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Matricide and femininity
Electra's role in the murder of her mother has been hotly contested by scholars throughout time. Many use Electra's by-proxy killing of her mother as a representation of daughter-inflicted matricide.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung attributes her behavior to what he coined as the "Electra Complex," the jealousy of the daughter towards the mother for her sexual engagement with the father. Sigmund Freud disagreed with this claim, noting that the "Oedipus Complex" cannot be applied directly to the female sex, since daughters do not undergo the same penis-envy as sons. Many contemporary scholars have theorized what this matricide means in the context of womanhood: Dana Tor invokes Lacan to argue that Electra's scheming represents a "ravage" between mother and daughter; Doris Bernstein sees the murder as a step on the path towards Electra's individuation; and Melanie Klein views it as emblematic of the dual power of the psyche to split of the mother into a good object and a bad one. Serena Heller recalls Ronald Britton's idea of the Athene-Antigone Complex to explain Electra's hatred of her mother deriving from an intense idolization of her father and, thus, a compulsion to exonerate herself from the restraints of feminity and the female body. Once the girl recognizes her gendered difference in the world, she must undergo re-cognition, deciding whether to mourn the maleness that they do not possess, or engage in a choice which frees them from their gendered bind. Athene, Antigone, and Electra all have a desire for "female castration" that dictates their choices in their patriarchal societies. Tor ultimately claims that the convergence of both Orestes' and Electra's motivations for revenge are two-fold: both a repayment for the debt of desire and a symbol of feminine jouissance. They must repay their Freudian or Jungian debts from the petals of desire. Their jouissance in her death arises from a pre-genital dichotomy of love and hatred from the son and the daughter towards the mother. Amber Jacobs also claims that the matricide in the Oresteia ultimately embodies a societal repulsion towards the female gender, as Athena's motherless status allows Zeus to argue that the father is more important than the mother and absolve Orestes of his crimes.

Professor of philosophical and historical anthropology Elizabeth von Samsonow notes the intense debate over Electra's relevance in the murder of Clymenestra—Sophocles, for example, viewed her as a key component of the killing while Aeschylus sees her as incidental—but refutes the tendency to shoehorn her motivations into Freud's model. She asks for scholars to reconsider Electra as undergoing vagina-envy, resulting from the woman's powerful and sexually-active position in a pre-Hellenic society. By liberating Electra from the male-centric complexes and histories that restrict her motivations, study of mother-daughter relations can evolve into an "outline of a future world." In another of her works, Jacobs, too, writes on the untheorized state of matricide in literature and asks for an expansion of symbolism beyond the classic Oedipean model.

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Electra's role in the murder of her mother has been hotly contested by scholars throughout time. Many use Electra's by-proxy killing of her mother as a representation of daughter-inflicted matricide.

Article body
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung attributes her behavior to what he coined as the "Electra Complex," the jealousy of the daughter towards the mother for her sexual engagement with the father. Sigmund Freud disagreed with this claim, noting that the "Oedipus Complex" cannot be applied directly to the female sex, since daughters do not undergo the same penis-envy as sons. Many contemporary scholars have theorized what this matricide means in the context of womanhood: Dana Tor invokes Lacan to argue that Electra's scheming represents a "ravage" between mother and daughter; Doris Bernstein sees the murder as a step on the path towards Electra's individuation; and Melanie Klein views it as emblematic of the dual power of the psyche to split of the mother into a good object and a bad one. Serena Heller recalls Ronald Britton's idea of the Athene-Antigone Complex to explain Electra's hatred of her mother deriving from an intense idolization of her father and, thus, a compulsion to exonerate herself from the restraints of feminity and the female body. Once the girl recognizes her gendered difference in the world, she must undergo re-cognition, deciding whether to mourn the maleness that they do not possess, or engage in a choice which frees them from their gendered bind. Athene, Antigone, and Electra all have a desire for "female castration" that dictates their choices in their patriarchal societies. Tor ultimately claims that the convergence of both Orestes' and Electra's motivations for revenge are two-fold: both a repayment for the debt of desire and a symbol of feminine jouissance. They must repay their Freudian or Jungian debts from the petals of desire. Their jouissance in her death arises from a pre-genital dichotomy of love and hatred from the son and the daughter towards the mother. Amber Jacobs also claims that the matricide in the Oresteia ultimately embodies a societal repulsion towards the female gender, as Athena's motherless status allows Zeus to argue that the father is more important than the mother and absolve Orestes of his crimes.

Professor of philosophical and historical anthropology Elizabeth von Samsonow notes the intense debate over Electra's relevance in the murder of Clymenestra—Sophocles, for example, viewed her as a key component of the killing while Aeschylus sees her as incidental—but refutes the tendency to shoehorn her motivations into Freud's model. She asks for scholars to reconsider Electra as undergoing vagina-envy, resulting from the woman's powerful and sexually-active position in a pre-Hellenic society. By liberating Electra from the male-centric complexes and histories that restrict her motivations, study of mother-daughter relations can evolve into an "outline of a future world." In another of her works, Jacobs, too, writes on the untheorized state of matricide in literature and asks for an expansion of symbolism beyond the classic Oedipean model.