Why does Electra want revenge?

Electra wants revenge because she believes Argos lives under usurpers who killed her father. Clytemnestra’s reasons — Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, his return with Cassandra — do not erase, for Electra, the fact of murder and stolen rule. She has no court to appeal to; Aegisthus holds power. Her daily mourning is therefore both love for Agamemnon and pressure on the house of Atreus to finish what the gods commanded through Apollo.

She also refuses Chrysothemis’ path of silence. To Electra, compromise looks like complicity. Revenge is how she restores honor and ends the humiliation of serving her father’s killers. Sophocles keeps her desire sharp rather than abstract: readers hear specific curses, see her poverty, and watch her risk beatings. The play’s justice theme depends on taking that desire seriously before judging the matricide Orestes performs.