Let me say at the outset of this lecture that I am not going to play that ancient game of trying to define the indefinable. Names of literary genres are but tags for works of art which have certain historical relations, but there is no more reason to believe that Hamlet and the Eumenides have a common essence than there is to insist that Louis Capet and Louis Philippe have a common essence, or that the Lever Building in New York and Lincoln's log cabin have a common essence. People have been trying for years to give satisfactory definitions of such terms as “tragedy,” “comedy,” “novel,” even “poetry,” and they have never succeeded. The reason for their failure is clear enough. Words have a history. When they are first used, it is likely that they are unambiguous, but as times goes on, they are applied to more and more different things.

In the Aeschylean version of the material with which Sophocles is dealing in his Electra, there appear a few important characteristics the awareness of which lends perspective to the Sophoclean tragedy.

For the purpose of this study, we only need to concern ourselves with the second part of the Aechylean trilogy, the Oresteia, namely the Choephoroe. The first part deals with the antecedents of the events. Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces, who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to appease the goddess Artemis and to regain divine favor for the storm-bound fleet at Aulis, returns, after Troy's destruction, victoriously to his land of Argos where Clytemnestra, his wife, has been nurturing her hatred of him because of his consent to Iphigenia's death. She has joined forces with Aegisthus, who, for savage cruelties committed against his family, is also burning with a desire for revenge on Agamemnon. Aegisthus not only becomes Clytemnestra's ally, but dishonors Agamemnon at the same time.

The prolog to the Electra has sometimes been called unSophocIean. The moment is too propitious: the dawn brings a golden sunlight and the voices of nesting birds. Orestes and his friends move alertly, confidently, on the verge of deeds. The young hero prepares to act with a kind of unspoiled alacrity. As Orestes recites his assignment in revenge, while the Paidagogos listens to correct his errors, we begin to feel that the briskness and dispatch are somehow suspect and shallow. We are in the dimension of action, but the action proceeds upon a single level according to a plan whose elements are logically conceived and causally connected. Orestes will obey Time, but it is one-dimensional Time, interpreted as a succession of events leading to a mechanical and inexorable conclusion.

Sophocles’ version of the Electra theme has been a constant source of trouble to the critics of Greek tragedy. Many of them conclude that it is a beautiful play, but a very poor tragedy. Other critics will defend the play on the grounds that if Sophocles wrote it, it must be good. Finally, there are those critics who try to infuse meaning into the play by forcing it into a philosophic framework which the critic has assumed prior to his analysis of the play. Let us look, briefly, at some of the conclusions reached by these critics.