Double the Vision: a Reading of Euripides'Electra

Abstract

Controversy about the evaluation of Euripides'Electrastill rages as fiercely as empty tigers or the roaring sea. ‘Euripides’ play is a singular instance of poetical – or rather unpoetical – obliquity … perhaps of all Euripides' extant plays the very vilest'; ‘as a drama of character,Electrais supreme … in its own genre, this is undoubtedly Euripides' masterpiece'; it contains ‘a power of sympathy and analysis unrivalled in ancient drama’; its characters are ‘involved in a persisting interpenetration of merit and status which accords some measure of tonal unity to this indifferent play.’ When a play earns judgements as contradictory and incompatible as these, one important stimulus to the verdicts is usually the critic's subjectively emotional response to a play whose views about society and society's values are provocative; more reliable (because less subjective) criteria of literary merit, such as the interplay of plot, character, structure, imagery, and ideas, are then subordinated or comparatively neglected as elements in the evaluation. Euripides'Electrais just such a play. It attacks, both openly and implicitly, some of the traditional values still held by many Athenians in 413 B.C., the probable date of the play's production, with a commitment that has engaged a great deal of scholarly attention. The techniques which Euripides deploys in his attack, however, have not been adequately studied. They provide the rationale, as well as the title, of this paper. Before the ‘double vision’ can be explained, however, it will be as well to outline briefly those traditional values subjected to the Euripidean vitriol.