“C’est cela que c’est, la Tragédie, avec ses incestes, ses parricides: de la pureté, c’est-à-dire en somme de l’innocence.”
[quick and dirty translation: "That's what Tragedy is, with it incests and its parricides: purity, or in essence: innocence"]

Frederic_Leighton_-_Electra_at_the_Tomb_of_Agamemnon

Giraudoux’s Electra doesn’t care much for the men in her life, and abhors the women – or rather the woman, her mother Clytemnestra. Obsessed with her father’s death and in love with revenge, she manipulates her brother Orestes to murder Clytemnestra and her lover, their uncle Aegysthus, guilty of Agamemnon’s death.

Through Giraudoux’s eyes, Electra is both a martyr and an inquisitor, a burning flame of merciless justice. Little does she care what might need to be sacrificed in her quest for justice: the well-being of a city, the life of her brother, a few innocents slain during a civil war? None of it matters if her justice triumphs.

Similar to Anouilh’s Antigone, Electra (the one who illuminates) opposes bourgeois happiness and demands a life of truth and absolutes. Hers is an elitist attitude, intense, chilling in her rejection of compromises. She refuses quietude, forgiveness or tenderness – and brings nothing in return but tragedy and a fanatic’s purity.

The alternative, however, is nothing to get excited about: lukewarm feelings, mediocrity,a life devoid of passion, a system built to forever uphold status quo and stagnation. Aegysthus is much more its defender than Clytemnestra (who was also moved by violent passions), a king who hides in valleys so the Gods will not pay attention to either him or his city. It is an insult to everything Electra stands for, and she forces him to declare himself, to rise up and fight.

Giraudoux does not take sides; the reader can make his own decision between the corrupt but peaceful king or its pure, death-dealing daughter-in-law. Aristocrats or revolutionaries? The choice is well nigh impossible… Or is it?

Giraudoux might suggest an answer to the dilemma with two unexpected, secondary subplots. One is that of the gardener to whom Electra is almost married early in the story, in a desperate attempt by Aegysthus to deflect the wrath of the Gods on a peasant family. The wedding is called off at the last hour, and the poor gardener is left to deliver a monologue extolling the values of love. In it, he also reveals his very real love for Electra, and his bitterness at the broken marriage that leaves him to face a life of loneliness. There is sadness in the monologue and no attempt to avoid it, but there is also acceptance, transforming what could have been the tragedy of his life into drama.

The other secondary character who might hold a piece of the answer is Agathe: married to the epitome of bourgeois values, Agathe cheats on her husband as much as she can, but always lies about it, preserving her family’s peace. Inspired by Electra, she reveals herself for who she really is and accepts her inconvenient feelings… but as she does so before her lies have become as deadly as the House of Atreus’s, she gives life a chance, making it stronger, more truthful, and Electra can comment that “the Queen (Clytemnestra) envies Agathe.” Beyond the political questions that permeate the play, this manifests the psychoanalyical resonances to it – fitting for the story of Electra!