In William Adolphe Bouguereau's Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862) (Figure I.1), Orestes turns away from his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he has killed to avenge the murder of his father, Agamemnon. Horrified rather than triumphant, Orestes is pursued by the Erinyes, or Furies, the three snaky-haired chthonic deities responsible for punishing blood crimes. Bouguereau's Clytemnestra – draped in red fabric, more swooning than dying – is utterly unlike the ferocious, ‘man-minded’ woman portrayed by Aeschylus (ἀνδρόβουƛος, Ag. 11), whose first thought on discovering that Orestes has returned is to defend herself with an axe (Cho. 889). Her graceful, relatively bloodless death contrasts also with the queasy intimacy created in the corresponding scene of Euripides’ Electra, in which Clytemnestra clings to her son, begging for mercy (1214–17) and showing him her breast (1207); in this version, Orestes describes how he hesitates, eventually covering his eyes with his cloak before slitting her throat (1221–3), as ‘the legs which [he] was born through’ (lit. her fruitful limbs - γόνιμα μέƛϵα, 1209) bend beneath her. Instead, Bouguereau romanticises and domesticates Clytemnestra, contrasting her pathetic figure with the ferocious energy of the Furies, a juxtaposition that recalls Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz's claim that female characters in Greek tragedy are represented as either sacrificial or vengeful.

This scene, and its many renditions and reinterpretations, expose some of the stereotypes and contradictions inherent in the complex interrelationship of revenge and gender. As in the case of Orestes, revenge is frequently depicted as a man's job: women incite and men act, performing the killings that establish their masculinity and protect their honour. Yet, while conceptualised as a quintessential masculine activity, revenge simultaneously unleashes the female Furies and the violent, ‘feminine’ emotions which threaten a man's reason and self-control. Hunted by the ‘hounds of his mother's hate’ (μητρὸς ἔγκοτοι κύνϵς, Aesch. Cho. 1054, cf. 924), Orestes is driven to near madness by their pursuit, his manliness undone by the same act that establishes it. Women, of course, also take revenge, as when Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon to requite the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. However, scholars are divided as to whether female avengers should be interpreted as honorary men, heroes in their own right, monstrous inversions of gender norms, or conduits through which male subjectivity is formed.