It is in this situation, amid ugly, argumentative scenes like this, that Electra has nursed her attitude toward her mother and her determination to kill Aegisthus. Confined to the palace, Electra is on the point of despairing of the prophecy of Orestes's return on one hand, and of killing Aegisthus herself on the other. In Sophocles, Electra's drive for revenge is maintained by her poisonous attitude toward her mother. When Clytemnestra accuses her of depraved hatred, Electra responds, "it is your heartlessness that forces me; Crime is quickly learned from crime" (SE 78) Hamilton refers to Sophocles's Electra as "burning with resentment for every wrong that she has ever suffered. She tells the chorus that she lives like a servant in her father's halls . . . taunted and insulted by 'that woman,' her mother" (Hamilton 194). Meanwhile, weary of Electra's "harrow[ing] them to the honor of the dead" (SE 71), Aegisthus is ready to banish her altogether, even as Clytemnestra has had a premonitory dream of Orestes's
...