Meditation Four: Interpretation is the fienst form of flattery.

Title/Subject:How are the three ways the story of Orestes and his family is told different from one another?

One wouldn’t think that three different people writing something based off of the same myth would end up telling such different stories, but they have. As I learned in my CI class, interpretation is everything. To put what I’m saying in more modern terms, I see the plays we’ve read so far an adaptation of the story of Agamemnon, Orestes, and Electra. This isn’t a foreign concept – writers and producers do this all the time today, so why wouldn’t it have happen in the time of ancient Greeks? It obviously did.
I see the trilogy we read by Aeschylus the original story – maybe because it was the first telling I read of the story, but also because it seems to be the most completely telling. There seems to be no huge bias towards Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, or Electra. It simply tells what happened – the war was fought, people died, revenge was had.
The way Sophocles told the story of Orestes and Electra was with Electra as the main character. Electra wasn’t a very dominate character in Aeschylus’ trilogy, but I could see why someone would be interested in her perspective. This reminds me of how writers can take minor characters in famous stories and construct completely new and different stories around their point of view. Author Gregory Maguire does this with characters like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz and an ugly stepsister from Cinderella. The plot of Sophocles’ Electra centers on the interaction between Orestes and his sister and the action they take against their murderess mother.
I find the way Euripides tells the story of Electra to be very, very different from the other writer’s views. Euripides takes Electra and the history behind her – the Trojan war, all the murders in her family – and condenses them. The war and the line of murders that start with the sacrifice of her sister are reduced into a few paragraphs of chorus work. What it does is show her life in a different setting all together – she was promised to a peasant man in order to keep her in line and in hopes that if she does have children, they will not be able to avenge her father’s death. This is more like a soap opera style way of telling her story. (Blasphemous, I know.)
While each of these writer’s have the same basic myth or story to work off of, like I said before, their interpretations make all the difference.