Agamemnon hesitates before treading the tapestries underfoot and entering the palace, just as Adam hesitated before taking the red apple Eve held out to him. Woman, it seems, does not suffer these qualms. She is not afraid, or else she is in the grip of something stronger than fear, stronger than obedience. Clytemnestra persuades Agamemnon, as Eve persuaded Adam. She alludes to the splendour and beauty of the tapestries, their costliness, his might in walking over them; Agamemnon is torn, torn between obedience to the gods and the desire to submit to his wife. It is as though, for a man, a woman represents the possibility of doing without God. She is a force of pure mortality, in whom the darkest and richest possibilities for living can be realised. Who are her gods? Whose authority, in the end, does she herself recognise?
He walks in, walks over the tapestries. He treads their beauty underfoot and she kills him. What does it signify, her need to get him inside? In a marriage, inside is where intimacy happens, where couples fight or make love, where they’re honest, where they’re their ‘real’ selves. Most marriages have a public face, an aspect of performance, like the body has its skin. A couple arguing in public is like the body bleeding, but there are other forms of death that aren’t apparent on the outside. People are shocked by cancer, so noiseless and invisible, and by the break-up of couples whose hostility to one another never showed. They seemed so happy, people say, for the idea that death might give no sign of its coming leads us to suspect it is already here. You were the last people, a close friend said to me, the last people we expected this to happen to. And this friend, like some others, went away, just as people run away from plague victims in their agony, for fear that it might be catching. Sometimes the phone rings in my half-empty house and a woman’s voice says, we’re so sorry. We were so sorry to hear.
Clytemnestra, in her husband’s ten-year absence, has become intimate with Aegysthus. He is not, of course, the father of her children. He is not her husband, for her husband still lives. She is queen of Argos but Aegysthus cannot be king alongside her, for the king — her husband, Agamemnon — still lives. There is no space for Aegysthus, no throne, no room. If Agamemnon were dead a space would be created: the fatherless children, the husbandless wife, the country with no king, these would be vacuums that needed filling to keep the enterprise of life afloat. But as it stands, despite Clytemnestra’s will, nothing about Aegysthus meets with a fair wind. His authority is rejected everywhere: the children resent him, the people refuse to recognise him, the country is viewed as being in a terrible plight. In marriage Clytemnestra found the force of life came up effortless and strong; children were born, power accrued, ambitions took root and flourished, but most of all there was belief, belief in the rightness and reality of it all. It is interesting what people will forgive, what they will tolerate, when they believe. When they doubt they will tolerate nothing, and Aegysthus is doubted by everyone except the woman Clytemnestra.
In Agamemnon’s absence Clytemnestra has had to play his role: she has learned that she is capable of governing his palace, of ruling Argos, of commanding his underlings. So the mystery of his masculinity has been, to an extent, unveiled; the form of male and female has been tested and found to be limitation and lie. This new relationship with Aegysthus has been chosen by the new unisexual Clytemnestra. She is seeking a new form, a new configuration of female and male. She is seeking equality. Children will not be born from equality, nor will empires be built or frontiers expanded, for the pure peace of equality begets nothing. It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before. To beget requires the domination of one thing by the other, the domination of female form by male content; then, in order to nurture what has been begotten, the reverse. Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have to use violence. To reach aftermath, first there has to be the event itself.
Why does she hate him so, this heroic husband of hers? Would she hate Aegysthus too if he were her bonded mate, father of her children, captain and gatekeeper of her life’s enterprise? Do all women have a special capacity to hate their husbands, all husbands the capacity to hate their wives with a hatred that is somewhere fused with the very origins of life? The first time I saw my husband after our separation I realised, to my surprise, that he hated me. I had never seen him hate anyone: it was as though he was filled up with something that was not of himself, contaminated by it, like a coastline painted black by an oil spill. For months black poisonous hatred has flowed from the fatal wound to our marriage, flowed through every source and outlet, soaked into everything, coated the children like the downy heads of coastal birds are coated in tar. I remember how towards the end it felt like a dam giving way by degrees, the loss of courtesy and caution, the breakdown of civility and self-controclass="underline" these defences seemed to define the formal core of marriage, of relationship, to articulate the separation of one person from another. Without them we would lose our form. Form is both safety and imprisonment, both protector and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken, but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place? The only alternative to form is chaos.
An outcast from marriage, I look at other marriages with a different eye. Silently I congratulate the couples I pass in the street, while at the same time wondering why they are together and I am alone. I know that they have succeeded where I have failed, yet I can’t seem to remember why this is so. Later in the Oresteia, when Clytemnestra has herself been murdered, the Furies tasked with representing her female outrage and keeping her righteous anger alive in the world keep falling asleep. They become drowsy, lazy, forgetfuclass="underline" they fail to remember and articulate the injustice she has suffered in her attempt to be free, to pursue the murderer and be his conscience, to keep cleaning the black tar of hate from her image. And I, too, cannot remember what drove me to destroy the life I had. All I know is that it is lost, gone. The blackness of hate flows and flows over me, unimpeded. I let it come. I cannot remember.
But Agamemnon killed Clytemnestra’s daughter, her first child. Men are said to resent the child that first takes the woman’s love and attention away. And it is true that a woman can find relief in loving something that is not her opposite. Her baby doesn’t judge her, doesn’t desire her: for a while it seems to reconnect her with her own childlikeness, her girlishness, her innocence, but in reality her links to that state have been irrevocably severed by motherhood. The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other. Out of their love they created an object, the baby, and in doing so they defined it, defined their love and its limitations.