Marguerite Yourcenar, Electre ou la chute des masques ( Electra, or the Fall of the Masks), 1944, a stage play first performed at Théâtre des Mathurins in 1954 and failed. Published Paris: Plon, 1954.

 

In translation: Marguerite Yourcenar Plays; translated from the French by Dori Katz, in collaboration with the author, (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984).

 

Clearly modeled upon Euripides’ Electra as Electra here is married to Theodore, a peasant farmer. She feigns pregnancy in order to attract Clytemnestra to her farmstead. Lengthy plotting with Pylades is an intriguing innovation. The corker may be the revelation just before sustaining the mortal wound that Aegisthus is actually Orestes’ father. All the talk of Electra having witnessed various sexual encounters between Aegisthus and Clytemnestra has amounted to an unrealized situation, that Orestes was fathered by Aegisthus.

The revelation comes in Part 2, Scene 4 (p. 110 in Katz’ translation):

            Aegisthus: … Like all great loves, our love will remain hidden. I’ll induct you into a world of facts and gold, of precision and solidity. I will teach you everything I know, I’ll try to spare you everything I have suffered. Aegisthus’ son will justify my life.

            Orestes: Aegisthus son! For eighteen years I was the son of the other one, the murdered one, the redbeareded man who was slaughtered upon his return home. How I hated him, the father who forced me to avenge him! I staggered under the task like a young solider carrying the weight of a dead general away from the battlefield. And now suddenly I’m Aegisthus’ son. Now I’m forced to resemble someone else, not only to resemble him, but to toleratre him, not only to tolerate him but to support him, maybe even to console him. This man is what I’ll look like in twenty years. And I’ll have to carry his history, I’ll be stuck with his memories. I, Orestes, will never get out of this mess.

            Aegisthus: You don’t even have to love me. I’m perfectly content to love you as myself.

            Orestes: Let me know. Don’t hang around my neck, don’t look at me with that look that says you’ll put up with anything because I am your son. Take that and that. I never thought I would be so glad to strike you!
            Aegisthus: (Stumbling.) What have you done? This knife … My god! My poor child.

            Pylades: (From the threshold.) come, Orestes. One never knows in this world whether on eis the avenger of his father, or a patricide.

            Orestes: Electra. Give me your arm, Electra…

 

Pierre L. Horn, Marguerite Yourcenar, TWAS (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 79 -81.

“[The play] failed due to the director’s and actors’ inability to express the frenetic cruelty of the play. Notwithstanding bad reviews, Gabriel Marcel remarks on its ‘great beauty’ and Thomas Mann writes glowingly that it is yet another proof of Yourcenar’s considerable talent. She wrote a new Electre in order to find out what would happen if the givens of the ancient Greek legend were changed and if, for instance, Orestes were not the legitimate son of Agamemnon but the bastard child of Aegisthus: regardless of one’s filial status, the plays shows ‘the horrible or sublime persistence of human beings in remaining themselves whatever happens… Evidence has no hold on [them] because no certainty or disillusionment is stronger than the mixture of instinct and will which makes them what they are.’.” (Horn p. 79 -80 citing first Marcel then Mann then Yourcenar herself.

Gabriel Marcel, “Le Théâtre de Marguerite Yourcenar,” Livres de France, May 1964, p. 6.

Thomas Mann, letter to Marguerite Yourcenar, quoted by G. de Diesbach, “La chose du monde la moins partagée,” Cahiers des Saisons 38 (1964) 286, then by Horn on p. 108, fn. 19.

M. Yourcenar, Théâtre, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimare, 1971, 2:20