Matricide

Matricide in Fiction and Drama

One of the most well-known and influential fictional matricides is that committed by the Greek tragic figure Orestes, whose story is told in the Oresteia by the Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. The three plays comprising the Oresteia are Agamemnon, the Choephoroe, and the Eumenides. Orestes's mother, Queen Clytemnestra, and her lover kill Orestes's father, King Agamemnon, as revenge for Agamemnon's murder of Iphigenia. Ten years later, Orestes avenges his father's murder by killing his mother and her lover at the behest of Apollo. His sister Electra supports his actions.

The Furies have Orestes placed on trial for the crime of matricide. Apollo defends Orestes by claiming that his mother committed the greater [Page 735]crime, because patriarchal rights take precedence over those of the matriarch. The jury is evenly split, but Athena makes the deciding vote by freeing Orestes. Scholar Amber Jacobs has argued that the matricidal impulse as exemplified by the Oresteia should be reexamined to develop a Law of Matricide equal to Sigmund Freud's Law of Patricide in his theory of the Oedipal complex, which became one of the cornerstones of modern psychoanalytic theory.

Well-known literary matricides include those in the novels Carrie by Stephen King and The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. The house where Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his entire family in 1974 became the basis for the alleged hauntings popularized in the book and movies entitled the Amityville Horror. One of the most memorable popular-drama matricides was that of the character Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, based on the novel by the same name. After killing his domineering and berating mother, Bates misses her presence. He preserves her body through taxidermy and assumes her identity.

Matricides in History

Well-known historical matricides include Ptolemy X's murder of his mother Cleopatra III of Egypt in 101 B.C.E. and Roman emperor Nero's arrangement of the murder of his mother, Agrippina the Younger. Modern U.S. matricides sensationalized in the media include those of Jack Gilbert Graham, who killed his mother and 44 other United Airlines passengers with a bomb in her suitcase in 1955; Charles Whitman, who killed his mother and wife before embarking on a 1966 shooting spree from a tower at the University of Texas at Austin; John List, who killed his mother, wife, and children in 1971 and was caught after appearing on the television show America's Most Wanted in 1989; serial killer Edmund Kemper, who beat his mother to death in 1973; and Lyle and Erik Menendez, brothers who shot their parents in 1989.

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