Unmasking Misogyny: Clytemnestra’s Demise in Aeschylus’ Oresteia
Classics
Volume 8 | Issue I | March 2024
International School of Astana ’26
Astana, Kazakhstan
My paper exploring misogyny in Aeschylus’ Oresteia through Clytemnestra was accepted for publication in The Schola on my birthday, 3 February. It feels very right to me now, because everything in this paper is life-affirming for me. Literature is the cornerstone of my life. I research it, and I am the author of two published papers. I create it, and one poem of mine, dedicated to Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle with a Bust of Homer’, has been published in The Ekphrastic Review. I patronise it, and I am the founder of the literary journal Timada’s Diary, named after Sappho’s poem The Dust of Timas. The publication is listed in Duotrope and Poets & Writers. It’s funny how everything related to literature inevitably connects me to the classics as well. My paper published in The Schola is a critical analysis of the myth of Orestes retold by Aeschylus. In it, I evaluate Greek misogyny as manifested through the bias of the Aeschylus narrative. The process of writing the paper was for me a fascinating game of hide-and-seek with the millennia-old allegories and subterfuges scattered throughout the text of the tragedy. It is for the sake of this game that I pursue literature and connect it to the classics. Only an ancient text, in my mind, can be so effortlessly artful and polyphonic. In the future, I intend to devote my career to these texts as a literary scholar.