Let’s clarify 2 things before we begin:
- Yes, the title is a reference to the Meredith Brooks song
- Clytemnestra did absolutely nothing wrong
First, I am going to tell you the story of Clytemnestra, then we are going to discuss what is at stake in the reception of this myth –– how has Clytemnestra’s story been weaponised by misogynists? What can feminists gain by revisiting this story? –– before finally looking at some of the most recent retellings of Clytemnestra’s myth, primarily Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019) and Claire Heywood’s Daughters of Sparta (2021).
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| 'Leda Anatomica' Salvador Dalí |
So, of course, you will remember when I told you the story of Zeus impregnating Leda while in the form of a swan. That same night, Leda slept with her mortal husband Tyndareus, king of Sparta. So, she came to be pregnant with two sets of twins, and ‘she bore Polydeuces and Helen to Zeus’ (they HATCHED OUT OF AN EGG… Or an egg each, it’s unclear), and Castor and Clytemnestra to Tyndareus (Apollodorus III.10) … presumably out of her vagina.
Despite ostensibly not being twins at all, Castor and Polydeuces are known as the twins (the Dioscuri), and they are forever immortalised as the gemini constellation. But that’s a story for a different day.
Let’s turn our attention instead to Helen and Clytemnestra, daughters of Leda, one the daughter of the King of the Gods and the other the daughter of the King of Sparta. In some versions of the myth, they were cursed to bring ruin and suffering to their husbands; in other versions, there is no curse, but the suffering follows them anyway.
On the topic of siblings, there are two brothers who are from the cursed House of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon marries Clytemnestra, and they are the king and queen of Mycenae; Helen marries Menelaus, and he becomes king of Sparta.
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have 4 children: Iphigenia, Electra, Laodice, and Orestes.
Meanwhile, Helen and Menelaus’ marriage doesn’t exactly go to plan. So Agamemnon leads the Greeks to retrieve his brother’s errant wife from Troy (and to retrieve all their treasure and to secure his own legend but WHATEVER).
All the Greek armies meet in Aulis, but they are becalmed, so they cannot sail to Troy. Agamemnon – via a seer – decides to invite his daughter Iphigenia to Aulis, supposedly to marry Achilles. When she and Clytemnestra arrive, however, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to Artemis and happily sails off to Troy, leaving Clytemnestra heartbroken.
And mad as hell.
While Agamemnon is stropping his way around Troy, Clytemnestra seethes.
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| Clytemnestra (centre left) weeping as she finds out Iphigenia's (centre right) fate. Achilles' (left) anger at Menelaus (right). Jacques-Louis David (1819) |
She invites her husband’s cousin/mortal enemy Aegisthus to Mycenae, and they have an affair and plot Agamemnon’s demise. Aegisthus was literally conceived to take revenge on this branch of his family, and Clytemnestra is also looking for justice.
10 years later, Agamemnon returns victorious from Troy, bringing with him innumerable plunder and his new concubine (read: sex slave), the young seer Cassandra.
Clytemnestra runs him a bath, wraps him in a robe she has woven, which works somewhat like a straight jacket, and then stabs him to death.
In some other versions of the myth, Aegisthus is the one who does the actual act of murdering. You can choose whichever one you prefer.
Elektra unceasingly mourns her father – whence Elektra complex, the female version of the Oedipus complex – and her younger brother Orestes returns 7 years later to seek revenge. He kills his mother and Aegisthus, and lives happily ever after, married to his cousin … except for the Furies that torment him for the crime of killing his mother.
I just want to share an excerpt from Aeschylus' Agamemnon, specifically from an absolutely incredible translation by Sarah Ruden (2016). This truly encapsulates why I will defend Clytemnestra until my last breath. She is a strong and irreverent woman, demanding justice. She is a Fury.
CHORUS:
We're stunned at this defiance in your mouth,
this bragging speech above your husband's body.
CLYTEMNESTRA:
You think you're prodding at a female moron,
but I don't shake inside, addressing those
who understand. And you can praise or blame me––
it doesn't matter. This is Agamemnon,
my husband, he's a corpse now. My right hand,
an honest builder, made this. Here we are.
[...]
So now you sentence me to banishment,
allot me hatred, rumbling civic curses.
Back then you offered him no opposition
when he, as casual as at one death
among the crowding and luxuriant flocks,
sacrificed his own child, my dearest birth-pangs,
to conjure up some blasts of air from Thrace.
Wasn't it that polluted criminal
you should have driven out?
(l.1399-1420)
Clytemnestra: Bad Wife.
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| Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, 'Clytemnestra and Agamemnon' (1817) |
For Pomeroy, ‘Homer’s attitude toward women as wives is obvious in his regard for Penelope and Clytemnestra’ because, while Penelope is lauded for her chastity, Clytemnestra is reproached for her infidelity, and all women ‘are to be forever sullied by Clytemnestra’s sin. This generalization is the first in a long history of hostility toward women in Western literature’ (Pomeroy 1975; 2015: 21-2).
When Odysseus journeys to the Underworld, he sees Agamemnon, who praises Penelope for being such a good, obedient wife, SO UNLIKE his own wife, who is the absolute worst, the archetype forever after of the most evil and disobedient woman.
The condemnation of Clytemnestra versus Penelope’s praise (and Helen’s sheer implacability) mark the beginnings of a Western literary tradition that treats women as sexualised symbols rather than fully realised characters.
Clytemnestra: Good Mother.
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| Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, 'The Sacrifice of Iphigenia', (1822-1825) |
There is another way of looking at Clytemenstra, though. In Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (2020), Natalie Haynes offers another interpretation:
Clytemnestra is a byword in the ancient world, and ever since, for a bad wife, the worst wife even. But for wronged, silenced, unvalued daughters, she is something of a hero: a woman who refuses to be quiet when her child is killed, who disdains to accept things and move on, (Haynes 2020: 171).
Is Clytemnestra a bad wife to Agamemnon? Or is she, instead, a good mother to Iphigenia? She is relentless in her demand for justice for her daughter’s ritualised murder. Instead of being an archetype of bad wifely behaviour, she is the model of dedicated motherhood, taking justice into her own hands when there was no legal recourse to protect her daughter or punish her husband, her daughter’s murderer.
For Haynes, Clytemnestra is ‘the mother of a daughter who has been slaughtered like an animal. Is it any wonder she nurses an unquenchable rage against the man who committed this crime?’ (Ibid., 151)
This echoes Clytemnestra’s characterisation in A Thousand Ships where her perspective is introduced in the following manner: ‘Ten years was a long time to bear a grudge, but Clytemnestra never wavered. Her fury neither waxed nor waned, but burned at a constant heat.’ (Haynes 2019: 286).
I love Haynes’ interpretation of Clytemnestra in A Thousand Ships, she is full of righteous fury and singleminded determination.
She also has a really touching moment with Cassandra. It would be easy to write their meeting with Clytemnestra as the spurned and jealous queen, unsympathetic to Cassandra’s many traumas.
Instead, Haynes gives Cassandra a moment of relief from her terrible curse –– to be able to accurately see the future, though no one will ever believe her.
‘You believe me?’ Cassandra asked. No one had believed her for as long as she could remember. Who was this woman who was immune to Apollo’s curse?
‘Of course I believe you […]’
‘No one believes me.’
‘You can see the past and the future?’ Clytemnestra asked. Cassandra frowned. She had stopped noticing the difference between these two things so long ago that it seemed peculiar anyone else should. The queen seemed to hear her thoughts. ‘Ah, they are the same for you. So you know what is coming, and yet you don’t run away.’ (Ibid., 306)
Why is this so evocative? Why does it mean so much to me that, just before Cassandra dies in a foreign land for her rapist’s crimes, she finds a moment of empathy and solace? Why is it so poignant that, just before her infamous crime, Clytemnestra is kind and patient with this girl she does not know?
Does Cassandra’s youth and gift of prophecy remind Clytemnestra of Iphigenia’s beauty and insightfulness at Aulis? Is Cassandra’s current situation the most recent reminder to Clytemnestra of Agamemnon’s criminality?
In Claire Heywood's Daughters of Sparta, dramatic irony is rife as we watch Klytemnestra’s life unfurl.
When she is a little girl in Sparta, she tells Helen how she just wants a husband who is ‘Someone kind, I hope. And wise. And a good father’ (Heywood 2021: 21). Agamemnon, we know, is none of these things for her.
Klytemnestra and Penelope have long been considered narrative foils, with Penelope doing everything right in her husband’s absence while Klytemnestra does everything wrong. So it is surprising to readers of Daughters of Sparta when Agamemnon leaves Mycenae and Klytemnestra gets to work maintaining his kingdom, inexorably mirroring Penelope in Ithaca.
It is Agamemnon’s slaughter of their daughter that animates the latent anger in Klytemnestra, in fact ‘She was surprised by the contempt in her voice. She was shaking now, with anger, with pain. But it made her bold.’ (Ibid., 227).
All Klytemnestra wanted was to be a good wife, and a good mother. But a shitty husband takes that all away from her. This interpretation really makes you interrogate the version of the myth where it is the daughters of Sparta that bear the curse, since Agamemnon is clearly the polluted one here.
In fact, Heywood’s Klytemnestra does not traipse happily into her infamy. She is unsure, unwilling to betray everything she has learned about being a good woman, but her love for her daughter will win out:
Aigisthos was right; she would do whatever it took to protect her children, to secure their future. She just had to summon the courage to trust him, and to pray that the gods would not strike her down for becoming that worst manifestation of womanhood: a traitorous wife. (Ibid., 270)
If you ask me, Agamemnon ran his own bath, now he’s got to lie in it.
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| David Scott, 'Death of Agamemnon' (1837) |
**Cover image: Shannon Tarbet (Iphigenia) and Susie Trayling (Clytemnestra) in Suhayla El-Bushra’s Iphegenia (2016). Photograph: Helen Murray ((source))
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