Jocelyn Moore, University of Virginia
Among the staged houses of Attic tragedy, the Oresteia’s fury-infested house has garnered most frequent critical recognition for a trajectory that strikingly entangles with human characters’. While the house’s arc of intensifying personifications throughout Agamemnon (36–9, 962, 1087, 1090–1, 1307) and Libation Bearers (471–3, 698–9, 807–11, 841–3, 961, 963–4, cf. 32–6) merits dedicated study (Noel 2023 adduces most of the passages), this paper establishes the continued theatrical career of an expressive tragic house in Euripidean drama. A likely allusion in Euripides’ Electra to Aeschylus’ personified house illuminates the house’s communicative role in Electra and suggests a wider vein of Euripidean artistry. Building on the recent material turn in Greek tragedy (Noel; Wyles; Télo and Mueller; Coppola, Barone, and Salvadori; Mueller; Le Guen and Milanezi), this paper argues that tragic houses repay intensified discussion alongside the influential presences of smaller tragic “objects.”
Electra lures her mother into her “poor” (πένητας 1139) “smoke-filled” (1140) house. This movement prompts Electra’s chorus to recall Aeschylus’ entrapment scene from Agamemnon: “once … the roof and the coping stones of the house shouted, saying these things” (τότε … ἰάχησε δὲ στέγα λάινοί / τε θριγκοὶ δόμων, τάδ’ ἐνέποντος·… El. 1148, 1150–51). The chorus’ retelling of an earlier theatrical event frames the coming moment when Clytemnestra’s cries will filter through the face of the skēnē. Given Electra’s dense play with Agamemnon (Torrance, 14–33, Raeburn), the chorus’ personified house calls attention to a complex engagement with the profusely personified house of Agamemnon and Libation Bearers. Electra’s chorus appears to mark the continuity with Aeschylus’ skēnē, as well as a new communicative mode for the house. Unlike Agamemnon’s opulent domicile, Electra’s rustic house is not personified. Unlike the physical destruction Agamemnon’s chorus experiences—of a staged house “falling” and “the rainstorm’s house-destroying blow” (πίτνοντος οἴκου … ὄμβρου κτύπον δομοσφαλῆ Ag. 1532), a passage Electra’s chorus recalls when it apprehends “the house’s turning winds” (El. 1147–8)— Electra’s chorus hears thundering (748) which does not affect the staged house. Yet the house in Electra participates in the drama’s theme of vexed recognition (e.g. Gallagher), its face becoming a central site for disclosure. Amidst repeated gestures to the visible poverty of Electra’s house (e.g. 250–2) which starkly contrast with Agamemnon’s royal house (Hammond), Orestes concludes at some length (357–90) that the decorum and hospitality performed in relation to the staged house is a better indicator than wealth. By performing a positive expression of the country oikos, the house in Electra inverts the monstrously polluted oikos which Cassandra transmitted in her protracted meeting with a personified house in Agamemnon (Ag. 1080–1245).
By drawing attention to his recasting of a house with a voice in Electra, Euripides may draw attention to the artistry which underlies the intensified human-house interactions which characterize his dramas. For instance, physical violence to the staged house features in Bacchae, Heracles (Moore), and Orestes (1567–95), and the repeated vivid imagination of a speaking house in Hippolytus (417–18, 790–93, 1074–5) is fueled by a witnessing capacity very similar to Electra’s house.