دانلود کتاب Woman, Tyrant, Mother, Murderess: An Exploration of The Mythic Character of Clytemnestra in all Her Forms

The mythic character Clytemnestra, a woman who has been described as “almost completely determined by her transgressive behavior” was, in her own time, one of the most detested villains in the canon of Greek myths and legends. Known best for her crime in conspiring with a lover to murder her husband Agamemnon upon his return from the Trojan War, Clytemnestra has been said from her first appearance in surviving written works to reflect badly on all women, everywhere.

She was, in fact, adopted as a sort of universal model of the “bad woman” in Greek society. Artists imagined and re-imagined her, shaped and molded her character, desires, and motives, and urged outside observers to perceive her in particular ways. In its most basic form, Clytemnestra's is a story of intra-familial murder and blood-revenge: her husband Agamemnon kills their daughter Iphigenia in a ritual sacrifice for fair sailing weather, for which Clytemnestra, with the help of her lover Aegisthus, kills Agamemnon and his concubine Cassandra upon his return from the Trojan War. After this, she and Aegisthus are killed in their turn by Clytemnestra's son Orestes, in some versions aided by his sister Electra, to avenge their father's death. This story is told, with some variations, in a number of ancient plays and poems, ranging from the Odyssey of Homer to the dramatic works of fifth-century Athens and beyond, into Hellenistic Greece.

While there have been multiple studies done on specific artists' visions of Clytemnestra, we lack a comparison of the representations of Clytemnestra across the different ages of Greek culture in which she appears. This paper provides that comparison. Since her first characterization in the Odyssey, Clytemnestra has gone from a simple puppet of her adulterous lover Aegisthus to a criminal mastermind; from loving mother to abuser and from abuser back to loving mother. Her character is extraordinarily changeable, and yet in no version does she truly escape the label of “bad woman.”

In this article I examine the changes artists have made in the formulation of Clytemnestra's character through the poems and plays that have come down to us intact. In addition, I speculate on the reasons for those changes and their accompanying shifts in representations of blame as they concern Clytemnestra. This exploration sheds light on gender expectations in male-dominated Greek society and the perceived social threats of aberrant females, as represented by Clytemnestra. This article, in six sections, follows Clytemnestra chronologically through the works written about her, covering the shift in blame that takes her from traditional (bad) woman to intelligent villain, her crossing of gender boundaries, her decent from complexity into a force of simple antagonism, her elevation to a character of sympathetic interest, the literary regression that portrayed her as a mindless horror, and finally the ways in which all these incarnations have combined to make her the embodiment of ancient Greek fears about women.