Clytemnestra In Aeschylus Oresteia

Chronicling the fate of the House of Atreus - a bloodline destined to beget suffering and bleed until it is bled dry - the closing moments of Aeschylus’ Oresteia depict, more optimistically, the very best of what Aeschylus hoped society could be. Yet to ignore the issues of gender and sexuality - the binary opposition and conflicting gendering of its two female ‘heroines’ and their subsequent inversion of societal norms, for example - is to confine the text and its characters unnecessarily. It is a disservice to limit Aeschylus’ sprawling text - to fail to see the unambiguous connection between justice and feminism, or to ignore the blaring gender issues within The Oresteia, is to allow the text’s reception and its lasting relevance to begin and end in antiquity. A multifaceted analytical approach is essential in order to gauge the social significance of a feminist reading of Agamemnon. The study of classical reception …show more content…
Meaning cannot be created without a reader to thus ‘create’ it, nor can a reader do so without a text to first activate a reading. Ground-breaking feminist thinkers such as Judith Butler can provide us with a rough framework by which we may explore gender identity in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Her exploration of the difference between biological sex and gender identity lay a foundation by which gender can be defined – namely, as a historical situation rather than as a natural fact (Butler, 1988). Butler’s exploration into performativity and its subsequent relation on gender formation can offer a richer, better-supported analysis of Clytemnestra and Cassandra as two characters that stand on conflicting ends of a fluctuating gender