Summary
Orestes and Electra sleep at the foot of the statue of Apollo while the three Furies angrily pace around them. The First Fury is stiff from standing all night but is excited to destroy the soft white bodies in front of her. She coos to the sleeping Electra that soon she will be screaming when the First Fury woos her and crushes her. She cannot wait to spread her hatred when the brother and sister are driven out of the sanctuary.
The Furies revel and gambol about, proclaiming that they will suck the matter from the humans’ hearts, take the light from their eyes, be the darkness in their souls, and ruin all that is beautiful. They buzz like flies as they lean in to Orestes and Electra.
Orestes and Electra awake, and Electra is frightened because she had a dream of her mother lying dead with blood spilling out of her. She looks at her brother and marvels that he doesn’t look different even though he was the one that killed their mother. Orestes is surprised that Electra, in contrast, looks haggard and old now. Electra moans that the crime is ruining her.
Suddenly Electra espies the Furies and Orestes tries to calm her and says they can do her no harm. The Furies growl but he rebukes them. Orestes looks into Electra’s eyes and is disappointed to see guilt in them. The Furies move toward Electra and cackle to her that she should reject her brother who has blood on his hands.
Electra asks if Clytemnestra suffered as she died and one Fury answers in the affirmative. Electra wails and covers her face. Orestes tries to tell her that the Furies just want to part them and that once she is alone they will devour her. He tells her that outside these doors is a world of light and hope and they can leave this place if she can just leave behind her weakness; it is that weakness that gives the Furies strength. He knows that he can never forget what he did to Aegsitheus and Clytemnestra, but he is free and he knows it.
When he reaches out for Electra’s hand, she pulls it back. The Furies laugh and tell her she should submit her body to suffering just as her soul is suffering. They dance around her. Orestes tries to grab her, but she runs down the steps. The Furies fling themselves at her.
Zeus enters and orders the Furies away. They slink off. Zeus adopts an attitude of compassion toward Electra and helps her up. He soothes her, and Orestes sneers that he should not have such an unbecoming attitude for a god. Zeus endeavors to convince Electra that Orestes does not love her.
Orestes is indignant. He claims Electra is dearer to him than life but she must free herself. Zeus mocks him for his boasting and calls him a braggart who only speaks thusly because Apollo protects him. In fact, Zeus adds, he came to save them both.
Electra questions this, asking what Zeus wants in return. He first says nothing, then amends it to a “mere trifle” and “a little penitence” (114). He wants her to disavow her crime. Orestes cries that she cannot turn back on fifteen years of hatred and hope. Electra tells Zeus that she did indeed feel hatred and hope, but Zeus counters by telling her they were innocent dreams and she never really wanted to have them come true.
Electra muses that she wishes that were true. Zeus continues, saying she was a child and dreamed of being a sad, criminal woman. She played the game of murder alone. Electra starts to understand. Orestes interferes and tells her Zeus does not know; only she can know what she really wanted. She was a “glorious young goddess, vivid with hatred” (115) and Zeus cannot take that away.
Zeus tells them both that if Electra will repudiate her crime, he’ll put the two on the throne of Argos. Orestes mocks him, asking if he will really take the throne of his victims and wear black while Electra wears Clytemnestra’s old clothes.
Zeus marvels at Orestes’s big talk after he murdered a defenseless man and old woman and how he seems to think he is the savior of the city. Outside all the folk of Argos are waiting with stones and pitchforks. He asks if Orestes is ready for the solitude of scorn and loathing, and Orestes simply replies “the most cowardly of murderers is he who feels remorse” (116).
Zeus stands tall and opens the temple to reveal the sky and stars above. He explains how he ordained the course of the planets and the music of the spheres; he made things to create and multiply; he makes plants grow and tides come in and out; he made the world good. Orestes, though, has done evil and the Good will come and crush him. He calls for Orestes to return to his saner self because the universe refutes him, and to go back to Nature’s bosom and know his sin.
Orestes laughs and says the “universe is not enough to prove me wrong” (117) and that Zeus is a god but not the king of man.
Zeus brings the temple back and lowers his magnified voice. He asks angrily who made Orestes, and Orestes replies that Zeus did but blundered in making him free. Zeus says he made Orestes free so he could serve him, but this was not the case. Orestes claims the mantle of freedom – he is neither slave nor master.
Electra begs Orestes to stop blaspheming. Orestes admits he hardly understands himself, for yesterday Zeus was his reason for living because he was put in the world to fulfill Zeus’s purpose. Then, though, Zeus forsook him. When he was with Electra, he felt his youth and he felt one with Nature and Zeus’s creation, but now he knows himself to be truly alone “in the midst of this well-meaning little universe of yours” (118).
Zeus implores him to come back to the fold and leave his lonely exile behind him. Orestes will not consent; he will blaze his own trail and have his own law. He does not hate Zeus and acknowledges that Zeus is God and he is Man, but he is alone. He plans to open the eyes of the people of Argos.
When Zeus hears this, he scoffs that the people do not want the veils torn from their eyes and do not want to see their barren, futile lives. Orestes retorts that they must have their freedom because “human life begins on the far side of despair” (119).
After a moment of silence, Zeus admits he is sorry for Orestes. Zeus reaches to Electra, and Orestes does as well. Electra rejects her brother utterly and bemoans her blazing, burning heart. She thinks he only has despair and squalor for her. She rushes out and the Furies move in. Electra calls out to Zeus that she will embrace him if he saves her from the flies. She announces that she bitterly repents, and then runs off stage. The Furies consider following but the First Fury says she is not for them; Orestes is their man, and will be for some time. They gleefully claim Orestes is weakening.
The tutor enters with food for Orestes, and says they will try to leave in the night. The tutor is afraid of the Furies and Orestes tells him to not approach. The tutor warns Orestes that the people of Argos have gathered and are armed. Orestes orders the tutor to open the door. The tutor is shocked but obeys.
The angry crowd thrusts past the door and barges in with loud, violent shouts. The sun floods the room. The crowd looks to Orestes and screams threats. Orestes stands tall and proclaims that he is King; he knows what happened fifteen years ago and has set it right. He claims the crime he committed of killing Aegistheus and Clytemnestra, and explains that it was done for the people’s sake. There is now a bond of kinship between him and the people. He will take their flies for them, but he will not take the throne. The god offered it to him but he will not take his victim’s throne or his bloody scepter; rather, he will leave and let the people of Argos reshape their own lives. All is new for them as it is for him.
Orestes pauses and then continues with a tale of rats in Scyros. They plagued the town and the people were powerless to stop them. One day a flute-player came and played a tune. All the rats flocked to him. They raised their heads and hesitated, then followed the flute-player as he left the city forever. As Orestes tells this story, he comes off the pedestal, walks into the parted crowd, and strides into the light. The Furies follow after him, screaming.
Analysis
In the third and final act, Orestes continues to assert his freedom but finds that Electra cannot arrive at this state herself. Zeus and the Furies are too persuasive, and the reality of freedom is too stark, too terrifying. Much of this act is a dialogue between Zeus and Orestes as they debate the nature of god and man, and freedom and existence.
When the act begins, Orestes is not at all repentant for his crime, but Electra is very distressed. The weight of the crime is unbearable and has aged her so she looks like Clytemnestra. She does not have the courage to do what her brother did – acknowledge that there is no past and no future, that what matters is the action, and that the gods are powerless. She is blinded by the Furies’ repeated cries that she is guilty and must repent. Zeus, who does not have real power but still has the power to persuade and convince, tells Electra exactly what she wants to hear - that her dreams of revenge were the ill-formed dreams of a child.
In the end, of course, Electra does repent: “I repent, Zeus. I bitterly repent” (121). She does not want the “misery and squalor” (121) that Orestes has in store for her. As such, she is ultimately an exemplar of the principle of “bad faith” that Sartre articulated in his existentialist theory: “[the] self’s choice may lead to a project of self-deception such as bad faith, where one’s own real nature as for-itself is discarded to adopt that of the in-itself. Our only way to escape self-deception is authenticity, that is, choosing in a way which reveals the existence of the for-itself as both factual and transcendent” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
The critic Rhiannon Goldthorpe delves further into Electra’s situation and personality. She hates Clytemnestra and Aegistheus and knows she hates them, and that state is what defines her selfhood. This hatred is an inauthentic way to construct an identity though, for “hatred is a substitute for the impossibly difficult act. For, paradoxically, the hatred which motivates the desire to kill guarantees Electra’s failure to fulfill that desire; to do so would destroy the state of hatred… for Electra the sustaining of her state of hatred takes precedence over the desire for action which would seem to be motivated by that state. In other words, the past takes precedence over a free future.”
This is certainly bad faith and Zeus makes the point several times in the text that knowing one’s freedom is a terrifying and momentous thing. He tells Orestes that the people actually don’t want this, that if Orestes removed the fear of the gods, all the people would have would be “Good digestion, the gray monotony of the provincial life, and the boredom – ah, the soul-destroying boredom – of long days of mild content” (57). In an even bleaker statement, he insists, “You will tear from their eyes the veils I had laid on them, and they will see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon” (119).
Even though Zeus asserts that the people do not want this freedom, he is nervous that Orestes will bring it about anyway. Orestes is a threat to him because the gods need this complete hierarchy of god over man to survive. They need man to be fearful and repentant; they need to subjugate and dominate. Critic Martha Evans notes that the character of Zeus has no power when he takes the guise of a man, but does when he is his true god-self, writing that this “underlines the extent to which the power of myth comes to subjugate even those who install it."
Evans has another theory that is worth considering before concluding this analysis of the play. She posits that when Orestes liberates the people from the oppression of their revenge, he “is in fact merely moving into the next mythological process, the repentance/absolution/salvation paradigm of the Christian myth structure… he is merely imposing upon them a new form of subjectivity by prompting a change in regime.” Orestes is part of a web of mythology because his actions “actually pull him into the predetermined unfolding of the myth and remove any lingering individuality or personal character… he transforms into Electra’s myth-image.”
