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SHIFTING SISTERHOOD: ELECTRA AND CHRYSOTHEMIS IN SOPHOCLES’ ELECTRA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2021

Lyndsay Coo
Lyndsay Coo*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Extract

When Sophocles wrote Electra's story, he gave her a sister, Chrysothemis. In their two scenes together, the sisters warn, entreat, cajole, insult, spar with, and proclaim affection for each other. While Electra maintains her public mourning for their father Agamemnon, Chrysothemis chooses not to openly defy his murderers, Aegisthus and their mother Clytemnestra, believing that resistance that accomplishes nothing is futile. Time has not been kind to this more pragmatic sister. In English-language criticism, she has acquired her own epithet, ‘timid’; her femininity has been dismissed as vacuous and her morality as driven by material self-interest. For many critics, she is a shallow and conventional figure whose main purpose is to act as a foil to the exceptional Electra. Since the pairing of a ‘stronger’ and a ‘weaker’ sister recurs in the depiction of Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone, this portrait of two contrasting sisters has been recognised since antiquity as distinctively Sophoclean, and the corresponding reduction of the sister–sister bond to a template has frequently precluded deeper examination of this relationship in both plays.

Type
III. Sisterhood
Information
Ramus , Volume 50 , Special Issue 1-2: In Terms of Athens , December 2021 , pp. 89 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Ramus 2021

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to Ben Folit-Weinberg, Lucy Jackson, William Kynan-Wilson, Anna Uhlig, the anonymous referees, and the editors of this volume, Johanna Hanink and Demetra Kasimis, for their insightful comments that have deeply enriched my thinking on this material. In particular, I thank Valentina Moro for a stimulating and constructive collaboration that made the writing of these companion(/sister!) pieces so enjoyable.

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