Mourning Becomes Electra is most often associated with Aeschylus’Oresteia, and Orin is typically seen as the counterpart of Orestes. This association makes sense in that both works are trilogies, and both are based on a parallel and intrinsic family dynamic rooted in deception, lies and murder. Aeschylus first created this powerful drama, which was later adapted by Euripides in his Electra and Orestes, followed by Sophocles for his own version of Electra (Easterling 352-353). O’Neill scholars have long recognized that certain facets of each version are obviously reflected in Mourning Becomes Electra. Egil Törnqvist, although primarily concerned with the playwright’s attempts to expose the convoluted human essence, gives evidence that O’Neill measured the language of Mourning Becomes Electra against that of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (185). Travis Bogard further sees a Euripidean influence in the “psychological interest and the incorrigible self­justifications for acts of violence” (342) as evinced by O’Neill’s characters. Margaret Ranald has noted that O’Neill’s trilogy “is reworked through the influences of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Jung, Freud and the combined traditions of puritanism and American history” (401). More recently, Stephen Black insists that while O’Neill “tried to make Aeschylus his model,” his “plays would almost always resemble those of Sophocles more nearly than they would those of Aeschylus or Euripides” (340). None of these statements contradicts the others; O’Neill certainly read the works of all three classical dramatists.² That aspects of all versions can and do appear in Mourning Becomes Electra speaks to O’Neill’s brilliant incorporative skill as an artist.

The playwright’s own preliminary notes simply record that his play is based on a “Greek Tragedy plot”; later the work is referred to as the equally generic “Electra idea” (Work Diary, April 1926, October 1928). Further indication that Mourning Becomes Electra is an amalgam of all of these works resonates in O’Neill’s own words that the play is “the most ambitious thing I have tackled” (Sheaffer 354). However, while each of these Greek plays depends on the murder of Agamemnon at the hands of an unfaithful and vindictive Clytemnestra, the king’s death has its roots in an earlier act of violence that has produced in his wife an uncontrollable longing for revenge. A comparison of these plays finds a common point of origin for Clytemnestra’s rage: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, to enable his fleet to set forth for the Trojan War. Although alluded to in expository dialogue only, this sacrifice is the central motivation for Clytemnestra’s vindictive murder of Agamemnon and is therefore a fundamental component in all ancient versions of the tragedy. Euripides alone creates an account of this preliminary history in his posthumously­produced Iphigeneia at Aulis (Easterling 353). This important but often overlooked influence on O’Neill serves as a “prequel” to the Greek plays which follow in action—and therefore to Mourning Becomes Electra as well.

In a recent essay exploring O’Neill’s drafts of “Homecoming,” Tanya Schlam notes that the playwright himself understood the play to be a “working out of psychic fate from [the] past” (89). Schlam’s essay demonstrates O’Neill’s reliance on subtext in shaping his themes and characters. In his meticulous revisions of “Homecoming,” the playwright routinely pared down the obvious to create a deep psychological impact on his audience. Clearly his Christine Mannon is openly derived from the corresponding character of Clytemnestra, the disloyal and vengeful wife of a warrior husband. I suggest that Christine’s motivation for murder is also subtly derived from that of Clytemnestra. Key excerpts from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra and Iphigeneia at Aulis verify the sacrifice of Iphigenia as Clytemnestra’s core motivational impetus for revenge. Similar passages from Mourning Becomes Electra confirm Christine’s motive for revenge as it parallels that of Clytemnestra and show that the character of Orin is drawn not only from Orestes but also significantly from the pivotal character of Iphigenia.³ A comparison of discernible parallels between Iphigenia and Orin will further corroborate the essential figurative connections between them.

Agamemnon most closely provides the structural and thematic matter of “Homecoming,” the first play of O’Neill’s trilogy, in that it begins with Agamemnon’s triumphant return from the Trojan War and ends with his death at the hands of his unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra. In Agamemnon the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis is repeatedly given as the primary reason for Clytemnestra’s desire for revenge. Agamemnon’s spoken ambivalence, first remembered by the Chorus, concerns the necessity of a blood offering:

A grievous doom it were should I obey not,
And grievous should I slay my child, my proud
home’s adornment,
With a maid’s life, spilt before the altar,
In red streams polluting so her own father’s hands.
Whate’er I choose, ’tis woe. (23)⁴

Agamemnon’s fateful decision to sacrifice Iphigenia creates in his wife the festering resentment that directly leads to his murder. Afterwards, a remorseless Clytemnestra confesses her motive:

What, did he not too wreak on his
household
As crafty a crime?
Nay but the branch he grafted upon me,
My long-wept-for Iphigeneia,
Even as he dealt with her, so is he faring:
Therefore in Hades let him not boast now.
As he sinned by the sword,
So is death by the sword his atonement. (68)

Iphigenia’s role as plot motivator in Agamemnon is later reinforced in Aeschylus’ The Choephori when Electra refers to her “sister, cruelly sacrificed.” Closely following this line, Orestes appeals to Zeus with the reminder that his father, Agamemnon, “worshipped thee with bounteous gifts” (86). This supplication can be read as an allusion to Iphigenia as well, for it echoes the Chorus heard in Agamemnon: “So he found heart to slay his own / Innocent child to aid a war / Waged for a stolen wife’s sake, / A ritual to bless a fleet’s voyage” (24).

In the Electra of Sophocles, again, Clytemnestra gives the sacrifice of Iphigenia as her motive for revenge. As she speaks to her daughter, Electra, Clytemnestra’s disdain of her husband is clear:

Evermore,
Thy father, and naught else, is thy pretext;
As that he died by me . . . By me? Right well
I know ’tis true. That deed deny I not,
For Justice seized him, ’twas not I alone;
And thou should’st aid her, wert thou wise of heart,
Since that thy father, whom thou mournest still,
Alone of all the Hellenes had the heart
To sacrifice thy sister to the Gods,
Although, I trow, his toil was less than mine,
And little knew he of my travail-pangs.
And now, I ask thee, tell me for whose sake
He slew her? “For the Argives,” sayest thou? (200)

In his version of Electra, Euripides also uses the sacrifice of Iphigenia as the basis for Clytemnestra’s retribution. Here Clytemnestra, in her most sympathetic incarnation, again tells Electra:

Of Tyndareus [Clytemnestra’s father] was I given to thy sire—
Not to be slain, nor I, nor those I bare.
He took my child—drawn by this lie from me,
That she should wed Achilles, —far from home
To that fleet’s prison, laid her on the pyre,
And shore through Iphigeneia’s snowy throat! (2: 91-93)

Although Clytemnestra also mentions the presence of “that prophet-maid,” Cassandra, as secondary justification for her actions, in the following speech of lamentation she quickly returns, with the hypothesis of gender reversal, to her primary motivation, the loss of Iphigenia:

Now had Menelaus from his home been stoln,
Ought I have slain Orestes, so to save
My sister’s lord? How had thy sire endured
Such deed? Should he ’scape killing then, who slew
My child, who had slain me, had I touched his son?
I slew him; turned me—’twas the only way—
Unto his foes. (2: 93)

In all dramatic versions, then, it is Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia to ensure winds for his passage to war that has clearly prompted Clytemnestra to murder him. The tragic and violent effects of her bereavement for Iphigenia are foreshadowed in her speech to Agamemnon in Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, lines that could easily be spoken by O’Neill’s Christine about her son, Orin:

Come, if thou go to war, and leave me here
At home, and through long absence tarry there,
With what heart, think’st thou, shall I keep thine halls,
When vacant of her I behold each chair,
Vacant each maiden-bower, and sit me down
In loneliness of tears, and mourn her ever?
“O child, he which begat thee murdered thee
Himself, none other, by none other hand,
Leaving unto this house such vengeance-debt!”
Seeing there needeth but faint pretext now
Whereon both I and thy seed left to thee
Shall greet thee with such greeting—as befits!
Nay, by the Gods, constrain not me to turn
Traitress to thee; nor such be thou to me. (1: 109-11)

In Mourning Becomes Electra Ezra Mannon, too, has “sacrificed” his son, Orin, to the Civil War, a brutal fact that his wife Christine has never forgiven. As in its ancient counterparts, this sacrificial act has taken place before the play begins yet sets in motion subsequent deeds of infidelity and murder. In Act Two of “Homecoming,” Christine’s exchange with her daughter, Lavinia, is startlingly reminiscent of the above-quoted lines from Agamemnon, from the Electras of Sophocles and Euripides, and from Iphigeneia at Aulis:

CHRISTINE. . . . when Orin was born he seemed my child, only mine, and I loved him for that! (bitterly) I loved him until he let you and your father nag him into the war, in spite of my begging him not to leave me alone. [. . .]

LAVINIA. (sternly) It was his duty as a Mannon to go! [. . .]

CHRISTINE. Well, I hope you realize I never would have fallen in love with Adam if I’d had Orin with me. When he had gone there was nothing left—but hate and a desire to be revenged—and a longing for love! And it was then I met Adam. I saw he loved me— [.] (287)

In this passage O’Neill’s syncretic vision is particularly striking. He distinctly mirrors the retaliatory Clytemnestra of Aeschylus: as in Agamemnon, here Christine plainly states that the loss of her beloved child prompts her crimes of infidelity and impending murder. The imperious Clytemnestra of Sophocles is evident too in Christine’s bitterly unapologetic tone. Just as plainly, O’Neill also captures the anguished humanity of the Euripidean Clytemnestra in Electra and Iphigeneia at Aulis when Christine’s sorrowful isolation impels her toward adultery and murder. Harold Bloom calls Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra “a figure of negative sublimity” (vii). In Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill skillfully amplifies and perfects this figure. The character of Christine exemplifies O’Neill’s understanding of the complexities of human nature: as an extraordinarily keen fusion of her predecessors, she is truly a three-dimensional dramatic character.

Carmen Alvarez voices the opinion of many scholars when she claims that Christine “kills her husband because of her passionate love for Adam” (36). These feelings of passion, however, are subsequent to her feelings of anger and resentment at the loss of Orin. Like the Clytemnestra of Euripides’s Electra, Christine has “turned ... unto his foes” (2: 93) for help in achieving revenge against her husband. In “The Dynamics of Misogyny” Froma Zeitlin acknowledges that in Agamemnon “the queen’s primary motive was maternal vengeance for her child, Iphigenia; her second one was the sexual alliance she contracted with Aegisthus in her husband’s absence” (55). As is the case in each incarnation of her ancient literary predecessor, Christine’s affair with Brant is an ancillary development, secondary to the loss of Orin, her beloved child, which loss leaves her bereft and “longing for love” (“Homecoming” 287). For Christine, just as for Clytemnestra in Iphigeneia at Aulis, the loss of her child has indeed caused her to forget her duty and focus on revenge:

BRANT. It would be damned queer if you fell in love with me because I recalled Ezra Mannon to you!

CHRISTINE. (going to him and putting an arm around his shoulder) No, no, I tell you! It was Orin you made me think of! It was Orin! (292)

The insistence on Orin’s identification here is also confirmation that Christine’s missing child is the foremost reason for her embittered machinations. Christine is not merely luxuriating in an illicit affair; the affair itself is driven by her loss. Like that of Aegisthus, Brant’s role as a lover becomes subordinate to his role in the drama as accomplice in exacting Christine’s “maternal vengeance” (Zeitlin 55). In “Eugene O’Neill’s American Eumenides” Richard Moorton, Jr. explains that the ancient Greeks were a “shame culture.” He further explains, “When Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon in the first play of the Oresteia, she deprives him not only of his life but of that which gave it value, his honor” (367). One can take this parallel a step further: deprived of her child, whose love gave her life its value, Christine first faces loss as a mother. She does not love her daughter, Lavinia.

In substituting the male Orin for the female Iphigenia in Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill creates the Freudian incest theme, bold and advanced in 1931, the year of the play’s first production by the Theatre Guild (Sheaffer 387). ⁵ This profound psychic wound initiates her desire for an equally ignominious end for her husband. Clytemnestra’s alliance with Aegisthus completes her husband’s disgrace. Christine’s role in life is limited by the constraints of Puritan mores to that of wife and mother. Bereft of her child, unfortunately her only love object, her own life thus devalued, Christine likewise seeks to injure her proud husband by entering into a sexual relationship with another, lesser man. Brant is indeed the “faint pretext” Christine needs to arrange an “ill home­coming” ⁶ for her husband (Iphigeneia at Aulis 1: 111).

In Act Three of “Homecoming” the absence of Orin is again alluded to as the impetus for Christine’s bitterness and lack of affection:

MANNON. I don’t want you to baby him when he comes home, Christine. It would be bad for him to get tied to your apron strings again.

CHRISTINE. You needn’t worry. That passed—when he left me. (303)

Christine’s possessive power as a mother over her favorite child has been denied; Mannon’s act of removing Orin from Christine has transformed her into a figure of wrath. Mannon, like his counterpart Agamemnon, substitutes the glory of war for the sanctity of the family. When he abruptly severs the abnormally close bond of mother and son, Christine no longer feels her obligation to her unloved husband in his role as patriarch.

In “The Hunted” Christine, in speaking to Hazel, Orin’s would-be love interest, once more alludes to the pivotal event of her loss of Orin, which parallels the sacrifice of Iphigenia and explains her ultimate poisoning of Mannon:

CHRISTINE. I was like you once—long ago—before— (then with bitter longing) If I could only have stayed as I was then! Why can’t all of us remain innocent and loving and trusting? But God won’t leave us alone. He twists and wrings and tortures our lives with others’ lives until—we poison each other to death! (326)

 

After murdering her husband, Christine tells Orin, “I want to make up to you for all the injustice you’ve suffered at your father’s hands” (338). This statement reinforces Christine’s perception of Orin as his father’s victim and echoes the Clytemnestra of Agamemnon, who acknowledges her husband’s murder as “Justice here accomplished for my child” (65). Christine’s words and actions are not alone, however, in pointing to Orin as a modern displaced Iphigenia in Mourning Becomes Electra. Mannon’s secretive behavior concerning the fate of Orin also mirrors that of Agamemnon toward Iphigenia. In Iphigeneia at Aulis Agamemnon, resigned to the necessity of sacrificing his daughter, laments, “what shall I say unto my wife, / Or how receive her?—with what countenance meet?” (1: 45). Later, he implores Menelaus, “Take heed for one thing, brother, through the host / Passing, that Clytemnestra hear this not, / Till I to Hades shall have sealed my child” (1: 51). In “Homecoming” Mannon is likewise first deceptive by omission and then evasive about Orin, as can be seen in the following conversations:

PETER. Orin not writing doesn’t mean anything. He never was much of a hand for letters.

 

HAZEL. I know that, but—you don’t think he’s been wounded, do you, Vinnie?

 

LAVINIA. Of course not. Father would have let us know. (270)

Mannon did not report Orin’s injury in the Civil War, as he is later forced to admit:

CHRISTINE. Where is Orin? Couldn’t you get leave for him too

MANNON. (hesitates—then brusquely) I’ve been keeping it from you. Orin was wounded.

LAVINIA. Wounded! You don’t mean—badly hurt?

CHRISTINE. (half starting to her feet impulsively—with more of angry bitterness than grief) I knew it! I knew when you forced him into your horrible war—! (then sinking back—tensely) You needn’t trouble to break the news gradually, Ezra. Orin is dead, isn’t he? (303)

Again, we see that Christine’s resentment toward her husband originates with Orin. Like Iphigenia, Orin too has been “forced” into assuming a heroic wartime role against his mother’s wishes.

O’Neill’s character studies for his trilogy show that Iphigenia, her sister Chrysomethis, and Cassandra were originally intended to appear as characters in Mourning Becomes Electra (Floyd, Eugene O’Neill 187-192). Also known is the fact that O’Neill initially intended to have actors wear masks in his trilogy. Although such ideas were rejected during the writing process, many of them have found their way into the play in oblique forms. Tanya Schlam explains that in creating Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill “eliminated some ideas, and condensed or transformed others to create a powerful, unified drama” (78). As the principal cause of Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, Iphigenia is too important a character for O’Neill to have eliminated entirely in his reworking of the story. A close examination shows that she has indeed been incorporated into the persona of Orin. Although the connection is not always an obvious one, clearly the character of Iphigenia is similar to that of Orin in ways that Orestes is not. Most importantly, as an object of sacrifice, Iphigenia alone is the offspring connected to war in all ancient versions of the tragedy. Orestes is as yet too young to be a soldier. In “The Hunted” Orin tells us that his father “was the war to me—the war that would never end until I died” (328). This statement is subtly reminiscent of Iphigenia’s sacrifice: for her father, Agamemnon, the war could not end, nor could it even begin, until her death.

Another connection between the two characters is that Iphigenia in Iphigeneia at Aulis does not literally die but is spared by the goddess Artemis at the last minute. In Euripides’ play the priest carefully measures his stroke and plunges his knife toward Iphigenia’s throat but finds he has killed instead a large deer that has miraculously taken her place before the altar. In Mourning Becomes Electra Orin is spared as well in an equally “close shave” (303) with a bullet. Both characters are transformed by their experiences: Orin, severely traumatized by shock, becomes a ghost of his former self, wishing that he had never “come back to life—from [his] island of peace!” (352). In Iphigeneia at Aulis Iphigenia is supernaturally transported to the land of the Taurians to preside over the temple of Artemis there. Her subsequent experiences are dramatized in Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians. The land of the Taurians, now known as Crimea, is an island-like peninsula bordered on three sides by the Black Sea and on the northeast by the Sea of Azov. Orin’s dreams of an island refuge, so thematically important to all the main characters in Mourning Becomes Electra, can therefore be connected to Iphigenia and her sanctuary as well.⁷

Both Iphigenia and Orin willingly yield to their similar fates, each bound by a sense of duty. In Iphigeneia at Aulis Iphigenia initially laments the prospect of death but at last tells her mother, “resolved I am to die” (1: 129). A sympathetic Achilles perceives such stoic heroism as a “hasty impulse” (1: 135) and pleads with her to avoid the “battle-shock” (1: 133) of sacrifice. Iphigenia submits to her father’s will, ignoring her mother’s tearful pleas of, “Hold!—O forsake me not!” (1: 139). Similarly, Orin fulfills his father’s wishes by enlisting in the army to fight in the Civil War. Christine tells us that she too has begged Orin to stay by her side—appeals that go unheeded by her determined son. In “Homecoming” Mannon explains that Orin too suffers from “brain fever from the shock” (303) of battle. Orin’s mad rush toward enemy lines is the final “hasty impulse” that both ends his involvement in the war and ironically labels him a hero.

Finally, Orin is described as “gentle,” “boyish,” and a “baby” throughout the play. Never overtly masculine, “a soldierly bearing is unnatural” to Orin, and he is first seen wearing an “ill-fitting” military uniform (327). Although he is of marriageable age, Orin clings to Christine and then to his sister, Lavinia, and the overt sexuality of the native islanders fills him with disgust. Iphigenia’s purity is certain; Orin’s sexual inexperience is merely implied in Mourning Becomes Electra before he is ultimately and complexly driven to incestuous impulses. Orin is his mother’s pride and joy. His chastity and perpetual adolescence could enable her to believe that she is not in fact getting “old and ugly” (297). Orin’s love for his mother never transforms into romantic love for an eligible woman, such as Hazel. Similarly, Iphigenia’s dutiful love for her father causes her to be sequestered away from the outside world and prevents her from ever realizing romantic love. Christine describes Orin in tender, possessive terms reminiscent of Clytemnestra toward Iphigenia. Christine claims that Orin is “my child, only mine” (“Homecoming” 287), as the Aeschylean Clytemnestra calls Iphigenia “my child” (Agamemnon 65), as the Sophoclean Clytemnestra refers to Iphigenia as “my daughter” (200), and as the Euripidean Clytemnestra calls Iphigenia “my child” (Electra 2: 93).

Orin Mannon is a uniquely binary character, an intricately layered palimpsest of male and female, victim and avenger. O’Neill’s subtle integration of Orestes and Iphigenia as source characters creates a truly tragic figure in Orin, who cannot sustain both life and agony. Orin’s conflicting duality embraces the curious ironies of humanity that so thoroughly compelled his creator. His inner conflicts arise from a sense of both culpability and helplessness that spring from his literary progenitors. Like Orestes, Orin is ultimately tortured by his act of vengeful matricide. Like Iphigenia, whose conflicted sacrifice begins Agamemnon’s ultimate downfall and therefore Clytemnestra’s and Orestes’ guilt, Orin is also an involuntary first cause that sets O’Neill’s drama in motion.

NOTES

¹ The modern spelling of “Iphigenia” will be used except when earlier editions are quoted or referred to, in which case the alternate spelling, “Iphigeneia,” will beused.

² As detailed in Louis Sheaffer’s O’Neill, Son and Artist and more recently in Stephen Black’s Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, among others.

³ Virginia Floyd, in The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment, also recognizes that Orin is an amalgam of two characters, Orin and O’Neill’s “discarded” (391) character, Hugh, a second, effeminate Mannon son. But my argument for Orin as influenced by the literary counterpoint character of Iphigenia is based on the complex issues discussed in this paper rather than that of a hypothetical character who would have affected the personality only of Orin.

⁴ Translations and editions are identified in the list of Works Cited. Which editions and translations of these plays that O’Neill read are unknown. However, using for this essay editions published earlier than 1926, the year in which O’Neill first noted the “germ idea” (Work Diary 25) for Mourning Becomes Electra, provides the most authentic texts as a basis for comparison and sources.

⁶ O’Neill’s probable source for the title of the first play of his trilogy.

⁷ In A Drama of Souls Egil Törnqvist thoroughly explores the use of symbolism in “practically all” (45) of O’Neill’s plays. See pages 38, 133-134, 179, and 191-192 for specific references to the recurrent theme of islands in Mourning Becomes Electra.

WORKS CITED

Aeschylus. The Oresteia of Aeschylus, transl. R. C. Trevelyan. Liverpool: UP of Liverpool, 1922.

Alvarez, Carmen Gago. “‘Hýbris and the Mannons’: A Study of Eugene O’Neill’s Trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra.” Estudos Anglo-Americanos 17-18 (1993­1994): 23-41.

Black, Stephen A. Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Aeschylus’s The Oresteia: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford UP, 1972.

Easterling, P. E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Euripides. “Electra.” Euripides. 4 vols. Trans. Arthur S. Way. London: W. Heinemann, 1920-1925.

___ . “Iphigeneia at Aulis.” Euripides. 4 vols. Trans. Arthur S. Way. London: W. Heinemann, 1920-1925.

Floyd, Virginia, ed. Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays. New York: Ungar, 1981.

___ . The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment. New York: Ungar, 1987.

Moorton, Richard F., Jr. “Eugene O’Neill’s American Eumenides.” Classical and Modern Literature 10.4 (1990): 359-372.

O’Neill, Eugene. Selected Letters. Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. New York: Limelight Editions, 1988.

___ . “Mourning Becomes Electra.” Three Plays. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

___ . Work Diary 1924-1943, Vol. I. Preliminary edition. Transcribed by Donald Gallup. New Haven: Yale University Library, 1981.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

 

Schlam, Tanya. “Eugene O’Neill and the Creative Process: The Drafts of ‘Homecoming.’” The Eugene O’Neill Review 23 (1999): 78-97.

 

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill, Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

 

Sophocles. “Electra.” The Tragedies of Sophocles. transl. E. H. Plumptre. New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1920.

 

Törnqvist, Egil. A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Super-naturalistic Technique. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.

Zeitlin, Froma I. “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” In Aeschylus’s The Oresteia: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988: 47-71.