Hofmannsthal, 'Elektra' and the representation of women's behaviour through myth

In Elektra Hofmannsthal created a drama more of its time than he cared to a dmit, but he concealed this specificity in the 'eternal' materials of myth. The play came into being in response to the promptings of a director (Max Reinhardt) and an actress (Gertrud Eysoldt). Contemporaries received the pl ay as a revision, either for good or bad, of accepted ideas of the Greeks. In a climate which identified a parallel between the 'cathartic' effect of Greek tragedy and the 'cathartic' treatment of hysteria in the new psychoan alysis, Elektra was readily understandable as an 'hysteric.' Hofmannsthal d oes not present her specifically as such but participates in a fin de siecl e trend to use hysteria as a synecdoche for female behaviours which challen ged the status quo. Hofmannsthal's own attitudes to women imply an anxiety about counter-cultural behaviour which, in Elektra, he mediates through two literary precedents: Sophocles' Electra and Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris. The article concludes by illustrating how Hofmannsthal constructs Elektra' s behaviour as 'improper.'