Christa Wolf's Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays
Reviewed by Dave Johnson
Summary
Cassandra is divided into five parts. The first is a novella, and the others are essays consisting of two travelogues, a work diary, and an open letter. The novella describes the final three days of Cassandra’s life. She is the oldest daughter of Priam and a prophet during the time of the Trojan War. The point of view gives a new twist to the well-known story of Troy. The essays, somewhat more interesting than the novella, tell of Wolf’s inspirations and feelings while writing the story. They give insight to the life that Wolf lived and the happenings during Wolf’s journey to Greece.
The Women’s Spin on War
The story of Homer’s The Iliad is one that is most often told and known in the male perspective. When asked to name a female in the story, most people that are familiar with the epic will name Helen, hands down. So why would Christa Wolf write on a little known character such as Cassandra? According to McDonald, "Wolf is working toward a new kind of text" (269). Wolf attempts to create a story of war in which a woman is the in forefront in order to illustrate the perils of male domination.
"There is an obvious fascination in the tension and interplay of tradition and innovation to be found in an old story retold from an unfamiliar viewpoint, and a peculiar interest in Cassandra herself, whose role in the Trojan saga is mainly a post-Homeric creation, so that we can observe her evolution from the rather dim distinction of being Priam’s only unmarried daughter to be mentioned by name in the Iliad to the intensely compelling figure who reveals invisible forces at work in Agamemnon’s palace in the Aeschylean scene that fired Christa Wolf’s imagination" (West 164). This viewpoint is one in which the feminist perspective shines throughout. The war is no longer a battle of strengths and weaknesses; rather, it becomes a battle of men versus women in which the men dictate because of social stipulations. "Men’s claim for absolute knowledge is nothing but rationalized domination" (McDonald 275).
"Through Wolf and Cassandra’s story we can observe how the power-structures become male-focused and regulated by men" (Russi 28). Wolf shows the reader her view of the world. She sees women being oppressed and men leading the world to inevitable destruction.
"News Report: A conference of peace researcher, scientists of variousdisciplines, physicians, and former high-ranking NATO military officers has been held in the Dutch town of Groningen. All the participants are said to view the future fate of Europe with great skepticism, because in the opinion of the assembly the United States, ensnared by the notion that the development of weapons technology would make it possible to ‘win’ the next world war even if it is an atomic war, is aiming to make Europe the theater of this next war, and including the annihilation of hundreds of thousands Europeans and Russians in its calculations." (Wolf 249)
This view may be relevant. Many people were scared of such warfare, but Wolf puts the burden completely in the hands of the male population. "It is men who make rigid categories and hierarchies among these modes of knowing, not women" (McDonald 275).
Wolf writes what she knows. "For Cassandra in Troy and Wolf in the DDR (German Democratic Republic), one fact especially galls: the arrogant claims of male narrators and male politicians to know, and to compel others to accept, their versions of who women are and what right government is" (McDonald 268). Therefore she writes from experience, not from sheer annoyance of the male gender. Women oppression and male domination is what she knows and she sees a link between her life and the life of Cassandra. From this parallel, she draws some exaggerated conclusions about the fate of the world and the role that men will play in it and the lack of a role that women will play. Her viewpoint is based merely on facts and required no actual thinking on her own. She thought, "Women used to be goddesses, then men became gods. War used to be somewhat civil, now I fear atomic warfare. Therefore, women are good and produce harmony and men bring upon the end of the world." The writing of Cassandra was a way that was conducive to telling her side of the story. She put a feminine spin on the aspect of war and people can now see things differently, whether they feel the new view is worthy or not. Wolf tells The Iliad and other stories from different points of view because they "promote the kind of value systems she opposes" (Russi 23). She abolishes the "corruption of literature and its forms which, following Homer, sustain what amounts to a metaphysics of male heroism (McDonald 274).
Brown, Russell E. "The Kassandra of Christa Wolf." Classical and Modern Literature:
A Quarterly. Terre Haute, IN (CML). 1989 Winter, 9:2, 115-123.
Djelal, Julia Celia. "Phantoms’ Last Words: Twentieth-Century Avatars of Helen of
Troy and Cassandra." Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly. Columbia,
MO, (CML). 1998 Summer, 18:4, 293-301.
McDonald, W. E. "Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra-or Cassandra’s Wolf?: Male
Tradition and Women’s Knowledge in Cassandra." Journal of Narrative
Technique. Ypsilanti, MI (JNT). 1990 Fall, 20:3, 267-283.
Russi, Roger Ph.D. Dialogues of Epic Figures: Christa Wolf’s Kassandra, Monique
Wittig’s Les Geurilleres, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand. Diss.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1993. Ann Arbor: A Bell & Howell Company, 1993.
West, Stephanie. "Christa Wolf’s Kassandra: a Classical Perspective." Oxford German
Studies (OGS). 1991-1992, 20-21, 164-85.
Wolf, Christa. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Trans. Jan Van Heurck. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc, 1984.
Recommended Readings
Hedda Gabler (Dover Thrift Editions) by Henrik Johan Ibsen
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Crucible : A Play in Four Acts (Penguin Plays) by Arthur Miller
The Iliad of Homer translated by Richard Lattimore
Click here to view a more in depth summary of each part of the book.
Click here to view a comparison of Achilles Between Cassandra and The Iliad.