Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture (review)

This is an ambitious and thought-provoking study, a psychoanalytical examination of five selected twentieth-century authors' treatments of all or part of the Electra myth. Scott's sensitive and insightful readings are based on extensive interdisciplinary research. Her writing is concise and persuasive, with an ideal balance between theory and its application, and with just enough biographical and historical background information to place the works in context. The Electra myth emerges as fascinating and greater than any of its retellings. Scott has tapped into an ongoing undercurrent in the human story.

Sigmund Freud does not fare so well in the book. Neither the man (who snubbed his mentor, Josef Breuer) nor his theories, which were necessarily based on his own limited personal experience as a male, can withstand Scott's convincing criticisms. She prefers Julia Kristeva's theories and puts them to particularly good use in her discussion of "Sylvia Plath's Electra Enactment," where she shows how the metaphors of consumption in Plath's early poetry are later countered by images of "reverse incorporation" (152), which is all part of Plath's grieving the death of her father from diabetes (when she was eight) and moving beyond her preoccupation with him. Scott is to be especially congratulated for her work in this final chapter of the book, because she is able to see beyond the superficial ugliness of some offensive verses and understand their healing function for the writer. There remains the awkward fact of Plath's suicide, which Scott does not seem prepared to interpret as the murder Plath did commit, although her self-description as having an Electra complex suggested an inclination towards matricide and she herself was a mother.

Scott's second chapter, her interpretation of Heiner Müller's highly condensed, eight-page Hamletmaschine, also demonstrates her skill in dealing lucidly with difficult material. Three chapters are devoted to Hugo von Hofmannsthal's seminal drama Elektra, which was written at the beginning of the twentieth century and influenced by modern dance. Scott calls Electra's dance of death a "strikingly daring innovation" (27) that throws the "entire tragic peripeteia" (43) off balance. It was nevertheless an innovation that would be imitated, an appealing expansion of the myth that heightened its effectiveness on stage. Scott goes beyond cultural and historical observations, though, to suggest why Hofmannsthal was so susceptible to the influence of dance. This is where the book becomes very interesting. In chapter 3, "From Pathology to Performance: Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Elektra and Sigmund Freud's 'Fräulein Anna O.,'" Scott points out that both Anna O. and Electra's mother Klytämnestra, who is "at least as mad as her daughter" (73), suffer from an "acute aphasic disorder" (73), something Hofmannsthal was uncommonly suited to portray because, as described in his "Letter to Lord Chandos," he himself seemed for a while "to have been afflicted with a rare form of linguistic aphasia" (74). Hofmannsthal was distressed by "the slippery quality of language" (75), and Elektra was his first major publication after his "literary breakdown" (75). The great attraction of dance for such a person is that it does not use words. It is visual – and silent.

Hofmannsthal rewrote Elektra in 1909 as the libretto for a one-act opera by Richard Strauss. Then it was Strauss's turn to add a new effect. Scott's fourth chapter, "Choreographing a Cure: Richard Strauss's Elektra and the Ironic Waltz," is a fine piece of music analysis showing how Strauss's insertion of the traditional Viennese waltz into a composition verging on atonality serves as a clue to the audience that Electra is not as crazy as she would let on.

Scott's analysis of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities focusses on the similarity of the relationship between the siblings Ulrich and Agathe compared with that between Orestes and Electra. The link to the Electra myth is rather tenuous, as there is limited action and Scott...