The Apology of Clytemnestra: feminine and feminist ‘revisions’ of a crime in contemporary rewritings

Queen of Argos, wife of Agamemnon, mother of Iphigenia, Electra, Chrysothemis and Orestes, but also lover of Aegisthus, Clytemnestra is a character who cannot be reduced to a single dimension. She is also characterised by gender ambiguity due to her so-called virile qualities (particularly in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) and the crime she commits. These questions about the characterisation of the character are revealed in the trial she has undergone in literature since Antiquity for having killed her husband Agamemnon and his captive Cassandra. The aim is to examine what happens to these representations in literary works that give voice to and defend the female character. The discourse of the murderess will be the subject of a precise literary and contextual analysis, which will highlight the issues and meanings of the crime itself and stimulate critical thinking on the history of representations of the feminine and gender relations. The aim of this work is threefold: firstly, to offer new conceptions of the mother-daughter relationship, often considered in criticism solely from the point of view of Electra; secondly, to analyse the way in which the authors, by adopting the point of view of Clytemnestra, make her story more complex and thus propose a ‘feminist revision’ of her myth. Finally, we need to ask whether the gender ambiguity that characterises this character for having committed a crime that reverses the law of the sexes in ancient works is preserved and even worked on by contemporary reinterpretations. Through her speech, does Clytemnestra appear as a figure who ‘troubles the gender’? Or does her exoneration mean the disappearance of some of her dimensions, or even the erasure of everything that constitutes her ambiguity?

Cassandre Martigny is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, in the HiSoMA laboratory: History and Sources of the Ancient Worlds. She wrote a thesis at Sorbonne University in Comparative Studies and Ancient Studies: ‘Devenir Jocaste : naissances et renaissances du personnage, de l'Antiquité à nos jours’ (‘Becoming Jocasta: the birth and rebirth of the character, from antiquity to the present day’), in which she studied the reception of the character of Jocasta and the making of her myth through a multilingual and diachronic corpus. Her thesis was Highly Commended in the first Durham Prize in Classical Reception. Her research focuses more generally on the reappropriation of female figures from Antiquity by modernity in the West, and brings together literature, the humanities and gender studies.