Analysis Of Orestes In Clytemnestra

Is murder still murder if there’s a justifiable cause? Is it ok to sympathize with a murder? While most side with justice for moral’s sake, there’s no denying the sense of relief when a character in a work of fiction who’s given a justable cause to be disliked (i.e. is a jerk) is cut down. Is someone’s bad attitude a free pass for murder? Of course not, but thats the luxury of fiction. As I read the Orestes I was introduced to Clytemnestra. While trying to portray the role of the loving wife, she sat on the throne of Argos plotting her husband, Agamemnon, demise. Through the trilogy we see her character transform from the intelligent trickster to the personification of the phrase, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” But she didn’t

Clytemnestra wasn’t like most of the women in Greece who stood silently by their husband 's side; she was a woman ahead of her time. Just take a look at her position, while her husband was at war she was ruling Argos. Most were not happy about this, but when confronted she would throw away her femininity to stand on equal ground. For example when she speaks to the chorus she says, “You try me out as if I were a woman and vain; but my heart does not flutter as I speak to you.” She was strong and had confidence in herself. Clytemnestra was also very cunning and manipulative. After the battle between Orestes ,her son, and Aegisthus ,her current lover, in The Libation Bearers she begins to calculate how she can get out of this situation alive. So she decides to play the family card and guilt trips Orestes with sweet words reminding him that she is, in fact, his mother. Clytemnestra tells him, “Hold, my son. Oh take pity, child, before this breast where many a time, a drowsing baby, you would feed and with soft gums sucked in the milk that made you strong.” This makes Orestes hesitate and reflect on whether or not he should kill his mother. Then we see how much of a liar she is when she cries,” I raised you when you were little. May I grow old with you?” The reader knows she did not raise him, Cilissa, his nurse, did. Finally, in The Eumenides we are shown how vengeful Clytemnestra is. At the start of the play she speaks harshly to the Furies because they are asleep and tells them to “wither him [Orestes] in your wind,after him, hunt him down once more, and shrivel him in your vitals’ heat and flame.” Even in death she can’t let her grudges go, even against her own kin. As much as Clytemnestra tries to look like a loving mother in The Libation Bearers and a supporter of peace in Agamemnon by telling the chorus “enough with the bloodshed” we see how selfish and evil she truly