"I, the seeress, was owned by the palace." The Dynamics of Feminine Collusion in Christa Wolf's Cassandra.

Hailed as a symbol of resistance and heroine, and in other instances decried for her lack of power, Christa Wolf's Cassandra remains a controversial figure. In choosing death over other alternatives, her action at once haunts and troubles contemporary interpretation. Drawing on Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic account of ideal love and feminine complicity in domination, this article examines central conflicts determining Cassandra's final gesture by tracing the dynamics at work in her apparent inability to survive destruction. This reading seeks to facilitate a critical understanding of Cassandra's profound identification with paternal authority and repudiation of the (m)other, as part of her collusion with patriarchal structures of domination. (ELS)

Due in considerable part to feminist interest, Christa Wolf's Cassandra has more often than not been examined as a narrative about women's powerlessness, the utopian potential of literature (Schmidt "Ohnmacht"; Kuhn), and feminine resistance and vision (Cramer). Yet, as Karen Jankowsky pointed out in 1988, the literary-critical establishments in both East and West Germany failed to examine Cassandra in terms of their common National Socialist history (35; see also Schmidt, "Ohnmacht" esp. 111-12). Since then, little has changed, and today Jankowsky's article remains one of the rare extensive treatments of Cassandra as a coming-to-terms with the past, as a fictitious discussion of the anchoring of Nationalist Socialist authority in German consciousness.(1) While it is not my aim here to examine this or any other specific historical connection further, I do propose to explore Cassandra as a document that speaks to the bonds that implicate feminine subjects in dominant power structures, assuming an investigative focus that of necessity entails attention to certain dynamics, perhaps at the risk of excluding or overlooking others. Such an investigation nevertheless has significant implications for Jankowsky's and other readings about the "ties that bind." These interpretations have raised vital questions about how, precisely, the bonds with dominant power are engendered and maintained in relation to "Vater Staat" and other social and psychic structures. Although Jankowsky, for example, alludes to the limitations on individual agency that are rooted in economic and political dependency, and Ricarda Schmidt touches on familial, civic, and occupational structures, no one has to date elucidated just how these agential limitations are instantiated and remain anchored in the interpersonal dynamics thematized in Cassandra. Indeed, Cassandra's repeated attempts at self-assertion seem foreordained to end in failure, even as the narrative structure itself intimates, much more hopefully, that Cassandra's readers may envision a future not possible for Cassandra. Precisely because my reading is concerned with why Cassandra's life and death suggest that feminine empowerment and resistance are greatly constrained in certain determinate contexts, I will not pursue here in detail the various implications yielded by analyses of this narrative's structure, or by readings of Cassandra in conjunction with, or--as is often the case--through, the four accompanying essays (Conditions of a Narrative). Surely these are valid enterprises, but they do not constitute the objective of this particular project.(2)

In the following reading, I consider how Cassandra's movement toward death reveals the difficulty, indeed the virtual impossibility of inaugurating and sustaining resistance in hegemonic culture. I thereby hope to illuminate the dynamic of complicity in familial-patriarchal interrelations and, furthermore, explore how a central divisive ambivalence in the feminine psyche appears embodied in this protagonist's physical division. Cassandra's body continually reinscribes the contradictory position of submissive femininity until the very end, as she seeks to assert herself as a subject while being objectified in the patriarchal social contexts thematized in Cassandra. To trace the development of Cassandra's disfiguring physical division, I analyze the psychic enactment of gender polarization in the key relationships that produce this dynamic: the "bonds of love" between the daughter Cassandra, her father, King Priam, and her mother, Queen Hecuba. The deforming gender polarization at the root of Cassandra's collusion with patriarchy reproduces itself in her relationships to others in Troy. It is manifest in her (sexual) submission to Panthous and, in more limited contexts, in her submissive relationship with Aeneas. Effects of this polarity also evince themselves in Cassandra's lack of "recognition" (in the psychoanalytic sense) of other women, notably her sister Polyxena.

Jessica Benjamin's analysis of the problem of domination in The Bonds of Love is instructive for understanding patriarchal domination as a contortion of the "bonds of love" in Cassandra. Not only does her approach elucidate crucial aspects of the deformation of interpersonal relations into masculine mastery and feminine submission in Wolf's text, but it also offers an exceptionally rigorous feminist intervention into psychoanalytic theory. The Bonds of Love critically illuminates what psychoanalysis accepts: the genesis of a psychic structure in which intersubjective relations effectively rationalize authority. By employing Benjamin's conceptual framework to make sense of Cassandra's divided self, we can better understand the passive-collusive role she reiteratively performs in her conflicted relationship to pater/patriarchy. These insights, furthermore, cast Cassandra's position at the conclusion in terms concordant with Wolf's socially critical treatment of her as someone who, through cultural shaping and determination, chooses to die. Hence, in my reading, Cassandra's decision is not merely some sort of "failure" or "defeat" (Brugmann 40), reproducing "heroic idealism" (Schmidt, "Myth" 258), nor is it an "unnatural mode of death at male hands" (Boa 151), but rather the result of determinate social forces that cannot be subverted simply by invoking individual or social agency.

Cassandra's ambivalent position is determined, on the one hand, by her feminine (and, later, feminist) consciousness and her attempts to subvert the dominant order and, on the other, by her overpowering identification with her father, to whom she remains "bonded" even after Troy has fallen. It is useful to recall the scenes that portray how this emotional-intellectual ambivalence is physically enacted by Cassandra's body, for they demonstrate how this division is performed. Cassandra becomes increasingly estranged from what she refers to as "this body." Her alienation, culminating in the perception that her body is no longer under her control, coincides with critical stages in the decline of Troy, with phases punctuated by the successive departures of the three Trojan ships for Greece. These episodes correspond to intense emotional confrontations between Cassandra and Priam: after the departure of the second ship, the conflict between speaking the truth and being a dutiful daughter to country and King becomes so acute that Cassandra begins to perceive her own voice as "strange," as it speaks the truth she finds herself unable to articulate. Her voice is portrayed as a force capable of tearing her apart. Rather than allowing herself to be destroyed, she lets the voice go free. She subsequently perceives herself as powerless when faced by what ensues:

 
   I heard myself tell Aeneas, "I myself knew from the start." The voice that 
   said this was a stranger's voice, and of course today I know--I have known 
   for a long time--that it was no accident that this strange voice which had 
   stuck in my throat many times already in the past should speak out of me 
   for the first time in Aeneas's presence. I set it free deliberately so that 
   it would not tear me apart; I had no control over what happened next 
   (38-39). 

As with her voice, Cassandra experiences vision as a process that could destroy her if she were to "see" everything as it really is. She repeatedly permits herself phases of "partial blindness" to protect herself from the destructive physical and emotional effects of seeing, of fully perceiving all at once: "I did not want the world the way it was, but I wanted to serve devotedly the gods who ruled it. My wish held a contradiction. I gave myself some time before I noticed it; I have always granted myself these times of partial blindness. To become seeing all of a sudden--that would have destroyed me" (40).