[In the following essay, Rutter examines the role of gender in Harrison's Oresteia.]

The Headmistress considered the splendidly wrapped Christmas present from the boy she'd harangued all term. ‘They don't carry grudges,’ she said. ‘Children don't carry grudges.’ Then corrected herself. ‘Boys don't. Girls—They're a bit iffy with grudges.’

I thought of Clytemnestra, stuck in Argos, ten years brooding on that grudge that turned to gall the organ that had started as her heart.

Girls carry grudges.

Why?

Because girls remember. Girls, the stay-at-home Penelopes at the loom, do-nothings （while men, the do-ers, sail off to do war, to do history） have inexhaustible time to brood on actions men forget as soon as They're accomplished. Like killing. Like war. Each invasion is such a surprise, such an adventure for frank, forgetful men, their bluff memories wiped clean of any war ever before. ‘Oh what a lovely slaughter!’ they crow. King Agamemnon

He swung the god-axe, Zeus the Avenger's,
tore Troy's roots up, dug her earth over,
her god-shrines shattered, her altars all gutted,
fruitful earth scorched into futureless dustbowls …

Let's celebrate! Let's scoff: ‘I doubt raper Paris thought it was worth it.’

But women （be-ers, not do-ers） are also survivors. Girls remember. So women ask questions:

‘Where's my father husband boy?
where do all our loved ones lie?
six feet under near the Troy
they died to occupy.’

Women remember the men who return from war ‘jars full of cinders’:

wives mothers sisters each one scans
the dog tags on the amphorae
which grey ashes are my man's?
they sift the jumbled names and cry …

Girls carry grudges.

Girls are culture's memory bank. And, in the stunning innovation that is Clytemnestra （‘I'm no more a breaker of bedbond,’ she says, ‘than, as a woman, I wield a man's weapon’: but she's lying, self-consciously ironic; the props are already laid out for the king-killing she has planned, and she will wield the knives）, women remake men's erased history in the present. Ten years on, Agamemnon has forgotten all about Aulis when he feels the trammel he cast whooping over Priam's city enmesh him at home. The metaphoric bloodbath that was Troy is literalised when his own bath turns red; the slaughter at Scamander is recapitulated in the grudge murder that memorialises one death: Iphigeneia's.

Tony Harrison's Oresteia made me hear the claimant voice of this she-grudge story. Like his Medea, his Oresteia is a ‘sex-war opera’, where ‘opera’ means not singing, as in Medea, but work: the continuing cultural work of reinventing in our own time those most ancient of myths—of gender expectation and subversion, of phallocentricity and misogyny—that Aeschylus called up to give form and language to something he had to say to his audience in Athens in the fifth century B.C. （Were these plays—we know they were originally performed exclusively by men—performed exclusively to men? Was this trilogy Aeschylus’ warning of what happens when women are pushed （down, back, under, away） too far? Was the third inscription on the temple at Delphi—after ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing too much’—‘Keep women down’?）

Iphigeneia.

For those brought up on Shakespeare, the Oresteia is loaded with surprises. We expect it to be the man's story, but from the first, with Clytemnestra—‘That woman's a man the way she gets moving’; she ‘feel＼s］ like a woman but talk＼s］ like a man talks’—expectations are subverted. Aeschylus' plays may not have been titled originally, but in our theatre, nominally the Oresteia would seem to be Orestes' trilogy. Yet Orestes makes a very late entrance, and a disconcertingly early exit. Agamemnon looks more conventionally the stuff of tragedy, the triumph of Troy despoiled by the killing of the king. But in this male-centred heroic world （male preybirds, male warriors, male clanchiefs, male chorus: only the queen and Cassandra the captive prophet break the Agamemnon's gender embargo） masculine stature is devastatingly ironised in the theatre's imagery, for what stands before us to speak for the clan, for the war, for male enterprise, to tell the whole story, is a chorus of impotent geriatrics, ‘Argos geezers’,

                                        recruiter's refuse
too old to join the expedition …
… doddering about on sticks …

The second and third plays reverse theatrical images. The stage fills with women: the Choephori, the libation-bearers who are also Trojan captives, and the Eumenides, who are Furies but also Kindly Ones, are female masks. A woman resolves the trilogy's final agon, which displaces Orestes' male defence of matricide with a renegotiation of female power in past history and future society. What we see is that a whole train of fury-ous women fuels the action of the Oresteia, grudge-nudged by male adventurism. Helen （is it a name or a metaphor?） is what the men call their campaign: ‘lust lode’, ‘man hive’, the ‘she manned by too many hes’. For this goad, this Helen who slips her mooring, who cuts the seal from bedbond, all causes give way. So Artemis, fury-ous, presents Agamemnon the demonic choice. And Clytemnestra, fury-ous, rolls out the red carpet. Will King Agamemnon trample ‘the dark dye-flow right down to the doorway’ that looks like red cloth but is really blood, his daughter's blood, and that spilt from the innards of Artemis'hare? Agamemnon pulls off his boots. ‘I'll feel that I'm walking the women who wove it.’ Then Cassandra, the fury-ous rhapsode, smells blood, hears:

Listen. The rooftops. Monotonous humming
that drones on forever and means only terror.
The blood-bolstered fiend-swarm holds its debauches,
cacophonous squatters that can't be evicted.

Interprets:

Apollo Apollo waygod destroyer
Again you're Cassandra's appalling destroyer!
…
He mocked me, Apollo, though dressed as his prophet.
He wanted me scorned and derided by bloodkin,
called vagabond, mountebank, gypsy and starveling.

Electra, the fury-ous daughter, dispossessed by the mother who ‘bartered her bairns and bought … her bed mate’, speaks gall:

A surge of choler and grudge sweeps over my spirit,
spitted on pain like a stabwound or spearthrust.

Then there are the Furies themselves, the she-gods of grudges, ‘blood-battening bat hags’ says gynophobic Apollo. They call themselves, more wholesomely, ‘daughters of Night’:

NIGHT, Night, Mother Night
who bore us to uphold bloodright
…
The she-god of life-lot gave us these powers
ours, ours, for ever ours.
Those who kill their kin I hound
until I've got them underground.

The Fury-ous women are metamorphosed. The Oresteia ends with them installed at the centre of the Athenian polis, the cavern bowels of the Areopagus: the hill of Ares underpinned by reconciled Furies! It ends with a procession of women, robed in red raiment that recalls the blood dye-flow Agamemnon trampled. It begins there too. For it begins with Iphigeneia:

a virgin's blood launches the ships off to Troy
Her shrillings beseechings her cries Papa Papa
Iphigeneia a virgin a virgin
what's a virgin to hawks and to war-lords?
He says a god-plea her father
her father then orders
attendants to hoist her up on to the godstone
she bends herself double beseeching Papa Papa
wraps her clothes round her making it harder
up up she gets hoisted like a goat to the godstone
a gag in her mouth her lovely mouth curbed like a horse's
so that this bloodclan's not blasted by curses
her garments stream groundwards the looseflow of saffron
cloth drifting cloth trailing
…
What came next didn't see so can't tell you

‘Argos geezers’ avert their eyes, but Clytemnestra knows what happened next. So she waits for Troy's fall, Agamemnon's return, nursing the bloodgrudge instead of her child.

Astonishingly, in this sex-war, Clytemnestra has the right of it. She is a monster. But so is Agamemnon. She is appalling, shrilling over the body of ‘Shaggermemnon, shameless, shaft-happy, ogler and grinder of Troy's golden girlhood’ who ‘butchered his she-child … as some specious god-sop’. But her stance only inverts and parodies Agamemnon's predicament, storm-stymied at Aulis:

Can I choose either without doing evil
leave the fleet in the lurch shirker deserter
let down the Allies we've all sworn allegiance

Agamemnon concludes （as Clytemnestra will too）:

They're asking for blood it's right what They're
asking

So:

Necessity he kneels to it neck into the yokestrap
…
The war-effort wants it the war-effort gets it

Clytemnestra, the king killer, is ‘impious’, the ‘spouse fiend’ urged by ‘Black Ares amok’; but Agamemnon the child killer is unspeakable, manically deranged:

                                        harnessed to what he can't change
and once into harness his whole life-lot lurches
towards the unspeakable horror the crime
so men get gulled get hauled into evil
recklessness starts it then there's no stopping.

The language Tony Harrison writes for the Oresteia has the musculature of Beowulf: godgrudge, thronestone, clanchief, lifelot. It releases the primitive, the savage that Harrison came up against in Aeschylus, himself apparently deliberately archaic, and the effect of such temporal cross-referencing by Bard I and Bard II is to cut the Oresteia free from “period”. Its myths are older than time but circulate freely through history, permanently available to any culture needing to examine itself. For our contemporary theatre, and the modern re-make of the myths, Harrison's finest invention was those compounds—he-child, she-child, he-god, she-god, bed-bond, blood-bond—that give equal weight, equal linguistic status to male and female, that erase the “feminine ending” （the one Clytemnestra eschews?）, the poetic falling off: daúgh-ter, gód-dess. He-child and she-child grapple as equals, both at home on the wrestling mat that is so frequently the metaphoric site for the Oresteia’s gender war.

Other verbal strategies—Harrison's ranging eclecticism of imagery, his playfulness in translating, his breaking apart of language and his wrenching it from its cultural moorings—make the sex-war of the Oresteia a diachronic debate, one that we recognise as the same round of suppression-frustration-reaction that does violence to gender relations today. So Argos’ king is brutalised: ‘Shaggermemnon’. So Helen of Sparta is demonised in an act of linguistic deconstruction that works on her as she works on men, destroying her even as the myth-making vandals appropriate her name to other cultural uses:

HELEN wrecker HELEN Hell
the one who first named her knew what was fated—
HEL-a god guided his tongue right- EN
HEL-spear-bride gore-bride war-whore- EN
HEL-ship-wrecker man-breaker Troy-knacker- EN

So the tattoo beat out in this bleak War lyric fuses multiple references, linking Troy to Vietnam to the Gulf, making Ares a Thatcherite entrepreneur but arousing too the depraved images of human flesh sold to the Holocaust and the absurdity of men using phallic weaponry to assert their masculinity in war that spends them, that kills them, the ultimate castration, the gelding of death:

‘Geldshark Ares god of War
broker of men's bodies
usurer of living flesh
corpse-trafficker that god is—
give to WAR your men's fleshgold
and what are your returns?
Kilos of cold clinker packed
in army issue urns’

In Harrison, as in Aeschylus, men win. Clytemnestra's revenge is appropriated by Aegisthus who makes Agamemnon's death answer Thyestes' feast. Apollo's breathtaking defence of Orestes’ matricide is to annul the charge since mother and child are not really kin:

The mother of what's called her offspring's no parent
but only the nurse to the seed that's implanted.
The mounter, the male's the only true parent.
She harbours the bloodshoot, unless some god blasts it.
The womb of the woman's a convenient transit.

Apollo's misogyny exposes the concealed agenda. There is more at stake in the Oresteia than Orestes’ fate or the future of the house of Atreus; more at stake than sex-war in Argos: nothing less than sex-war, gender coup on Olympus where men win by the simple expedient of inventing a new race of ‘sky-gods’, ‘upstart he-gods’ to supplant female power, Mother Earth, Night, her daughters the Furies, the most ancient of she-gods, whose force is Creation, the blood of the womb. The Oresteia tells this story obliquely, via the traded insults of Apollo and Furies. He calls them ‘Animals! Beast-hags hated by he-gods!’ whose ‘bat-snouts go snorting in society's bloodtroughs.’ They quote back their brief:

When we came into being, they were marked out, the confines.
We and the Olympians have no intimate contacts.
…
When bloodkin kills bloodkin
that lets the Furies in
…
We memorise murders. We're never forgetful.
We terrify mortals. We spit on their pleadings.
We relish our office, though spurned by the he-gods.

For the Furies, Apollo the sky-god is the abomination, a ‘thief of a he-god’, a ‘strutting young upstart’, his ‘thronestool sticky with bloodspill’, condoning matricide, ‘poaching the preserves of she-fate and life-lot’: ‘They do things like that the new era he-gods’. What is oblique in the Oresteia Tony Harrison makes explicit in the Medea where men's motives in supplanting the Mother are irrefutably exposed even as their habits of historical revisionism are traced back to gynophobia:

As part of their hostile campaign
against the old Earth Mother's reign
men degrade her
in whatever form she takes
Goddess brandishing her snakes,
Helen, Leda …

So Medea is re-mythologised into a ‘half-crazed children-slayer’; Eve of the ‘monstrous patriarchal fib’ is just a bone of Adam's rib; Pandora, the source of evil. In each case,

The point of this projected role
is that it's the opposite pole
of Mother Earth,
and what was once the source of life
's degraded
…
＼by］ menfolk who attempt to drag
the All-Giving Goddess down to Hag
and source of ill.
…
but when the horn of plenty poured
with all the good with which Earth's stored
she was the pourer.
Embattled men had to reply
with gods, male gods from the sky
and not the earth.

Enter Apollo. Enter the he-gods. Enter Athena to cast the vote that saves Orestes’ life, that upholds Apollo, discountenances the Furies: Athena, a she-god, but one whose gender is inscribed within male revisionism, offspring of Zeus, born from his head. So men win in the Oresteia. The Furies, placated, accommodated, are also captured, contained in that cave-womb sited under Ares’ heel: ‘Keep women down.’ That's what we hear at the end of the Oresteia （and we must interrogate the ending: keep alert, says the Medea, for ‘As the sex-war's still being fought / which sex does a myth support / you should be asking’）. But what we see is something different. The stage picture shows us men sidling off after the trial—Apollo's exit is not even noticed. The stage belongs to women, Athena and the Furies. Trial turns into celebration, grudge into blessing, as a procession of women,

the women of Athens, girls, mothers, old women
will come as a glorious group in procession.
Drape our honoured guest-strangers in robes of deep sea-red.

Iphigeneia's bloody garments turn Grudge to Blessing, and what we see at the end of the Oresteia is she-child, she-god Triumph. Our ears contradict our eyes: men win! men win! But the stage picture remains on the retina. There is Blessing at the end. Or maybe verbal imagery and visual imagery resolve into a sex-war paradox:

Batter, batter the doom-drum, but believe there'll be better.