Clytemnestra Book Quotes

(...) well, there's a girl I used to know, and I wasn't sure if I should find her and talk to her or if I should just forget about it. (...) Oh! You must go to her and implore her. You must call her your Terpsichore, your Echo, your Clytemnestra. You must write poems for her, mighty odes - I shall help you write them - and thus - and only thus - shall you win your true love's heart.

Pandora is an agent of change, and the embodiment of the will of Zeus. She is not an unmitigated evil, as her box-opening reputation might have you believe. She is dual: kalon kakon, beautiful and ugly, good and evil. What Pandora brings to mortals is complexity. And that is true of all the women in this book: some have been painted as villains (Clytemnestra, Medea), some as victims (Eurydice, Penelope), some have been literally monstered (Medusa). But they are much more complicated than these thumbnail descriptions allow.

And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December 1910 human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles, and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.