Hofmannsthal, Elektra and the Representation of Women’sBehaviour Through Myth

In Elektra Hofmannsthal created a drama more of its time than he cared to admit, 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 play 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’ treat‐ment of hysteria in the new psychoanalysis, Elektra was readily understandable as an ‘hysteric’. Hofmannsthal does not present her specifically as such but participates in a fin de siécle trend to use hysteria as a synecdoche for female behaviours which challenged 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’s Electra and Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris . The article concludes by illustrating how Hofmannsthal constructs Elektra’s behaviour as ‘improper’.