Clytaemnestra, Electra and Penelope

In the Oresteia, Clytaemnestra and Electra, mother and daughter, have very different sexual natures, though both women are devoted to revenge. Clytaemnestra takes revenge on her husband, Agamemnon, not simply because she has a lover but because Agamemnon had killed her first husband and her child. Her vengeance is thus bound with her sexuality and with the way Agamemnon had forced her to submit to him. Electra is non-sexual in her behavior--though she has been married off by her mother, she does not consummate the marriage. Her entir

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e to waste on this girl, and it might see that the wife is merely jealous. However, her sexuality has become bound with Aegisthus during her husband's absence, and both have reason to hate Agamemnon and to seek revenge. Her sexual nature has thus become enmeshed with the very idea of revenge, leading her to help Aegisthus kill her husband. She refers to the death of her daughter, Iphigeneia, sacrificed by Agamemnon some years earlier, as one of the reasons she is seeking revenge. Her jealousy over Cassandra is another reason she gives, though she has in fact betrayed Agamemnon with Aegisthus in his absence and so has already transferred her love to another. She also sees herself as the instrument of revenge on the whole house of Atreus, meaning she is the instrument for the destruction promised long ago. In The Odyssey, Penelope is left behind with her son, Telemachus while her husband is in Troy. Odysseus would be gone for thirty years, and his time away from home can be divided into thirds--for the first ten years, he was fighting the Trojan War; he was lost on the way home and spent ten years on an island, despairing of ever returning home; and finally he spends ten years making his way back once he is released from thi
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Approximate Word count = 1650
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)