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Gender Issues in Aeschylus' Oresteia Trilogy

s for killing Clytemnestra; he is acquitted.

At first glance, and even if one were prepared to admit that a finely tuned contemporary feminist social critique of Aeschylus would illustrate nothing so much as that each age seems capable of showing its moral and ethical superiority to and distinction from preceding ages, a presumptive misogyny endemic to the culture of the Oresteia seems almost impossible to overlook. Examples from the plays make a compelling case for the fact that the masculinity and patriarchy that have been historically privileged in the West have an ancient provenance. As Barnes remarks (9), Plato's Republic envisions men and women doing identical tasks and presumes that "men would always do them better."

In the Oresteia, the most blatant exercise in privileging the male position in human experience comes in the Eumenides when Apollo says that Orestes's murder of Clytemnestra is just plain not as serious as Clytemnestra's murder of Aga:

The cases are not equal. Here died a noble man

Gifted by heaven with majesty and honor,

She caught him in a mantle; no escape

For him, she fettered him in cunning folds

And cut him down (Eum. 705-16 passim).

Elsewhere Apollo also complains about Clytemnestra's infidelity to her husband. Agamemnon, as is known from the Iliad, quarreled with Achilles over the sexual favors of Briseis. When, in the first play, he comes home, he brings his concubine, the beautiful Cassandra, daughter of Priam and instructs his wife to "take her within, and kindly. . . . She, chosen out of many goods and captives, the flower of all, is mine--the army's gift" (Ag. 21). To the victor belong the spoils, although Hamilton's translation (21) of the Agamemnon includes the comment that Cassandra is "an awkward subject." Kitto (24) refers to Cassandra as "the new affront which [Agamemnon] is offering to his wife."

Having offered the affront, Agamemnon proceeds to enter the palace, take a...

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Gender Issues in Aeschylus' Oresteia Trilogy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:06, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683162.html