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The inevitability and impact of the past become most discernible when we return home, whether the return seems joyful or sad. For the ancient Greeks nostos meant returning home after a long and epic journey. From this concept we get the English word nostalgia , or acute longing for familiar surroundings. 2Collective nostalgia for a bygone era often centers on physical objects representing the past: an eight-track cassette, a landline phone, or a Polaroid camera denotes a time different from our own. Sometimes this pleasant nostalgia can obscure the darker truths about the reality of the time it craves. A particularly strong sentimentality is concentrated in textiles, especially when these objects purposely appeal to the past. A blanket may be a new, one-of-a-kind object, but if it has been sewn from old, previously worn-out clothing, it exists as a visual and tangible reminder of the passage of time.
More often than not, theater uses textile props and clothing as its primary representational medium, empowering the narrative. These symbolic fabrics and costumes can best be described as Shakespeare’s “decorations and costumes of grief,” as they act as physical and psychological traps, but also allow outward expression of “what the inside shows.” . Textiles proved exceptionally practical for conveying the inevitability of the past inherent in the drama ” nostos ” because of their nostalgic properties. In both classical and early modern drama, cloth and clothing serve as visual and material guides to convey the inevitability of the past and the risk of death inherent in coming home.
The physical manifestation of resentment, arrogance, and death is concentrated in Agamemnon’s infamous reddish-purple tapestry . To trap Agamemnon on the threshold of his homecoming, Clytemnestra instructs her servants:
Clytemnestra’s literal rolling of the red carpet takes the form of a gesture of goodwill, but the “oversaturated” river flowing into Atreus’ cursed house is intent on carrying Agamemnon to his doom. Clytemnestra’s perverse sense of justice seeks retaliatory bloodshed, not temporary punishment or reconciliation. Suggesting that the reddish-purple tapestry allows justice to bring Agamemnon to “the home he / never hoped to see,” Clytemnestra simultaneously hints that Agamemnon had no desire to return home to Argos, and foreshadows his imminent death, the last “home” for the returning traveler beyond the palace.
As with the other Atreides, Agamemnon’s arrogance foreshadows and brings about his tragic downfall. Clytemnestra seduces her husband to “assume the role of the arrogant oriental tyrant” by using manipulative support, using the seductive luxury of the tapestry as a selling point and evoking the image of Priam of Troy. 6 The cloth itself has both religious and psychological significance, and the abstract properties of the weaving of the cloth contain a more powerful symbolism. 7 From a religious perspective, although Agamemnon’s fear of incurring the wrath of the gods seems reasonable, this transgression seems trivial compared to the king’s other sins. If, as Oliver Taplin argues, “what ties this stage action to the past-and later to the future-is the theme and imagery of unholy trampling,” then it is the King’s previous transgressions, not the defilement of the cloth, that prevents him from full nostos. 8 Entering the tainted house on the reddish cloth creates an evocative scenic image of Agamemnon’s guilt, but also creates a visual connection between returning home and being trapped. 9
To trap Agamemnon even further, Clytemnestra summons the evil power of home. As the king walks through the reddish-purple cloth, Clytemnestra continues her monologue, peppered with references to homecoming, home, and cloth.
The significance of the color of the purple-red cloth cannot be overstated. Clytemnestra’s reference to the breeding of the purple stain by the sea and the dark red dye used to dye clothing-an allusion to the bloodshed and “stain” on Atreus’ house, and to the blood spilled by Agamemnon in killing Iphigenia-turns the threshold of the house into an altar. On this altar she offers both material goods and Agamemnon’s life.
Her comparison of his undelivered corpse to a net foreshadows her later use of a real net to ambush, trap, and kill him in a tub. The net imagery is repeated throughout the play; Cassandra prophesies that “the wife is a net he / marries to murder here / insatiable vengeance is coming” (807-809). She identifies Clytemnestra as a “net” and associates her character with capture and deception. Indeed, when later Clytemnestra displays the bodies of Cassandra and Agamemnon before the palace, she explains, “I threw a cloth over him with no exit / outlet – something like a net – / an evil wealth of cloth” (1038-1039). . In this confession, Clytemnestra equates cloth and net, reinforcing the ability of clothing to oppress those who wear it and the power held by those who use its symbolism–or actual physical properties–to control others.
Clytemnestra’s allusion to both the net and the cloaks in her sarcastic dismissal of Agamemnon’s often reported death in Troy further underscores the use of clothing as a net. Taplin does not say with certainty whether Clytemnestra uses the same cloth on which Agamemnon treads earlier in the play or another prop, but Muller points to a “well known and roughly contemporary” painting on a red-figure bowl by the artist Dokimasia. which shows Agamemnon entangled in cloth moments before his murder, as evidence that the reddish-purple tapestry may have served as the murder weapon. Nevertheless, Müller also argues that the explicit textual reference to the tapestry’s dual use as a net may have weakened the visual effect of Agamemnon and Cassandra’s bodies deployed on the excicle.for the audience to see. However, given that classical tragedians used props sparingly and for special emphasis, the intuition that one prop represented both the first cloth and the net carries weight. In this scenario, the connection between Agamemnon’s tragic fate and Clytemnestra’s desire to settle her marital and familial resentment through murder becomes palpable through the use of a single stage object of cloth. Her accomplice Aegisphus declares that he saw Agamemnon “caught in the net of justice,” emphasizing the connection between distorted justice and the inevitable entrapment of the cloth net (1213). Furthermore, the tapestry prevents Agamemnon from reaching full nostos.because, as Müller notes, “by Clytemnestra’s design and through the mediation of the cloth, the returned monarch approaches the palace without even setting foot on his native soil.” 14 Thus, Clytemnestra’s plan to prevent Agamemnon’s heroic return relies on the physical properties of her chosen weapon. Clytemnestra and the cloth cooperate to undermine Agamemnon, and the props’ ability to catch and kill reflects her penchant for duplicity and destruction.
The interplay between the evil house and the objects that do its bidding is the essence of the inevitable deadly homecoming. Speaking outside the realm of clothing and costume, but within the framework of the idea of home as an evil object, Cassandra reveals the invisible contamination of home.
Cassandra refers to the choir composed of the elders of Argos and describes another, hidden choir. “Evil” remains invisible to both the choir and the general public, but Cassandra insists on their importance, even though they occurred “long ago,” as the lingering smell warns her of ancient decay. Like Agamemnon, the house itself cannot escape its past, as Cassandra argues that evil cannot be undone. The deadly homecoming created by Clytemnestra’s network must be counterbalanced by a homecoming motivated by a different kind of justice. As Cassandra predicts, the cycle of vengeance breaks another nostos . She identifies the homecoming with Atreid, who until this point in the saga remains invisible.
As Cassandra predicts, Orestes will return to his native land virtually as a foreigner – even disguised as a stranger when he greets Clytemnestra in Hoephoras – before seeking refuge in Athens, a place that offers refuge but cannot be called Orestes’ home. Only through a version of justice other than retribution can Orestes break out of the cycle of vengeance and finally return to his purified home without fear of premature death. By killing his mother, the personification of the net, Orestes puts an end to the terror of the cloth in the house of Atreus.
