CASSANDRA: A Novel and Four Essays

by Christa Wolf ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 24, 1984

Who was Cassandra before people wrote about her?"" Novelist/memoirist Wolf (The Quest for Christs T., A Model Childhood) casts her answer in both a fictional and a non-fictional form. in the novella that begins the book, Cassandra--the classical seeress who, rebuffing Apollo's advances in her dreams, is fated to have the gift of prophecy but never to be believed--is at once ""the first professional woman"" (taking on priestly duties new to women), a crusader for peace (opposing her father Priam's Trojan war against the Greeks), and the lover of Aeneas; yet she is also a cynically traded-for ""object,"" a woman driven ""mad"" by patriarchal folly. Wolf's fictional Cassandra, emotionally if obliquely portrayed, is quite compelling--but the non-fiction essays that follow are very diluting. This section, though intelligent, draws the Cassandra/modern woman (writer?) parallel almost suffocatingly close. There are perorations against nuclear weapons: ""The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe what we see. We cannot express what we already believe."" There are murky Marxist-feminist analyses: ""How, in the semitic-Christian religions, women had for centuries been assigned the role of slaves, and how the same religions supplied a serviceable background ideology to the manufacturing and factory systems of early capitalism in that they justified the discipline, industry, subordination, and self-denial which this system needed."" Wolf's European (German) anxiety is pursued intensely. Yet the book is ultimately inchoate: her special mix of emotion and obliqueness explained out, made stiff.

Pub Date: July 24, 1984

ISBN: 0374519048

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION