show and practical concerns. She waited patiently for ten years to avenge her daughter, and the same hour the opportunity presented itself, she wrapped her truant husband in a big sheet and took an axe to the loser. She was the twin (some say half-twin, depends on your myth) sister of Helen “the destroyer” of Troy and shared in just as much tragedy, but refused victimhood even when she was finally slaughtered by her own son. It’s hard to get much tougher than that.

But that’s not what’s most interesting about her. Clytaemnestra is just as fascinating a woman for her role as a mother and a wife, a woman wronged and a woman in power. Agamemnon killed not one, but two of her children (he slaughtered her firstborn, the infant child of her first husband, at the same time as he dispatched said first husband and brought Cly home as a wife/war prize), and abandoned her to an unstable city crumbling under the weight of its own age and old, counterproductive traditions. She took the reins and took control, and had to make some incredibly difficult decisions in the process–sending Orestes away to quell the threat he presented as he grew, alienating (but not, despite some claims, evidently abusing) Electra by having an extended affair in front of her in Agamemnon’s absence. When she’s finally defeated, it isn’t when Orestes kills her. Read the stories–she keeps on keepin’ on, although in a much angrier and more vengeful aspect than before. It’s at the very end of the Oresteia, when the gods decide (on some pretty arbitrary moral considerations and patently false biological ones) that a child’s loyalty is to a father alone. That’s when Clytaemnestra’s spirit really loses the fight. But she stays with us–with me, anyway–as a character, for what she did and didn’t do inside her life.

Anyway, this tangent has nothing to do with anything going on in my life right now, other than the fact that in a different world I might have become an academic, and that we should all be happy that we live in this world instead. Someday I might write a book about Clytaemnestra myself, but I promise it won’t be for a while. In the meantime, I’d just like to read that one.


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