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Abstract
In Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984), Wolf retells the Trojan War story from the perspective of the seer Cassandra, taking the Trojan War as a parallel to issues of her day. She uses the Amazons as important secondary characters, representing them as both woman-loving women and warriors. Wolf believes their valor in battle is only a version of men’s militarism and thus provides no solution to the problem of war, her primary concern.
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The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
Notes
1 I am here making explicit my position as author, encouraged by Wolf’s own contextualizing of her work (on which see Beebee & Weber, Citation2001, p. 265) and her emphasis on subjectivity (on which see Kuhn, Citation2015; Rabinowitz, Citation2019). I want to thank Walter Penrose, Jr. for his invitation to contribute to the volume and generous editing, the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions, and Peter J. Rabinowitz for his typically astute reading. Of course, the remaining flaws are my own.
2 I fear that this way of analyzing Wolf’s work, and perhaps the work itself, participates in lesbian erasure, if not the kind of feminist bashing that Thomsen and Essig (Citation2022) document in their essay on feminism and TERF-phobia.
3 Future references to Wolf’s text will include parenthetical page numbers only.
4 The summer 2021 issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies on “Are Lesbians Obsolete” offers more discussion of this general question and includes a more capacious definition of lesbian identity, based on identification with other women (see above).
5 She lived through tumultuous times and adapted to many different ideologies. Born in a Polish town that became German under the Nazis, she was a member of the Nazi girl scouts; after the war, the family fled the Soviet army, but wound up in the East under the Soviet victors. And she ended her life in the reunited Germany. For a discussion of these issues, see, for instance, Wolf (Citation1988, p. 111).
6 The censored edition of the book is analyzed by Graves (Citation1986).
7 In contrast, Kuhn (Citation2015, p. 156) argues that “it is highly unlikely that Wolf was conversant with issues at the forefront of second-wave feminist discussions.”
Wolf notes that she has other suitcases as well, full of archaeology, history, and so on (p. 273). She is not Janie one-note. Beebee and Weber (Citation2001, pp. 267–270 esp.) discusses the authors she is/was in dialogue with.
8 I was unable to get hold of these writings. Jean Wilson has written an extensive analysis of the intertextuality of Wolf and Kleist (2000). She cites one line from Wolf’s essay on Kleist that reminds me of Judith Butler’s use of Antigone: he inspires her to look for a “livable life” (Wilson, Citation2000, p. 195, citing Wolf, Citation1990, p. 670), Cassandra asks over and over “how to live”.
9 In Wolf, Achilles is always “the brute”; his murderous love is reserved for Troilus, Cassandra’s brother and his first victim (p. 75).
10 The Nazis used the Amazons on horseback in the propaganda for their festival “Night of the Amazons” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Amazons#/media/File:Ausschnitt_Nacht_der_Amazonen_Programm1937.png). I don’t have the background to go into depth on Wolf and Naziism here, but she was born in 1929 and was part of a very particular generation of writers (Wolf, Citation1988, pp. 130–132), and that propaganda may have influenced her ambivalent attitude to the Amazons in the narrative. She is aware of the danger of idealizing women warriors.
11 For a detailed discussion of the fragment, with authors Diane Rayor and Sandra Boehringer, see Brigida and Charlotte (Citation2021). https://sweetbitterpodcast.com/2021/03/04/sappho-9-transcript/.
12 Sappho is directly related to the Amazons in an interesting story from Diodorus Siculus (3.55). He tells of an Amazon queen called Myrine who terrorized the Eastern Mediterranean and who conquered islands in the Aegean. She founded the city of Mytilene on Lesbos, which was named for her sister, who also took part in the campaign. Lesbos was the home to Sappho and source of the term lesbian for women who are sexually attracted to other women. The capital city of Lesbos bears the names of the Amazon Mytilene to this day. Thanks to Cheryl Morgan for this reference.
13 The bibliography here is enormous; for a recent summary, with examples also of the challenges to this statement of the ancient ideology, see Penrose (Citation2016).
14 Wilson (Citation2000, p. 196) comments on the importance of the intertextuality of this question and its relation to Kleist’s play.
15 There is a story (Statius Thebaid 1) that his mother Thetis sent Achilles to Themiscyra dressed as a girl to escape the war. Wolf also portrays Achilles as trying to avoid the war, but the subtext is homoerotic he is found in bed with a young man. Wolf goes on to suggest that Odysseus might regret having drafted him: “For Achilles was after everyone in sight: young men, whom he genuinely desired, and girls, as a proof that he was like everybody else” (p. 83). On the potential homophobia of Wolf’s treatment of Achilles, see Rabinowitz (Citation2019, pp. 83–84).
16 In questioning why she did not just tell the Stasi to leave her alone, rather than collaborating, she speculated that she did not realize yet that they were “them” (McGrane, 2011).
17 Similarly, indigenous people’s world views are suppressed in dominant colonial cultures today but continue in many places.
18 The way that Cassandra tells the story of the war resists linearity, or any simple statement of cause and effect (the ship bringing Helen is not a cause but an effect, and Helen isn’t really there).
19 See n. 10 above.
20 Thanks to my colleague Franziska Schweiger for this idea.
21 The long publishing process has rendered Ukraine old news; we have a new war in the Gaza Strip between Hamas and the Israeli right-wing government. Perhaps no nuclear threat, but a reminder of the price of nationalism.
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Nancy S. Rabinowitz
Nancy S. Rabinowitz Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz is the author of Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (1993) and Greek Tragedy (2008), as well as numerous articles; she is the co-editor of many volumes, including Teaching Classics in US Prisons (2021), Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Sexuality and Gender in the Ancient World (2015), From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom (2014), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World (2002), Women on the Edge: Four Plays of Euripides, (1999), Feminist Theory and the Classics (1993). Currently she is at work on a handbook on theater for incarcerated women with Rhodessa Jones and an interactive e-book called “Queering the Past(s)” (https://classicalassociation.org/queering-the-past/