Cassandra Through a Feminist View: Christa Wolf’s Reinterpretation of Cassandra

This thesis offers a feminist interpretation of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who appears in the Trojan War in the Greek myth of the Iliad. East German novelist Christa Wolf summons this mythological princess in her novel Cassandra. By understanding the connections between the elements in the novel Cassandra and Wolf’s personal concerns, this research seeks to uncover the story that Christa Wolf is appealing to us through her novel. Christa Wolf attempts to align author and protagonist through a shift in narrative perspective — in other words, she expresses her own claims by giving voice to Cassandra. Broadly, the novel can be divided into two parts: the first half deals with the three Greek voyages before the Trojan War, and the second half covers the Trojan War itself. This thesis focuses on the events presented in Wolf’s Cassandra. Through literary analysis of what Cassandra witnesses and narrates, it examines, via textual scholarship, how these accounts carry symbolic weight in a feminist narrative structure. Based on Christa Wolf’s vision of contemporary society, the thesis sounds an alarm about male-centered cultures that ignore or distort women’s truthful speech, and explores the potential for a new kind of community. Through Cassandra, Wolf highlights a “we” community (in the spirit of something like Ideology) — a community consisting of both Troy and Greece, and ultimately a dialectical unity of male and female. From this perspective, Christa Wolf’s crisis-oriented approach, as expressed through Cassandra’s resolution, could also apply to contemporary social crises. The Trojan War in Cassandra’s time, along with the arms race and nuclear threat in Europe — issues that were of concern to Wolf — have re-emerged in new forms today. The problem is not only physical warfare. As civilization advances and conveniences increase, these benefits tend to be skewed toward certain regions and countries. What was once physical war now takes the form of economic conflict, such as trade disputes, and the resulting harms concentrate on the vulnerable — especially children and women. Are there policies that can end such war, destruction, and plunder? I believe that the “we” community envisioned through Cassandra can offer an alternative.