Because she is a woman, Electra cannot act alone. Her mother and her mother’s lover have refused to
allow Electra to marry for fear that she will bear male offspring who will grow up to avenge
Agamemnon’s murder. Electra’s isolation is further emphasized by Sophocles, who has given her a sister,
Chrysothemis, whose character contrasts conspicuously with Electra’s. Unlike Electra, her sister is
willing to accept the current situation, and she urges Electra to “yield” to Clytemestra and her lover. The
one thing Electra cannot do is yield and, when a report is brought of the death of Orestes, Electra tries to
persuade Chrysothemis to join her in taking matters into their own hands and exacting vengeance
themselves, even though they are only women. Chrysothemis, while acknowledging the justice of what
Electra proposes, is too weak to follow her sister’s lead. Electra resolves, therefore, to act alone.
The report of Orestes’ death, however, is a fabrication, as the audience knows but the characters on stage
do not. By this point in his career Sophocles had thoroughly mastered the technique of dramatic irony and
one of the most dramatically effective scenes in this play is the detailed description of a chariot race at
the Pythian games, in the course of which Orestes’ chariot crashes and he is killed, his body so horribly
mangled that “no friend or relative could recognize him.” This scene has been brilliantly prepared by
Sophocles, who earlier in the play brought a stealthy Orestes on stage, instructing one of his servants to
deliver to the palace a false account of his death so that he can catch Clytemestra and her lover off guard.
The scene in which the false report is conveyed also exploits another feature of Attic drama that
Sophocles had been experimenting with since his earliest years as a dramatist. Near the beginning of
Sophocles’ career it had become permissible to add a third actor to the two that had sufficed for
Aeschylus’ The Persians and for other early dramas. This innovation (which some ancient sources
ascribe, probably wrongly, to Sophocles himself) took place before the end of Aeschylus’ lifetime, and
Aeschylus took advantage of the opportunity, to a limited extent, in The Oresteia. Sophocles’ use of the
third actor in his early Ajax had likewise been limited, but in Electra full dramatic advantage is taken of
having three speaking actors on stage at once. The account of Orestes’ death is delivered in the hearing of
both Electra and Clytemestra (as well as the chorus). We, the audience, are dynamically drawn into the
action of the play, not so much by the content of the speech, which we know to be false (although it is a
skillful and stirring narrative), but by the varying reactions that it elicits from the two women. For Electra,
this is the crowning disaster in a life that has been filled with wretchedness; it means the end of the one
hope that still remained for her, the hope of securing vengeance and, thereby, justice. Electra’s reaction is
contrasted directly with that of Clytemestra. Sophocles is too accomplished a dramatist to portray a
mother who is overjoyed at news of her son’s death, but he does make it clear that Clytemestra’s response
to the servant’s report is a sense of relief and security: She can now sleep at night, knowing that she no
longer needs to fear that Orestes will return and avenge her murder of Agamemnon.
The reactions of Electra and Clytemestra, different as they are from each other, are both misguided. In
fact, Orestes has returned, unrecognized by friends and relatives, and by the end of the play he has brought
relief to Electra and vengeance upon Clytemestra and her lover. Of course, the members of the audience
were fully aware from the start how the action would be resolved: Not only were they well prepared by
Sophocles’ skillful dramatic handling of the material, but the material was itself familiar from The
Oresteia and from other literary and artistic representations of the story. Sophocles’ originality lay in the
way in which he adapted and reacted to the work of his predecessors, especially Aeschylus. The
resolution in The Oresteia had involved the gods and the city of Athens, and the crisis on both the divine
and the human levels could be settled only by subordinating the claims of the family to the civic
organization of the state. But in Sophocles’ Electra the family reasserts itself, in the form of Electra’s
unbending devotion to her father’s memory and in her brother’s claim of justification in avenging
Agamemnon’s murder. As in The Oresteia, the gods seem to give their approval, but not in any direct
manner, since they take no part in the action of the play; rather, the role of the gods is hinted at through