Cassandra Written by Christa Wolf

Cassandra Written by Christa Wolf to Aeschylus's Agamemnon

Christa Wolf's Cassandra: A woman finally believed?

Aeschylus' ancient Greek tragedy Agamemnon is a work told from the point-of-view of male eyes. It was explicitly designed to be performed before an all-male audience. In the mythological drama, the great leader of the Greeks, General Agamemnon, comes home after fighting the Trojan War. He expects a warm welcome and instead meets death at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover. Clytemnestra's anger, even her infidelity, seems understandable to a modern reader. Agamemnon tricked his wife into bringing their daughter Iphigenia to be slaughtered at the temple of Apollo, so he could keep his obligation to fight for Helen of Troy and lead the Greek forces. But in the Aeschylus play, Clytemnestra is portrayed as evil and vengeful. Her decision to take a lover stands in marked contrast to good, faithful wives in Greek mythology, like Odysseus' wife Penelope, who patiently waits for her husband to come home.

By usurping her husband's authority and taking a lover, Clytemnestra is a threatening figure to male power, although she treats her own daughter Electra cruelly, and kills Agamemnon's unwilling concubine Cassandra. Feminist Christa Wolf, in her retelling of the story in a novella fittingly titled Cassandra, relates the tale through the point-of-view of Cassandra instead of Clytemnestra, as the sympathetic reader might initially expect. Instead, Wolf states that Clytemnestra is a woman who tries to integrate herself into the prevailing systems of power and patriarchy, by allying herself with men, rather than questioning the system of male authority and war altogether. The loss of Iphigenia motivates the queen to 'best' her husband at his own 'game' of violence, not to opt out of the Greek economy of revenge and hate. Clytemnestra's jealousy of Cassandra, who is forcibly brought home as a concubine of war, reveals the queen to be less of a friend of women than the reader might suspect. But in Christa Wolf's version, the tale of the Trojan princess, doomed to foretell the future and never to be believed, is brought into sharp focus as a critique of the way patriarchy turns women against other women. Cassandra, unlike the powerful Clytemnestra, has resisted gaining power through men, and suffers for it.

Cassandra plays a relatively minor role in the Greek version of the story, but even her original persona gives a feminist potentially fertile material. According to legend and Wolf's text, the Greek god Apollo tried to violate Cassandra's chastity. When she refused him, he gave her the paradoxical gift of useless prophesy. Cassandra admits that she desired the gift of foresight, but when he was unable to overpower her, he spat into her mouth, which meant that she could see all (including her own impending demise, as well as the demise of her homeland) but no one would ever believe her. Like so many women, deprived of males of authority, Cassandra, by rejecting a conventional sexual existence, will never be trusted, despite the clarity of her vision about the foolishness of fighting for Helen, and Agamemnon's foolish belief that all will be forgiven by his wife.

Apollo's violation of Cassandra by spitting in her mouth highlights Wolf's stark illustration of how war results in the rape of innocent women, something that is alluded to in the Aeschylus drama, but not viewed with horror, simply accepted. The reader of Cassandra is forced to experience viscerally how unlike Helen, who was brought home in triumph after war, Cassandra is treated like an object. The Trojan prophetess never harmed anyone. But she is raped by Ajax at the fall of Troy, enslaved by Agamemnon, and brought home to her demise. In her mind, she resists, even though her words and deeds have little impact on the external, material world. For example, Cassandra identifies with the Amazons, but her own desire to have a powerful; effect upon history is continually thwarted. She longs to stand beside Aeneas and to fight with the Amazon queen. Throughout the text, Cassandra admires strong women -- warrior-queens, followers of Sappho, even though her own role as a truth-teller about war is denied. And sadly she dies the victim of a woman, as well as to men's decisions to sacrifice and rape women.

Cassandra is killed history, killed by another woman for being in a relationship she did not desire. However, she is no bloodless female, absent of sexuality, despite her resistance of Apollo. In this respect, Wolf does update her story -- rather than a virgin or a sexless prophetess, Cassandra does have a relationship with Aeneas. She loves this hero with the ardor of a young woman, calling him the soul of Troy. But because he is a man, unlike Cassandra, Aeneas can master history and triumph. The admiration of Aeneas indicates the verisimilitude Wolf brings to her tale -- Cassandra has emotions and feelings, rather than simply spouts words, as in Agamemnon.

Wolf also interjects anecdotes into the story to make it more clearly told with Trojan eyes such as the Trojan's allegation that Helen was abducted because Priam's sister Hesione's eloped with a Spartan. Again, this underlines Wolf's theme of women as pawns and spoils of war -- it does not matter what Helen or Hesione want, merely what they represent to their families and the different sides of the conflict. In the novel, Cassandra's tale is a tale of an introverted woman, whose resistance is primarily articulated from within her soul and mind. This is also reflected in the structural outline of Wolf's novel. The first part of the novel describes Cassandra's life and her reflections on the Trojan War, while the others consist of Wolf's own internal reflections upon writing the novel and Cassandra as a heroic figure. Unlike the original drama that would be portrayed externally to an audience, and thus draw attention to the bloody actions of the play, Wolf's work is psychological and interior, a fitting style for a character whose most truthful life is confined to the mind, and who is regarded as a madwoman, even by her family. And unlike the drama, the author is an articulated and reflective presence in the novel: the most important events of this very postmodern novel happen within the author's soul and the mind of the mythological figure. The interior monologue is reflective, and fundamentally feminist and anti-war, in contrast to the sweeping epic of mythological struggle and clashes of values in the Aeschylus play.

Wolf wrote her novel during the height of the Cold War, so her fears about where the evils of men might lead seemed real, given the possibility of nuclear annihilation that gripped Europe. Wolf clearly feels like a modern Cassandra, along with other members of the peace movement she supports. Thus, Wolf uses the myth of Cassandra as a kind of jumping-off place, to explore issues of war and women -- rape, powerlessness, and pacifism. Her novel uses the earlier text only for the basic plot, and the rather one-dimensional prophetess of Troy becomes a fully human, compelling character. Wolf avenges a historical and literary wrong done to Cassandra, who is not given her due in literature, just as the mythological character was ignored in life. She renders the figure significant, and undoes Apollo's wrong -- Wolf believes Cassandra.