Clytemnestra both victim and executioner

Abstract

The present article deals with the relation between the concept of mask and some dynamics of fiction and revelation related to it. Each person, in the sense of individual, wears more masks, according to the roles and contexts of the society in which they live. The mask hides and, at the same time, reveals parts of the subject's personality. Even in the dynamic "victim-executioner" the roles, although apparently opposed, can sometimes be confused and overturned, and the masks can be exchanged. Among the figures of Greek mythology, Clytemnestra, the uxoricide who witnessed the murder of her first husband and newborn son, who saw the beloved daughter Iphigenia sacrificed for her husband Agamemnon's cravings for power, embodies the double role of victim and executioner. Clytemnestra has no other way to claim her role as a wounded mother and betrayed queen, if not to take power and exercise it in a bloody way: from being a victim she becomes an executioner, manifesting in her actions the primitive, cruel and murderous part she despised in the husband and in the world that surrounds her.