women's writing. Sappho's lines on the bittersweet experience of that “untamable dusky animal,” “limb-loosing love,” introduce the tone of subjectivity that marks Cassandra's narrative. The same tone is heard in the voice of the narrator/author who, in the short initial paragraph, envisions the captive Cassandra before the lion gates of Mycenae. Then there follows a transitional statement in which the “I” of the narrator/author opens the way for the voice of Cassandra to speak through her: “Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death” (3). Cassandra, too, speaks of death in her first lines: of her own, of its inevitability, and yet of her reluctance to hasten it with suicide, for she wishes to live on “in order to see” (4), to understand until the end (5). The question she seeks to answer: “Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may?” Her answer: “To speak with my voice: the ultimate” (4). The connection between the prophetess and the (contemporary) writer is established. Both seek to know and speak the truth about themselves and reality, and subjectivity is both the means to and the expression of that truth. Like other contemporary women writers (one thinks of Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood, Monique Wittig, Kate Millett, Nathalie Sarraute), Wolf asserts that a subjective apprehension of reality reveals more about its truth than an arid abstract rationalism (225–26, 244, 287).⁴ Yet she also warns against rejecting “the achievements of rational thought, simply because men produced them,” and against replacing the destructive immaturity of “a masculinity mania” with a corresponding “femininity mania” (260). Rather, all human beings have the need for developing their autonomy through “rational models of the resolution of conflict, and thus also for confrontation and cooperation with people of dissident opinions, and, it goes without saying, people of different sex” (260).

Cassandra's search for self-knowledge, the assertion of herself as subject, and the process of resisting the alienation from the self typical of her times are the most important themes of the novel. They are also elements common in many modern feminist writings. Simone de Beauvoir's study of The Second Sex is perhaps the most famous analysis of woman-made-object.⁵ Annette Kolodny has identified “the fear of being fixed in false image or trapped in unauthentic roles” as one of the most pervasive themes in contemporary fiction by women (83).⁶ Certainly Wolf's Cassandra also exemplifies this. She rejects the usual role of wife and mother and chooses the dignity and power of the office of priestess, for “how else could a woman hold a position of power?” (26). But she must then resolve the conflict between the role expected of her as a member of the royal family and her need to speak the truth as she sees it. The resulting inner tension causes her prophesies to erupt from her in epileptic-like fits that others find easy to interpret as madness (38–39, 59–60, 68–69). Then she must also combat that onus, for madness is one tag attached to “women whose lives no longer serve a function for men” (Carruthers 283).⁷

Some contemporary women writers regard patriarchal culture as the cause of such destructive self-alienation. Adrienne Rich has written: “And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” (“When We Dead Awaken” 35). Although Wolf agrees that the limitations placed on women's development is “the weak point of [Western] culture, which leads to its becoming self-destructive” (260), she is perhaps less inclusive in her blame-laying than some feminist writers in the West. In Cassandra, for example, not all of the Trojan men become caught up in the vainglorious, power-hungry behavior called forth by the Greek model.⁸ Aeneas and his father Anchises are welcome members of the female community outside the city wall. And these women pity as well as fear their men, whom the spirit of the times reduces “to the level of butchers” (118). Nor does Wolf associate gender per se with the destructiveness of self-alienation. For example, she portrays Penthesilea, the man-hating Amazon, sympathetically but also critically (107, 117–19). Cassandra sees that Clytemnaestra has bought into the destructive male game of power and so “her house, too, will fall” (42). Men as well as women are the victims of a desire for power and glory, but the former have the additional burden of self-delusion (Priam and Paris in particular).

Cassandra gains support in her search for autonomy through the community of women that forms as a spontaneous reaction to their growing powerlessness in Trojan society. This subculture predates the war itself and stems from the exiling of the old female gods from Troy. Among these women, Cassandra finally gains a sense of belonging fully to herself and to a group: “There at last I had my ‘we’” (124). All are welcome, men as well as women, who recognize what the Greeks and, increasingly, the Trojans do not: “Between killing and dying is a third alternative: living” (138). Men wounded in body and spirit by the war come to them (132) as do female slaves from the Greek camp (109) and the scattered defeated Amazons (119). The women live in caves above the Scamander River, caves where roots hang in the entrance “like the pubic hair of a woman” (19) and ancient carvings of female deities stand (123). It is here that Cassandra learns to know and be close to others, and it is through the love and understanding of women that she breaks through her isolation and alienation. Indeed, much of the richness of Wolf's novel derives from the reader's witnessing Cassandra's developing understanding of and sympathy for the women around her: Penthesilea, her sister Polyxena, her mother Hecuba, and her servant Marpessa, among others. This aspect of plot and character development in Cassandra links it to works by Western feminist writers in which the theme of female friendship and mutual support as reality and as an ideal is important.

The concept of a separate female culture is also present in some feminist writings.⁹ And speculation about matriarchal prehistorical cultures is not unusual.¹⁰ But in spite of the pre-eminence of women in the alternate subculture she imagines in Cassandra, Wolf would not seem to agree with writers who assert or imply that women must live totally separately from men in order to attain autonomy.¹¹ Rather, the ideas expressed in her work link her to writers like Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time), Doris Lessing (Shikasta) and Ursula Le Guin (The Dispossessed). In all of these works, as in Cassandra, women and men in situations of material scarcity or insecurity form societies marked by mutual respect and affection. The women in the caves outside Troy are dimly aware of the significance of their lives as a “gap in time” that must be used (124), and they attempt to communicate this significance to those who would come after them (132–33). Wolf's novel is the literary recreation of the message such a society might have wanted to communicate and of the individual who, like Cassandra, would have found self-realization within it.

On the evidence of such elements of its content, but also in its intention, it becomes clear that Cassandra is a utopian work. As such, it is part of an important branch of women's writing. Anne Mellor's study of feminist utopias is helpful in this context. In her analysis of such works, Mellor declares that “utopian thinking is inherently critical and prophetic” (241). By “prophetic,” Mellor means the presentation of reliable alternate worlds—an entirely appropriate function for the legendary Cassandra, of course. Critical utopias, in Ernst Bloch's sense (Das Prinzip Hoffnung), have “a practical social purpose” (Mellor 242). Cassandra belongs to writing of this sort, for it “define[s] a moral vision, set either in the future or the past, that functions implicitly as a critique of present society,” and it “offer[s] some suggestions as to how [its] utopian vision might be achieved within history” (Mellor 242). Even without the background material of the Cassandra-essays, the utopian implications of Wolf's novel reveal themselves in the depiction of the devastation wrought on Trojan society and culture by the war and of the healing power of the loving community formed outside its perimeters by the women. Wolf's essays make her intention even clearer. She reflects on speculations that Minoan culture (which has been associated with the Trojan culture of Cassandra's era) was one of utopian equality between women and men (200, 205), imagines that Cassandra may have lived at a time when the dominant Mediterranean culture of peaceful, trade-oriented Crete was succumbing to the disruptive pressure of the warlike Achaean robber-princes (247), and finally envisions a Troy that is “a model for a kind of utopia” (224).

The Cassandra-essays also make clear that the kind of utopia Wolf has in mind is of the critical variety. It is not merely a literary construct, but “provide[s] materials for the political imagination” (Stimpson 276). The destructive split of the human entity into body, soul, and mind (230), the assigning of male and female qualities to all elements of experience (and the concomitant devaluation of everything associated with femininity—223), above all the over-emphasis on (male) hierarchical rationality in viewing reality (244, 257, 283–84), have led inexorably to the destructive alienation of the contemporary world. The environment is ravished by short-term exploitation (216), impersonal power structures dehumanize the individual (259), and the destruction of Europe looms on the horizon (228–30, 239–40, 250).¹² The solution is that a new perception and expression of the world must be developed, one that acknowledges the complexity of life and the value of the subjective “female” elements in it and one that therefore can heal the alienation of the individual. This would have a cumulative healing effect: “Autonomous people, nations, and systems can promote each other's welfare; they do not have to fight each other like those whose inner insecurity and immaturity continually demand the demarcation of limits and postures of intimidation” (259). This is at best a tenuous solution, one that has no guarantee of success. Cassandra, Wolf's model in attaining the individual autonomy necessary for this open view of the world, does not survive the destructive forces around her, after all. And Wolf herself is only too aware of the temptation to give up the hope of changing things that is her motivation for writing: “At night the madness goes for my throat” (240).

This hope of effecting social, political, and cultural change through literature is essentially utopian. It is the basis for the new way of writing that Wolf advocates.¹³ Like other contemporary women writers, Wolf claims that traditional (male) aesthetic models are inappropriate, for they do not allow those who have been traditionally powerless and voiceless to express their experience of existence: “I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions—‘literature,’ ‘aesthetics’ are such institutions—must have experienced the desire for self-destruction” (299). Any rigid system of aesthetics is alienating, for it has been “invented not so much to enable us to get closer to reality as for the purpose of warding it off, of protecting against it” (300). The very structure of the male-developed epic supports and perpetuates the heroic patriarchal tradition that allows woman only to be an “object of masculine narration” (297). In general, Wolf asserts, the Western literary tradition has impoverished the potential for understanding and expressing the complexity of human experience by its emphasis on linear plot development, by favoring dualistic and monistic thinking, and by evolving closed images of the world and systems: “the renunciation of subjectivity in favor of a sealed ‘objectivity’” (287). Such criticism if very close to that voiced by Hélène Cixous, for example, when she writes of “the phallocentric tradition” (The Laugh of the Medusa” 879) and “hierarchized” phallocentrism (“Sorties”), by which she means the antagonistic, dualistic separation of all experience into activity (male) and passivity (female). She, like Wolf, advocates the recognition and even the celebration of difference and of multiplicity of experience and expression (“Sorties”).¹⁴

Wolf herself refuses to pose a new aesthetic system and instead claims to have no theory of poetry: “There is and there can be no poetics which prevents the living experience of countless perceiving subjects from being killed and buried in art-objects” (142). What she offers instead is a model for writing that combats “the sinister effects of alienation, in aesthetics, in art, as well as elsewhere” (142). Cassandra's narrative is an example of this. It is nonlinear in structure, a “narrative network” (262), as Wolf terms it.¹⁵ There is no authoritarian, analytical narrator who intrudes with “self-satisfied, complacent, know-all condescendingness.”¹⁶ Rather, Wolf gives Cassandra her voice, a voice “from below” (271), that allows the expression of hitherto silent experience, the everyday experience of the powerless, the voiceless, the forgotten.¹⁷

Cassandra's narrative is not only an example of the subject matter and “open” narrative style that Wolf advocates. Her depiction of Cassandra is also an extended exercise in the same process of (self)-actualization in which her protagonist is engaged. She wishes to “scratch off the male tradition” that adheres to Cassandra (“Documentation” 100) and “to lead her out of myth into the (imagined) social and historic coordinates” (111). It seems to me that she succeeds in this admirably.¹⁸ At the same time, she fulfills her aims as a writer of nonauthoritarian texts. Cassandra exemplifies the “revision” (Rich) of history, of literature, and of women's experience that so many feminist writers and critics have called for. Wolf herself said that her work on the Cassandra material altered her way of looking at things (“viewing lens”/“Seh-Raster”) as nothing had since her first readings of Marx thirty years before (278).

It is understandable that the literary and political establishment in the German Democratic Republic has viewed Wolf with distrust and sometimes antagonism. Her concept of a “real, existing utopia without which every reality is unlivable for human beings” (“Berührung,” Lesen und Schreiben 209), a concept that she finds necessary for her writing, is potentially subversive in a land that constantly exhorts its citizens to be content with “real existing socialism” (i.e., the status quo). Party-liners have not greeted her criticism of bellicosity in both East and West favorably. Nor have they approved of her locating the Western cultural tendency to devalue and deny the attitudes and modes of expression of the powerless, especially of women, in her own land as well as in capitalist societies. By asserting a need for a female mode of writing, Wolf criticizes not only the Western “bourgeois” literary tradition. She also challenges the much-vaunted claims of sexual equality in the CDR, specifically in its male-dominated literary establishment, but also in the society as a whole.¹⁹ It is a courageous stance for a writer in a socialist land to take, and one that she can afford only because of the international acclaim her works have earned.

It would be presumptuous to claim that Wolf is now a feminist rather than a socialist writer. She herself rejects the label “feminist” because of the negative connotations this word has in German cultural history.²⁰ It is interesting that in the fourth Cassandra essay (273) she lists Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, and Cixous’ Womanhood in Letters among the books she is reading as she writes the novel, but she does not list these works in the bibliography appended to the German edition of the essays. It seems that Wolf is reluctant to associate herself even so indirectly with such writers, although she obviously confronts their ideas in her Cassandra-essays. Certainly her works do not display every concern of Western feminism. For example, Wolf does not view lesbianism as an answer to gender oppression or as “a laboratory in which to create a new expression” (Carruthers 301). Nor does Wolf assert the need for a new female language, although she recognizes the difficulty for women to write in a language used so long to exclude and objectify them (305). She also does not speak of the need for women to “write their bodies,” to create an idiom that reflects women's specific sexuality.²¹ But Wolf shares several of the most basic concerns of Western feminist writers: the exploration of the connection between the oppression of women and the alienation and self-destructive qualities of contemporary society, an accompanying revision of traditional conceptions of myth and history, and the belief that such a revision, mediated through literature, can change human society. Wolf's growing consciousness of herself as a woman writer has strengthened the parallels between her work and that of avowed feminist writers. This development in the work of a committed socialist writer illuminates the extent to which feminist and socialist thought share concerns and arrive at solutions in common. For readers in the West, this may be one of the more interesting messages hidden in Wolf's roman à clef.

Notes

1. All page citations refer to Jan van Heurck's one-volume translation of the novel Kassandra and the essays that appeared simultaneously in German: Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1983).

2. Virginia Woolf regretted the shortness of this tradition in A Room of One's Own (132–35), for example. Adrienne Rich also writes of her struggle to reappropriate that tradition in “Blood, Bread and Poetry” (528).

3. See Wolf's novel No Place on Earth. (Kein ort. Nirgends) (1979) about the forgotten Romantic poet Karoline vbon Günderode and her essays on Günderode and Bettina von Arnim (found in Lesen und Schreiben: Neue Sammlung, 225–83 and 284–318).

4. Feminist critics have recognized the importance of subjectivity for women writers as well. See Donovan (344–46), Cixous (“Sorties,” “Laugh of the Medusa” 879).

5. See especially her introduction, vvi, xix, xxix. Nancy K. Miller shows that some female authors refuse to give their heroines “happy endings” because they recognize the inappropriateness of the traditional (male) view of women's fulfillment in love (46).

6. Kolodny's essay, as well as those by Donovan and Carruthers, give many examples of this. Works as different as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1972), Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972), and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) come to mind in this context.

7. For related discussions on the subject of women and madness, see Marguarite Duras (176), Christiane Rochefort (184–85), and Gilbert and Gubar (43, 51, 68–69, 77–78).

8. Several feminist writers have asserted a connection between the male drive for power and men's absorption with heroic behavior: Leclerc (86), Cixous (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 887–89), Woolf (65–66).

9. The subculture outside the walls of Troy is like a concrete representation of the “wild zone” of women's experience that Elaine Showalter discusses in her excellent study (30–31).

10. See Elizabeth Gould Davis’ discussion of prehistorical matriarchies in The First Sex (New York: Putnam, 1971), 33–96.

11. Pertinent works are Monique Wittig's Les Guerillères, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World,Motherlines, and The Vampire Tapestry, and Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground.

12. These are concerns that many feminist writers also associate with the treating of women as objects; for example, Rich (“Blood, Bread and Poetry” 540) and d'Eaubonne (67).

13. Mellor states: “Feminist theory is inherently utopian” (243).

14. Cixous writes in “Sorties” of an all-inclusive androgynous text which she terms “pederastic femininity,” that “bombards and disintegrates these ephemeral amorous singularities so that they may recompose themselves in other bodies for new passions …” (98)

15. One is reminded of comments by Woolf and Dorothy Richardson that indicate that they believed that the form of interior monologue might be most appropriate to a “female consciousness” (cited in Donovan 344).

16. Dorothy Richardson, Forward to 1938 edition of Pilgrimage, quoted in Donovan (343). Richardson was thinking of James and Conrad in particular.

17. Wolf has long been conscious of the restrictions narrative technique can place on truthful literary expression. This is a central concern of The Quest for Christa T. (1970). Myra Love's excellent study also connects Wolf's narrative style and feminist writing.

18. See this writer's forthcoming article in Contemporary Literature: “‘Scratching off the Male Tradition’: Christa Wolf's Cassandra.

19. For example, cultural functionary Wilhelm Girnus wrote a vicious attack on the last of Wolf's Cassandra essays for its “unscholarliness” and for representing a bourgeois rather than a Marxist-Leninist view of history and women's role in it.

20. This writer asked Wolf at a reading in 1982 in Mainz, West Germany, if calling her a feminist is justified. She emphatically replied “No!” and explained this by saying that she “doesn't hate men.”

21. French feminism has been most vocal in this regard. See Cixous (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 886), Irigaray (103), and the section “Creations” in New French Feminisms (160–86).

Works Cited

Carruthers, Mary. “Imagining Women: Notes Towards a Feminist Poetic.” Massachusetts Review 20 (1979): 281–307.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1 (1976): 875–93.

———. “Sorties.” Excerpted in New French Feminisms, 90–98.

d'Eaubonne, Françoise. Le fémininisme ou la mort. Excerpted in New French Feminisms, 64–67.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans, and ed. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Donovan, Josephine. “Feminist Style Criticism.” In Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman. Cornillon/Bowling Green: Bowling Green Univ. Press, 1972, 341–53.

Duras, Marguarite. “Interview.” Signs 1 (1975): 423–34.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979.

Girnus, Wilhelm. “Wer baute das siebentorige Theben?” Sinn und Form 35 (1983): 439–47.

Irigaray, Luce. Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Excerpted in New French Feminisms, 99–110.

Kolodny, Annette. “Some Notes on Defining a ‘Feminist Literary Criticism.’” Critical Inquiry 2 (1975): 75–92.

Leelere, Annie. Parole de femme. Excerpted in New French Feminisms, 79–86.

Love, Myra. “Christa Wolf and Feminism: Breaking the Patriarchal Connection.” New German Critique 16 (1979): 31–53.

Mellor, Anne K. “On Feminist Utopias.” Women's Studies 9 (1982): 241–62.

Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction.” PMLA 96 (1981): 36–48.

New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Rich, Adrienne. “Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet.” Massachusetts Review 24 (1983): 521–40.

———. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York/London: Norton, 1979, 33–49.

Rochefort, Christiane. “Are Women Writers Still Monsters?” In New French Feminisms, 183–86.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982, 9–36.

Wolf, Christa. Cassandra. Trans. Jan van Heurck. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

———. “Documentation.” German Quarterly 57 (1984): 91–115.

———. Lesen und Schreiben: Neue Sammlung. Darmastadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929.