Cassandra by Christa Wolf

First published:Kassandra: Erzählung, 1983, 2 volumes (English translation, 1984)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: c. 1200 b.c.e. in the novel

Locale: Mycenae and Troy in the novel; Athens, Crete, and Mycenae in the essays

Principal Characters:

• Cassandra, the narrator, a Trojan princess and the priestess of Apollo
• Priam, and
• Hecuba, Cassandra’s parents, the King and Queen of Troy
• Aeneas, Cassandra’s friend and lover, who is destined to escape from Troy
• Anchises, Aeneas’ father, a benevolent old man who comforts Cassandra and other women of Troy
• Panthous, a priest of Apollo, Cassandra’s superior in the religious hierarchy
• Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks
• Helenus, ,
• Troilus, ,
• Paris, and
• Hector, Cassandra’s brothers
• Polyxena, Cassandra’s sister, who is sacrificed on the grave of Achilles
• Achilles (The Brute), a violent, lustful Greek warrior
• Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, who kills both her husband and Cassandra

The Novel

The captive Cassandra stands in Agamemnon’s chariot outside the lion gate of Mycenae, awaiting her death at the hands of Clytemnestra. She knows that Clytemnestra is now killing Agamemnon in the palace. She says as much to the Greek elders who cluster around the chariot, but they, like her own people, do not believe or cannot understand her dire prophecies. She casts aside, as a bitter mockery, the insignia of her rank as a seeress and a priestess of Apollo. What time she has left she spends recalling her past, from the time she enjoyed the status of favorite daughter to Priam, her beloved father and King of Troy, until the time when Priam imprisoned her in the dungeon. She was punished because she would not cooperate in a plan to use her sister, Polyxena, as erotic bait to trap Achilles in the temple of Apollo. Achilles had demanded Polyxena as the price of giving back the body of Hector. According to the plan, while Achilles was making love to Polyxena, Paris would wound him in his vulnerable heel.

Cassandra’s adamant refusal to cooperate with this plan was not motivated by any love for Achilles, whom she abhorred, nor was it a statement against the profanation of the temple, which had been declared neutral territory in the contest between Trojans and Greeks. To Cassandra, her refusal was a protest against a long process by which women had been deprived of all autonomy in this irrational war. This supposedly gallant contest over a woman was a lie from the very beginning. There was no Helen in Troy; the king of Egypt had taken her from Paris after Paris had abducted her from Menelaus’ palace. The original kidnapping had been justified, presumably, by the fact that Priam’s sister had been kidnapped by the Greeks in the past. Kidnapping was, after all, a rather common practice among the Greeks.

Cassandra, who began as a merry and thoughtless girl enjoying her privileges, realized that women were simply pawns in men’s military and commercial rivalries. The Greeks did not want to acknowledge Trojan control of the commercial sea route between East and West. Besides, warfare was a way of life for the Greek soldiers, and it had become so for many of the Trojan men as well. Even the imperial Hecuba, Priam’s wife, who had shared actively in government, was denied access to the inner councils, and old Priam was controlled by a military junta that cared little about family honor.

Cassandra had her first lesson in the necessity of submission to men at the time of her first menstrual period. Like all other women of that time, she had to sit before the temple of the love goddess until a man threw a coin in her lap; she then had to follow that man—whoever he was—into the sanctuary, where he would deflower her. (Herodotus describes this custom and notes that ugly women were forced to return again and again until they were chosen.) Cassandra was spared humiliation, however, because Aeneas hastened to claim her. Instead of violating the frightened girl, Aeneas simply reported to Hecuba that the deed was done. Cassandra fell in love with Aeneas because of his kindness on this occasion. She fantasized about him when the chief priest, Panthous, came to her bed at night.

Only much later did Aeneas actually become her lover. Perhaps the least plausible detail of this story (which is made more believable in many ways than the original epic) is Cassandra’s refusal to leave Troy as it burns, when Aeneas asks her to flee with him. She says that he is going to be a hero and that she could not love a hero. “We have no chance against a time that needs heroes,” she says.

The Characters

Cassandra, the narrator, is a much more complex character in Christa Wolf’s novel than the mythical prophetess, loved by Apollo, who gave her the power of prophecy and cursed her when she resisted his advances. According to the myth, Apollo asked for a goodbye kiss but spat in her mouth. After that, no one believed her. Here, Cassandra has a dream of Apollo, a nightmare in which he forces his attentions on her in the form of a wolf. This has some mythical justification, since the god of light was sometimes called Apollo Lykeios, a rather obscure god of wolves and mice. The mythic variant works well in this context, since it suggests that ideal masculinity has a dark and malicious side which is little recognized. Cassandra’s experiences with her father, with the high priest of Apollo, and with some of her brothers (as well as Achilles and Agamemnon) contribute to her disillusionment with dominating males. By the end of the story, she withdraws from Aeneas, the hero-to-be, perhaps simply because she recognizes that power corrupts and heroes are prone to change.

She is complex in other ways, aside from her insight into male bravado. Much of her perfected wisdom is self-knowledge. She recognizes that she herself was part of the problem of a deteriorating Troy. She does not present herself as heroic or tragic, or even much concerned about others. She disdains marriage, wanting only to be a priestess—the sole “profession” open to a woman of her class. She resents the fact that her twin brother, Helenus, is made a priest first simply because he is a man, when she has a greater gift for the role. Her envy of her brother, however, does not make her any more compassionate toward her sister, Polyxena, who craves the attention that their father lavishes on Cassandra. As she grows older, Cassandra realizes that her sister’s development into a coquette, who would even flirt with the unattractive Achilles, can be traced to her loveless childhood and low self-image. Thus, Cassandra’s vehement refusal to cooperate with the plan to use Polyxena as live bait is prompted partly by feelings of guilt for having neglected her sister’s welfare.

Cassandra’s character becomes more compassionate with time. She begins to understand and empathize with other women through her friendship with her personal slave. Her slave introduces Cassandra to a group of women, both Trojan and Greek, who meet in a secret place in the mountains outside Troy. The only man who is often with these people is Anchises, Aeneas’ father. He seems to be a kind of spiritual father to those in misery. He carves figures of animals out of wood and gives them to his friends. The figures become a secret signal of friendship, designating where one may find shelter in need.

Agamemnon is a weak man, sexually impotent but dangerous. Such men must act in a belligerent fashion to bolster their masculinity. He is burdened by guilt for having sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to get favorable winds for the voyage to Troy. He is vaguely drawn to Cassandra, not out of lust, but because she reminds him of his daughter.

Critical Context

Christa Wolf is an East German writer who grew up in Hitler’s Germany. This accounts for much of her distrust of heroes. Both the insecurity and the sense of guilt of Wolf and her parent’s generation have left their marks on her writings. The early naivete and uncritical acceptance of the young Cassandra which changed, in time, to disillusionment and horror may reflect the slowly developing perception of the author when she was a member of the Hitler Youth. Her autobiographical novel, Kindheitsmuster (1976; A Model Childhood, 1980; reissued as Patterns of Childhood, 1984), is filled with observations about how her contemporaries selectively forget or distort the recent past, unwilling or unable to face the reality of its cruelties. In that convoluted account, the child’s mother is likened to Cassandra; she was punished by the Gestapo for saying that even a blind man could see that Germany would lose this war.

Bibliography

Booklist. LXXX, June 15, 1984, p. 1432.

Fries, Marilyn Sibley, ed. Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. A collection of essays by twenty-one critics covering many of Wolf’s texts from a variety of critical perspectives. Not only includes essays from a feminist perspective but also gives some idea of the varieties of literary methodologies applied to Wolf’s work. Contains an index and an extensive bibliography.

Herrmann, Anne. The Dialogic and Difference: An/Other Woman in Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Insightful feminist analysis of the construction of the female subject in the works of Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf. An index and a bibliography including many references to feminist theory are provided.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, June 1, 1984, p. 530.

Kuhn, Anna K. Christa Wolf’s Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. An insightful analysis of Wolf’s development from her early works to Storfall (1987; Accident, 1989). Kuhn traces Wolf’s movement from a reliance on Marxism as an ideology to a later development of a more feminist position. Includes an index and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works.

Library Journal. CIX, July, 1984, p. 1328.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. July 29, 1984, p. 1.

The Nation. CCXXXIX, September 22, 1984, p. 246.

New Leader. LXXVII, October 15, 1984, p. 14.

The New Republic. CXCI, July 30, 1984, p. 40.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, September 9, 1984, p. 20.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, May 18, 1984, p. 144.

Wolf, Christa. The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Edited by Alexander Stephan. Translated by Jan van Heurck. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. A collection of essays by Wolf on a wide variety of political and literary topics. Provides useful insights into the author and her attitudes toward literature and politics. Includes an introduction by Grace Paley.

Wolf, Christa. The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. Translated by Hilary Pilkington. New York: Verso, 1988. A collection of interviews with Wolf. Very useful for understanding Wolf’s process of composition, as well as her political concerns. A short bibliography of primary works is included. Contains an introduction by Karin McPherson.

World Literature Today. LVII, Autumn, 1983, p. 629.