Agamemnon, The King of Argos, had sacrificed his daughter
Iphigenia to the gods. In revenge, his wife,
Clytemnestra, assisted by her lover, Aegisthus, killed him on his return from the
Trojan War.
Orestes, the son was banished, but the second daughter Electra was allowed to remain: "She does nothing, says nothing. But she is there". As the play opens, Aegisthus wants to marry her to the palace gardener in order to deflect towards "the house of Théocathoclès anything that might cast an unfortunate light on the
house of Atreus." Electra, with the assistance of her easily dominated brother Orestes, who has returned from banishment, relentlessly seeks the murderer of her father, while feeling an implacable hatred for her mother. Eventually Electra and Orestes themselves are destroyed by the curse that follows the house of Atreus. Giraudoux's play is a rewriting of the myth, taken from an epic passage in
Homer's
Odyssey. It had previously been rendered in tragedies by
Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and
Euripides in the 5th century BC. With many anachronistic changes, including the role of the
bourgeois couple as a burlesque reflection of the tragic couple, Elektra is another example of the timelessness of the tragedy. Written in 1937, it would in effect be a "bourgeois tragedy", according to Jean Giraudoux himself. == The quest for the truth ==