Summary

Chapter Six, as with all chapters focalized by Orestes, is detailed in third person past tense narration. It opens when, following Dinos’ death and Aegisthus’ capture at the hands of Leander’s troops, Electra – who has now “taken up residence in her mother’s room” (235) – prepared for Leander’s visit to the Mycenaean palace. Electra had not come to Orestes’ room following Clytemnestra’s murder; she was instead “too busy making sure that her mother’s guards were surprised and strangled or hacked to death” (235). And in this regard, Electra became, at the end, not at all dissimilar from Clytemnestra. Orestes remarked that “his sister was dealing with the servants precisely as his mother had,” and further, that “Electra’s very voice, like her mother’s, had a way of emphasizing that she controlled things even when it was clear that she...