Queer and/or Lesbian?: Amazons in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra

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.

Keywords:

• Amazons
• Christa Wolf
• Cassandra
• Trojan War

Amazons, Christa Wolf, Cassandra, Trojan War

Essays such as this one often reflect their origins as papers delivered at conferences and the like. Those contexts shape the questions we ask, and, as a result, the answers we provide.¹ Thus, for a seminar on feminist receptions of Homer (Cox & Theodorakopoulos, 2019), I began to think about Christa Wolf’s Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (Wolf, 1984) and its feminist re-vision of the Trojan War story; consequently, I emphasized her use of Homer (and minimized the Aeschylean echoes). Then, for a panel on queer Amazons, I focused instead on how Wolf utilized the Amazons in Cassandra, asking what was queer about them. I argued that the text as a whole was queer not so much in its depiction of homoeroticism but because it destabilized heteronormativity, genre, history, as well as sexuality.

For this special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, I felt obliged to look more closely at what was lesbian in the text. That led me to a question that is pressing these days: what is the place of lesbianism in a world that is increasingly validating the terms queer and trans? Is lesbian identity obsolete? That is the provocation offered by Hagai and Seymour’s (2021) recent issue of this journal. In their introduction, they distinguish between a “born that way” or strictly sexual definition, and a political definition:

Understanding lesbian identity as grounded in choice and politics offers lesbianism to anybody who self identifies with womanhood and is oriented towards other women. Different configurations of lesbian identity that include trans, cis, nonbinary, bisexual, and asexual lesbians are included under the lesbian tent. A clear insight from this triple issue is that in a world in which gender and sexual categories increasingly proliferate, the strength of lesbian identity is that it is nonessentialist, which makes it a fruitful ground for solidarity across different identities. (Hagai & Seymour, 2021, p. 2)

Thus, they refuse the split between lesbian and queer/trans. And I attempt that same bridging in this essay.²

I feared that this essay would be anti-lesbian. Wolf takes the Amazons as the extreme outliers, warriors who are erotically connected to women, but also man-haters. She does not idealize them. At the same time, she creates a third space that is like the lesbian tent that Hagai and Seymour refer to, where the Amazons are welcome—but they refuse it. That space is reminiscent of the 70s lesbian feminist ideal, but it is more queer than lesbian—it includes men.

The novel as a whole is a reworking of the Trojan War story, told through the eyes of Cassandra, the prophet who was fated to speak the truth but not to be believed. Wolf was critical of Homer and epic, finding little in the Iliad of interest to a woman writer, so she shifted her focus from the Greek warriors to a Trojan princess. She referred to her text at one point as a roman à clef (Wolf, 1984, p. 264),³ but it is not clear what she meant by that (Jenkinson, 1990, p. 235; Wagner, 1988, p. 95). I see it as referring both to herself as a woman writer embodied in the prophet Cassandra and to the times she lived in (Kuhn, 2015, p. 167; Pickle, 1987, p. 149; the Trojan war represents the nuclear war she fears is coming).

The Amazons are not a major component in the narrative, but Wolf uses them to make her larger point about war. They are warriors, and though she makes them sexually attracted to women (which the ancient tradition did not do very clearly), they are not objects of admiration but rather the ideological antagonists to her heroine. Thus, though I see Cassandra as an anti-heternormative text, and a queer one in many ways, it is less a lesbian text, if by that we mean one that explores or celebrates same-sex desire between women.⁴ Cassandra is primarily an anti-war text and only secondarily about sex and gender. Since the patriarchy is waging the war, however, Wolf presents a strong critique of the treatment of women in her imaginary Troy. As Anna K. Kuhn says: “Wolf broadens her analysis by exploring how the patriarchy’s systematic exclusion of women has helped shape our present catastrophic world political situation” (Kuhn, 1988, p. 178).

The text is generically complex. The title and publication history emphasize this complexity. For instance, in the version I used, it is named Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays because it is hybrid, but sometimes the narrative is published alone, and the essays are published separately (Beebee & Weber, 2001, p. 260; Kuhn, 1988, p. 184). That practice, however, minimizes one of the ways we could call it queer: its form is mixed.

It is also anti-normative and resistant to traditional aesthetic structures. Wolf had been invited to give a series of lectures on poetics at the University of Frankfurt (in West Germany) in 1982; the draft of the “novel” was presented as the fifth “lecture,” thus originally last. The talks then would have set out “the preconditions of a narrative” (p. 140, the title she gave the published talks). We can see Wolf’s pushback against categories in this structure.

Moreover, she blatantly refused to do what was requested. She said she would not give a poetics because she did not have one; she then quotes this definition from the Classical Antiquity Lexicon: “‘Poetics’: … theory of the art of poetry … which at an advanced stage takes on a systematic form, and whose norms have been accorded ‘wide validity’ in numerous countries since the age of humanism” (p. 141). She did not want to participate in such systematic forms, it would seem. Then, while the English edition refers to Cassandra as a novel, Wolf herself called the fictional portion “a narrative,” something much more open and exploratory, as Wagner (1988, pp. 92–95) argues. Furthermore, the lectures are not even in traditional essay form. The first two are travel journals of a trip Wolf took to Greece and Crete with her husband, in which she reflects on literature and archaeology; the third essay is a work diary, putting antiquity in the context of seemingly imminent nuclear disaster; the fourth and final essay is a letter to a friend about Cassandra and women writers. As a result of its compound nature, it is not productive to analyze this work in any single way.

Wolf’s life was equally complicated.⁵ As an East German writing in the years leading up to re-unification, Wolf stood at a problematic border between “then” (the Holocaust and WWII), “now” (socialism, the Cold War), and the future, which she saw as in danger of disappearing under the threat of nuclear war. Wolf looked to the past to think through issues in the present. The Trojan War provided her with a cautionary tale about war, which she then connects to what she sees going on in Germany in the 1980s. Wolf is explicit at one point in the essays: while speaking of her fear of annihilation, she says she is looking for a utopia: “The Troy I have in mind is not a description of bygone days but a model for a kind of utopia” (p. 224). She knows that the times and people are different, but she nonetheless finds something enduringly familiar and useful in the past.

Going back to earlier eras is a common strategy for writers who wish to criticize repressive regimes. In the GDR, writers were under intense scrutiny; indeed, the essay portions of Wolf’s essays (but not the narrative) were censored.⁶ Socialist realism was the dominant approved literary form, and her earlier novel, The Quest for Christa T., was censured and banned in East Germany because it was too psychoanalytic (on socialist realism, see Kuhn, 2015, pp. 155–157, 161). Though Wolf was experimental, she managed to squeeze through the cracks and was a very successful and internationally acclaimed writer. Politically, Wolf spoke out against the repression of writers (Weingartz, 2009). She also opposed the ways in which the state failed to live up to its claims of gender equality (Wolf, 1988, p. 121, 125, but cf. 114). Still, she remained a socialist and party member until 1989.

While she was a very distinguished writer and rewarded accordingly, she was nonetheless also under surveillance, as many writers were. But she was also briefly an informant for the Stasi (E. German secret police)! This revelation in 1993 after the wall fell was very troubling to some of her leftist feminist readers (like me). When she read her files, she claimed not to remember this period (1959–1962). A review in The Nation discusses the events and her lack of memory: “The most devastating fact of all slipped her recollection for years. In 1993, while perusing the 42 volumes of surveillance files that the Stasi had assembled about her, she discovered a ‘Perpetrator File’ revealing that she had worked as an unofficial collaborator—in Stasi parlance, an ‘I.M.,’ or inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—from 1959 to 1962. Wolf not only insisted that she had repressed all memory of her complicity, she was stunned when she found out” (Rothberg, 2018, p. 30). In replying to the news of her role, she emphasized the language of the reports: “It horrifies me that there is a language in these files, a sort of Stasi language, that I myself was speaking, and that I can no longer identify with at all,’ she said in a 1993 interview with The New York Times” (Rothberg, 2018, p. 30). As I will discuss in more detail later, that shift of language is reflected in the narrative; Cassandra’s role as a prophet in a state she comes to oppose is partially about language, and she notes the contrived and controlled language of others in the establishment. Wolf was in a similar position.

In general, it is difficult to say just where Wolf stood politically. She didn’t want to be identified with any “ism” (Beeler, 1995, p. 234 n. 1), and she specifically rejected western feminism which she defined simplistically as just man-hating (Pickle, 1987, p. 157, n. 20). Kuhn (2015, p. 155) points out that in Marxist doctrine, sexism was only a problem of capitalism, solved in socialism. Nonetheless, Wolf did not escape western feminist influences; she traveled widely, and she took feminist books with her when she made her annual move to her summer house: “The First Sex. Mothers and Amazons. Goddesses. Patriarchy. Amazons, Warrior Women, and He-Women…. Women and Power. The Sex Which Is Not One… Mother Right. Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The White Goddess. A Room of One’s Own” (p. 273). These texts from second-wave feminism, French feminism, and Marxist feminism place her intellectually.⁷ And in the narrative, she clearly has a Marxist critique of patriarchy even if she denies the feminist label.

Let me turn now to the Amazons, those lesbian feminist icons, in Wolf’s narrative. In antiquity the Amazons were known as enemies to be conquered, on a par with the Centaurs, Persians, and Giants on the Parthenon frieze. They were portrayed as the opposites of Greek women, and at the same time, they were geographical and cultural outsiders. As Page duBois argued early on, that mythology supported the ideology of Greek men’s unique status in culture; the Greek hero typically kills the Amazon, thus proving his superiority (duBois, 1991, pp. 33–39, 55, 80 et al.). Greek heroes Herakles, Theseus, and Achilles battled with Amazons—and conquered them in battle or captured them, with a trick (Plutarch, Life of Theseus 26; see Mayor, 2014, pp. 249–286; Penrose, 2019, pp. 181–183).

Although they are called man-haters (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 723-4) and live in an exclusively female world (Aeschylus, Suppliant Women 287), in the myths they also famously evoke male desire. There is frequently an element of lust in the murderous violence turned on them—Achilles is said to have fallen in love with Penthesilea as he was killing her; Herakles had to win a belt from the Amazon Hippolyta; Theseus married Antiope (perhaps after raping her, or perhaps she went willingly: Mayor, 2014, pp. 129–123; Penrose, 2016, pp. 3–5, n. 4, 109 citing Plutarch, Life of Theseus 26, “Amazons were by nature well-disposed to men [philandrous].”). Wolf wrote an essay about Kleist’s play Penthesilea and an afterword to it (Wilson, 2000); thus, it was obviously important to her.⁸ In the play, the Amazons pursue men for procreation, but are supposed to release them after consummation in a Festival of Roses that celebrated their victory (Kleist, 1998, p. 31 et passim). Penthesilea instead singles Achilles out and pursues him in battle with a desire to capture him; the language is both aggressive and erotic (Kleist, 1998, pp. 31–32). Talking of their upcoming battle, Achilles says “She sends me bridal messengers enough/on feathered wing, they woo me with her wishes/They speak with deathly whispers in my ear” (Kleist, 1998, p. 29). Later the two are in love, but ritual (and tradition) demands that they fight (Kleist, 1998, p. 112); neither intends to kill the other–Penthesilea plans to defeat Achilles but keep him in Themiscyra; Achilles plans to marry her and bring her home with him. In a fit of madness, she not only kills him but becomes an animal: she bites his flesh along with the dogs (p. 128) (Kleist, 1998, p. 128). She then kills herself (Kleist, 1998, p. 148).⁹

More recently, however, lesbian feminists have embraced the Amazons as early avatars (like Sappho, whom Wolf also cites, as we will see); the name Amazon graces numerous lesbian publications and the like, from Ti-Grace Atkinson’s Amazon Journey to current blogs. June Thomas says in her blog on the Amazons: “To read, write, or think about lesbians is to be surrounded by Amazons. This morning I read a play by Carolyn Gage called The Amazon All-Stars. On my bookshelf, it sits alongside The Amazon Trail, by Lee Lynch; Karla Jay’s The Amazon and the Page; and Valley of the Amazons, by Noretta Koertge. Back in the day, there were feminist publications called Amazon: A Feminist Journal, Amazon News, Amazon Spirit, Amazon Times, and the Amazon Mime Grapevine” (Thomas, 2022 https://medium.com/prismnpen/the-real-spectacular-amazons-lesbians-connection-9aac08fb77e4).

Given that Wolf mostly used Homer and Aeschylus as sources for the Cassandra story, where the Amazons are mentioned but do not appear, she did not have to include them in her text. But she does, and she makes them prominent, though she is very indirect in her presentation. I’ll start with the how, and then move on to the why of this aspect of the novel. In Wolf’s portrayal, Amazons hate men and love other women. The narrative opens with Cassandra in a scene taken from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1072–1330); she is seated on a chariot beside Agamemnon in Mycenae, looking forward to her death at the hands of Clytemnestra, and back on her life in Troy (p. 4). She is the speaker/narrator for the rest of the narrative, a structure I will come back to later.

She almost immediately introduces the Amazon Myrine as an interlocutor to whom she is trying to explain herself. Myrine, she says, could not understand that “there is something of everyone in me, so I have belonged completely to no one, and I have even understood their hatred for me” (p. 4). The specific object of their attention is Aeneas: Cassandra says she can’t hate Aeneas for surviving and leaving Troy and going on to found Rome, as legend has it; in contrast, the Amazon warrior Myrine despises him, calls him “traitorous” (p. 5), and cannot forgive that betrayal.

Wolf sets two important scenes on the city’s walls (teichoskopia, a technique Homer deploys, for instance, with Helen in Iliad 3). In that famous Iliad setting, Helen, the woman who allegedly caused the war, looks at the armored men with admiration; in Wolf we have instead an instance of lesbian desire (though it is not labeled as such). As she remembers standing on the wall with Myrine that last time (p. 6), Cassandra is led further back to the memory of saying goodbye to Aeneas. In that conversation, she described her first meeting with Myrine: “I talked of how I had seen her, Myrine, march through this gate three or four years before beside Penthesilea and her armored band. Of my rush of irreconcilable feelings—amazement, compassion, admiration, horror, embarrassment, and yes, even an infamous amusement…”

The desire becomes more direct a couple of paragraphs later: “Myrine got into my blood the moment I saw her, bright, daring, ardent beside the dark self-consuming Penthesilea. Joy-giver or pain-giver, I could not let her go” (p. 7). Cassandra feels it in her body: “At last, after such a long time, my body again. Once again the hot stab through my insides. Once again the utter weakness for someone. How she tore into me” (p. 7). Cassandra calls her “pony” and first breaks her beloved’s shyness by winding “her blond mane around my hand and so found out how very much I had felt like doing that for so long” (p. 7). It is significant that Myrine is identified with a pony since the Amazons were often associated with horses—they were excellent riders, were reputed to have been the first to tame horses (e.g. Lysias 2.4) and frequently appear on horseback in painting.¹⁰ Thus, the women’s relationship is quite physical and intense.

Nonetheless, Cassandra’s desire is not exclusively for other women. There are at least two erotic triangles at work in the narrative. Aeneas was Cassandra’s first lover, as we find out later. In this section, we get an oblique acknowledgment of their relationship—but in the negative: “Sometimes we embraced. Aeneas and I did not touch each other anymore…” (p. 6). Cassandra mentions that she talked to Aeneas as she used to talk to Myrine. It seems, then, that there is some sort of equivalence between these two; Aeneas was her lover, and so was Myrine. A triangle is set up, though here the glue is not sexual desire but another kind of intercourse—conversation. There is, in addition, an implicit lesbian triangle—Myrine was Penthesilea’s lover as well as Cassandra’s, and Cassandra was jealous of Penthesilea (p. 6). Thus, Cassandra is attracted to both men and women. The Amazons, however, are strongly lesbian in her depiction: at one point, Cassandra thinks Aeneas is giving Penthesilea a significant look, but there is no suggestion that Penthesilea is interested in him, or any man (p. 115).

That lesbian desire echoes the Sappho fragment that Wolf takes as her epigraph for the narrative. The passage is intensely erotic: “Once again limb-loosing love shakes me, bitter-sweet, untamable, a dusky animal” (p. 3, Lobel & Page, 1955, fragment 130). This definition of Eros is quintessential Sappho, especially if you look at the Greek; here Eros is sweet-bitter (glukupikron), a desire that is amechanon, an animal (literally, a creeping thing) that the human has no tool or machine to deal with.¹¹

Using this Sappho fragment for her narrative’s emblem would have strongly suggested lesbianism to its readers when the book was published in English. Although Sappho was not always seen as a woman-loving-woman (many of her poem fragments are on other subjects, and male scholars in the past focused on her male relations—as they did with the Amazons), she was generally so defined by the late nineteenth century. And by the twentieth century, she was certainly an emblematic figure of lesbianism. In the essays Wolf uses Sappho again in her critique of the dominance of male authors, offering her as an example of one of the few early women writers. She cites this passage: “One man praises horsemen as the most beautiful treasure/of the dark earth, another foot soldiers,/another fleets of ships, but I say it is/what a lover longs for” (p. 296, citing Sappho fragment 16, Lobel & Page, 1955). This very famous fragment sets love against war and heroic masculinity. Love, however, is not about satisfaction but about the lover’s desire for the inaccessible. Sappho gives Helen as an example because she left parents and children for love of a man; she then introduces Anactoria, as her absent beloved girl. Sappho would rather see Anactoria than all the armies of Lydia in their armor.

Wolf does not quote those lines about female desire. What stops her? Is it lesbian erasure? Or fear of the censors, given that the socialist state in East Germany was based on the family as reproductive unit? According to the Communist party line, a good man and a good socialist was not a lover of other men (Evans, 2010, p. 557 and passim). Or is it simply that the passage did not seem relevant? She was most interested in both Sappho and the Amazons for their opposition/connection (respectively) to war, which was her predominant concern: the Trojan War in the narrative and the threat of nuclear war in her own time.¹²

Compulsory heterosexuality and the exchange of women are a large part of Wolf’s critique of the war—but separatism (the Amazon way) is not the solution (Kuhn, 2015, p. 155). The structure of gender in ancient Greece was at least in theory completely dimorphic: simply put, men worked outside, women inside; men’s metier was war, women’s was marriage.¹³ In both Trojan and Greek societies, only men would fight. Hector says to Cassandra: “Too bad you’re not a man. You could go and fight. Believe me, sometimes that’s better.” “Better than what? … Never again, Hector, dear one, did I want to be a man. I often thanked those powers which answer for our sex that I was allowed to be a woman” (p. 111). Since they are both female and warriors, the Amazons destabilize the gendered organization of society.

When Cassandra first speaks of Troy, it seems to have an egalitarian sex/gender system (unlike that of the Greeks): Priam consults Hecuba in her megaron (an architectural feature that characterized Mycenaean palaces); Cassandra and Hecuba both address the council. Women don’t have to marry anyone if they don’t want to (p. 79). That changes as the war progresses; Troy becomes more like Greece, and gendered relationships reveal the transformation. Women are left out of the men’s deliberations—Priam says the council is not a place for women (p. 92). And Cassandra and Polyxena are given to men against their will to forward the war effort (pp. 125–127, 133).

But Cassandra was naïve in thinking that Troy was egalitarian in the first place. The Troy she lived in and loved had traditionally practiced a form of ritual compulsory heterosexuality. Girls who had begun to menstruate sat in the temple of Athena, waiting to be “chosen” by men. Cassandra objects to that ritual rape and, as a result, is confirmed in her desire to be a prophet “at any cost” (p. 4, 7, 9). In this way, she is refusing to become an object, as Wolf says in the essays (p. 228, 238), which was the fate of women in general. She is, according to Wolf, “the first professional working woman in literature” (p. 176). But she does not escape: her ascension to the role of priestess required the promise of sex with the god Apollo (pp. 15–16); her refusal to consummate the union leads to her famous fate: no one believes her.

Wolf is analytical about why she chose Cassandra. She describes her relationship to her mystically and perhaps erotically: she was drawn to Cassandra. She says in the essays that she was tracking her for two years and that Cassandra took possession of her (p. 141, 142). The Amazons then are used, and Penthesilea in particular, to reveal Cassandra.

Though it might seem obvious who the Amazons are, since they were introduced through Myrine in the opening pages as warriors and lovers of women, Cassandra later re-introduces Penthesilea with a question: “Who was Penthesilea?” (p. 117).¹⁴ Asking this question allows Wolf/Cassandra to address identity, which is a central issue for the character (and perhaps for the author). In the war that is raging, Cassandra must choose between her royal position and love for her father, on the one hand, and her despair at what the Trojans are becoming as a result of the war, on the other (p. 94). As a prophet, she recognizes that she must similarly choose between “my birth and my office” (p. 11). Anne Kuhn talks about “the tension between patriotism and self-love” (Kuhn, 1988, p. 183). But identity is not fixed and stable: the Trojans unlike the Greeks “have experienced war” (p. 11). They were formed by it: “War gives its people their shape” (p. 13). Cassandra evolves; she ends up being imprisoned for refusing to go along with the plan to use Polyxena as a tool to trap Achilles (pp. 125–127) and ultimately as a trophy to adorn his grave.

In the narrative, Penthesilea stands unequivocally for opposition to male dominance: “Her every appearance, her every sentence, was a challenge to someone. She was not looking for allies among us. She was not merely fighting the Greeks; she was fighting all men” (p. 117). Cassandra is put off by her (p. 117). In this, Wolf cites the classical Greek view, that the Amazons are man-hating (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 723-4; Suppliant Women 287), but she also emphasizes that Penthesilea asserts a male power: she “ruled as only kings rule” (p. 117). To answer her own question as to who the Amazon Queen was, Cassandra introduces the rumors circulating in Troy about their new allies: “They had killed all their male kin; they were monsters with only one breast; they kill whomever they love, love in order to kill” (p. 117). While Cassandra does not necessarily believe these rumors, after all she was in love with Myrine, she cannot escape hearing them and repeating them.

Wolf alludes to the ancient story that Achilles fell in love with Penthesilea while he killed her (“and Achilles’ very heart was wrung/With love’s remorse to have slain a thing so sweet” [Quintus of Smyrna 1, 666–674]) only to discount it. She also rejects Kleist’s version of the interconnectedness of love and death (see above). Her depiction of the battle is violent and nothing else, no loving Achilles here; Cassandra emphasizes that absence when she says that because Achilles is “unable to love,” he “desecrates the dead woman” (p. 120). The violence he enacts on Penthesilea’s body is a result of his lack of feeling: “The men, weak, whipped up into victors, need us as victims in order not to stop feeling altogether” (p. 120).¹⁵ And Penthesilea does not exchange a gaze with Achilles as she does in images on Greek vases. No, this Penthesilea would not be captured and live as a slave: instead “she scratched him with her dagger and forced him to kill her.” Refusing to be an object, she asserts her subjectivity by courting death itself.

Wolf deploys the Amazons and lesbian desire in her critique of patriarchy and the literary form of epic, but she stops short of endorsing them. They are the equal and opposites of men, and for that very reason, they don’t offer a solution to the problem of war for Wolf. As warrior women, the Amazons do not assert a hierarchy of values based on love, as Sappho did. Indeed, Penthesilea, as a good general, spreads the death wish among her comrades (pp. 118–119), forcing Myrine to fight. Cassandra does not want to admit that a woman can desire death (p. 119); yet, when she is lying next to the dead Penthesilea, she wishes to die, to “exchange places. Hey, my dear. Nothing is sweeter than death” (p. 122).

In an interview with Jacqueline Grenz, Wolf states it explicitly: “I tried to show an evolution. I wanted to show how this obsession with femininity can go astray. It embodies a sectarian tendency which I find repugnant, as I do everything which amounts to purely separating off those different from oneself and behaving in a hostile manner toward them. This is how I interpret the Penthesilea position. I was interested less in Penthesilea than in those women who were prepared to analyze their own position, who didn’t rush into an absolute battle against men and the male world, but who were able to put themselves in question too. Their position is more productive because it does not break the connections with society as a whole” (Wolf, 1988, p. 125). In her work diary, she calls Penthesilea “the doomed line of matriarchy” (p. 263).

Although she was awestruck by Penthesilea’s power and took Myrine as a lover, ultimately Cassandra, like Wolf, rejects the Amazons and what they stand for. Wolf is moving toward something that I would see as more open, and therefore perhaps more queer than lesbian (Kuhn, 2015, p. 162, identifies this as third-wave feminism). This is a literal third space, one that Penthesilea rejects. Cassandra, however, ultimately accepts it after a long struggle. When Marpessa, another lover of hers, introduces her to the Amazons, they are in the company of other women she knows in a community on the outskirts of Troy, under Mt. Ida. Though this is a woman-dominated space–Cassandra notes that “All the women she knew were there”–it is not women-only: Anchises (Paris’ father) is named, and there are wounded soldiers being nursed back to health. As a result, Cassandra is surprised to encounter the Amazons there: “Normally they could not stand to have men anywhere near them” (p. 117).

Nonetheless, Penthesilea at first seemed to belong in the outsider community: “They were at one.” Cassandra, on the other hand, does not yet fit in: “I say ‘they’ for I held back at first” (pp. 117–118).¹⁶ In the course of Cassandra’s transformation, the two women shift positions. In a little play, Penthesilea asserts her philosophy that there is a gender war going on; another woman from the cave community argues that it is a war against people (p. 118).

Penthesilea: The men are getting what they paid for.

Arisbe: You call it getting what they paid for when they are reduced to the level of butchers?

Penthesilea: They are butchers. So they are doing what they enjoy.

Arisbe: And what about us? What if we became butchers too?

Penthesilea: Then we are doing what we have to do. But we don’t enjoy it.

Arisbe: We should do what they do in order to show that we are different?

Penthesilea. Yes

Oenone: But one can’t live that way

Penthesilea: Not live? You can die all right.

Hecuba: Child, you want everything to come to a stop.

Penthesilea: That is what I want. Because I don’t know any other way to make the men stop.

At the end of the scene, a young slave woman from the cave community invites Penthesilea to join them, saying: “Between killing and dying there is a third alternative: living.” Penthesilea retorts with a firm “no,” and goes to meet her fate—death on the battlefield with Achilles. In contrast, when Cassandra is injured while leading the dirge for Penthesilea after the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, she is taken to that community and is healed. At that point, she is finally able to say “we” and identify with the group that Penthesilea rejected (p. 124).

The strength and courage that Cassandra so admires (e.g. p. 7) go too far for the other women in the marginal community (and for Wolf). The Amazons are the equal and opposite of men’s war making (anti-aneirai in the Iliad 3. 189 can mean both equal to and opposed to), but they are not a solution for exactly that reason. As two poles, one is not completely superior to the other. While Penthesilea is confident that there is a firm distinction between the way she and the Amazons wage war and men’s militarism, Cassandra sees them as parallel and not fundamentally different. Part of her overall point about Troy is that you may become the enemy you fight: the Trojans give up their ideals and become like the Greeks (see above on gender). For some time, Cassandra has been meeting with other women in the evenings (pp. 51–52). In one scene, Arisbe (mother of her half-brother Aisakos) makes Cassandra see that Priam is not that different from Agamemnon: he was willing to sacrifice his son (Paris) as Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia (p. 53). Cassandra’s privilege as well as her attachment to the family stops her from recognizing the flaws in Troy until much later (p. 53). Given that Wolf was thinking about nuclear war, in which both East (Warsaw Pact nations) and West (NATO) were stockpiling warheads, there was not a difference between them in terms of the propulsion toward death. The peace movement broke down boundaries of East and West Germany (Kuhn, 1988, p. 179).

Is it possible to have a life under such conditions? In a war? Wolf’s answer is yes, and she develops a utopia in the community where Cassandra first met the Amazons: it is on the outskirts of town, on the River Scamander; it is a secret, underground community, and Wolf notes that brown women and slaves congregate there (p. 19). Servants from the Greek army find their way there. It is a liminal space in terms of locale and class and ideology. She envisions an—other place, not the city of Troy and not Greek, one that is communal, a socialist place, but with roots in a pre-Hellenic matriarchy. They celebrate the goddesses Cybele and Artemis (p. 19). Wolf’s commune is not a 1970s-style female separatist enclave, however; it seems to be open to all who oppose the dominant society; as I mentioned earlier, Anchises is there. In sum, Wolf does not accept the view of writers such as Wittig or many other utopian feminist writers—she rejects the ideal of the warlike Amazons.

The community is not female only and is not marked as sexually lesbian, but it is definitely in resistance to the dominant order—something that queer theory has recently claimed for its own. At the same time, it seems based on a sort of cultural and political lesbianism popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The marginal space reflects what Wolf learned about pre-Hellenic matriarchy in her travels to Crete; like the Minoans, these people worship the great goddesses. Like lesbian enclaves, the space coexists with but is outside the dominant (palace) culture and is based on a secret knowledge that predates the Olympian hierarchy. For instance, Apollo in Olympian myth was depicted as handsome and golden (p. 15); sex with that version of the god gave Cassandra her power, and when she refused him at the last moment, he cursed her; he couldn’t take back the gift of sight, but he could make it so that no one would believe her.

Her status as prophet was predicted by a dream, not of the traditional golden Olympian Apollo but of Apollo as a wolf. At the palace, she had nursemaids and servants who were from the cave-dwelling community. When she tells her dream to her nurse Parthena, she learns “dark stories… which I was not supposed to repeat to anyone. I would never have thought that this ambivalent god could be identical to our unimpeachable Apollo in the temple” (pp. 16–17). At another time, we hear Parthena call out to Cybele. When Cassandra asks about her, “the nurse recoiled. I could see that she was forbidden to speak that name” (p. 19). Cybele was a Phrygian mother goddess (Magna Mater), who Wolf at least believes predated the Olympians; taken over and important in Rome, her priests were the Galli (a sect of eunuchs). And she was worshiped by the Amazons, (Bennett, 1967, pp. 17–29, 73; Tyrrell, 1984, p. 55). This traditional female knowledge is censored in Troy——but is maintained in sub-cultures.¹⁷

Cassandra’s ambivalence about her role hurts her. After the battle, when the women lay Penthesilea out for burial, Wolf emphasizes their gender (Amazons and Trojans) “nothing but women” (p. 121) and nationality, no Greeks; they dance wildly, and Cassandra goes wild with them and prepares to “exit from time” (p. 121). Strangely, though, in this scene reminiscent of the famous activities of maenads and Dionysos, Cassandra calls on Apollo to protect Panthous, his priest and her sometime lover. As a result, she is run down by the women (p. 122). Then, when Aeneas carries her away to the cave community, the narrative emphasizes her resistance: “So I came to the women in the caves, carried in Aeneas’ arms. ‘Someone had to carry you to get you here,’ they used to tease me later. ‘Otherwise you would not come.’ Would I have stayed away otherwise?” (p. 122).

Wild dancing allows Cassandra to step out of time. Thus, this utopia implies a different time as well as place. To quote J. Halberstam, “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction,” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 1) and out of the experiences of gay men with AIDS—titles such as “Is the Rectum a Grave” (Bersani, 1987), or No Future (Edelman, 2004) give the flavor of this strand of queer theory. The Amazons, Cassandra and all of Troy clearly live under the conditions outlined by theorists like Edelman and Halberstam: there is no future for them, not because they refuse reproduction entirely, or because of AIDS, but because of the war. Wolf is more like Muñoz (2019) in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, who opposes the celebration of negativity in this work on time, insisting that we must imagine a future. The absence of a future in Wolf’s liminal community does not signal anti-sociality; rather it spurs appreciation of the present. The participants learn new things, like how to make pottery, and in the process experience the body anew: “This turned into a touch-fest, where we spontaneously touched each other and got acquainted. We were fragile. Our time was limited and so we could not waste it on matters of minor importance. So we concentrated on what mattered most: Ourselves—playfully as if we had all the time in the world. Two summers and two winters” (p. 133) This sense of embodiedness, which is based on fragility and limited time, opens up new possibilities to the women who experience it.

The structure of the whole complex text is resistant and disruptive, and not only of the sex/gender system, as discussed above. The narrative opens with a disembodied voice saying: “It was here. This is where she stood” (3). We soon understand that the speaker is looking at Mycenae and imagining Cassandra in the past; the words emphasize both time (“was”) and place (“where”). Then the speaker shifts and so does the tense: “Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death” (3).¹⁸

It is easy to identify the first voice with Wolf, for she later says: “The first and second essays… attest to how the figure of Cassandra takes possession of me” (142). When she was reading Aeschylus’ Oresteia, she states, “I witnessed how a panic rapture spread through me, how it mounted and reached the pinnacle when a voice began to speak: ‘Aiee!Aieeee!//Apollo! Apollo!’ Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me… Three thousand years melted away” (144–45). Thus, the text as a whole dissolves time: the narrative starts in the unspecified time of a narrator looking at someone, then jumps back to the time of the Trojan War, and then moves forward and back in the past.

In the essays, Wolf highlights the way that dissolution of borders opposes the alienation imposed by literary form (142); such linguistic and political alienation are also at work in the narrative—Troy changes and Cassandra’s language changes with it until she is forced to leave the city for this marginal community of outsiders. Cassandra mentions the ways in which actions and language are changed by the war—she can no longer just go in to see her father; the way is guarded by Eumelos (“a capable man,” 50). Eumelos has determined that Menelaus was no longer a “guest-friend,” since he was “our future enemy. Ever since they had surrounded him with ‘a security net.’ A new word. In exchange for it we gave away the old word ‘guest-friend.’ What do words matter? All of a sudden those of us who persisted in saying ‘guest-friend’—including me—found themselves under suspicion” (p. 55). “We were not allowed to call it ‘war.’ Linguistic regulations prescribed that, correctly speaking, it be called a ‘surprise attack’” (p. 71).

The city is an example of how a possible or seeming utopia corrodes from within while attacked from without, becoming like the enemy: “But what if for a long time we had been facing a different question altogether: Whether to take on the enemy’s face knowing that we would be destroyed anyhow?” (p. 103). Neither Troy nor East Germany was faithful to their ideals. The prophet and the writer, however, are both complicit with the regime that they also criticize.

In both narrative and essays, Wolf looks back to Aeschylus, Homer and the Trojan War; to write an anti-war story requires telling it differently. But why bother with that story in the first place? I have talked about the political reasons for going back to the Trojan War. There is also the status of Greece and Homer. She says it would have been “criminal” to miss the opportunity to go to Greece (p. 143). Why criminal? Perhaps because “it calls to her soul,” though she claims that statement is ironic (p. 143); after all, she does call Crete the “cradle of the West,” “our” culture, in contradistinction to that of the Americans she meets. It seems that she was more invested in the ideal of Western civilization, and more specifically Europe’s roots in ancient Greece, than she lets on with her biting criticism of Homer’s epic. From within this cultural norm, which celebrates antiquity and sees it as the ancestor of modern Europe, it would make sense to look to the Trojan War for an analogue to a current war, especially since it was conceptualized as a battle between East and West. But Wolf is distancing herself from traditional German Graecophilia (and perhaps Nazi idealism of the Amazons)¹⁹ by setting her tale in Troy and telling it from Cassandra’s point of view.²⁰

The question of “why go back” to Antiquity comes up specifically in the travel letter essay and is associated with lesbian culture. Wolf comes upon her friend Helen with her traveling companion Sue, a couple who are looking for every example of the labrys that they can find (p. 195). The Amazons fit in here: this axe was used exclusively by women in antiquity, and in ancient Rome as well as in modern feminist circles, it came to be associated with Amazons and female empowerment. These women are interested in the Mother Goddess, early versions of the goddess Demeter, who is Cybele in the narrative. Like lesbians who haunted (still haunt) Lesbos, they are looking for themselves in the past. But Wolf is critical of this tendency of modern feminists, saying “How does it help us to know that the ancient Greeks gradually replaced ‘mother right’ with ‘father right’? … Doesn’t this harking back to an irretrievable ancient past reveal more clearly than anything else the desperate plight in which women see themselves today?” (p. 195). Carla Freccero talks about the quest for a ghostly lesbian in the return to the past, the search for oneself in the past (Freccero, 2007, p. 488, et al.). Wolf’s lesbians remain ghostly she never identifies them as lesbian per se (nor are the two men who are traveling together gay).

Where does all of this leave us? Why do we go back to the Amazons? What do we want from them? The ancient Greeks and others (like Kleist) viewed them as a form of the monstrous other; as warrior women they were rupturing the norms of the patriarchy. Wolf uses them but opposes their militarism. They are the antagonists who allow her protagonist to find and define herself in a community of women, and some men, that is nurturing and loving. Can we still use the Amazons without falling into the trap of militarism? Maybe. In Cassandra, the oppression of women is to be opposed, but all men are not the problem. Wolf rejects the Amazons’ us/them ideology, but her utilization of matriarchal imagery and values of the Minoan past enable her to retain what she finds useful in the ideals of lesbian feminism. Thus, for Wolf, lesbianism is not obsolete (as some are asking today, see the special issues of the Journal of Lesbian Studies cited above, n. 4), but she finds the Amazon identity per se limiting. Perhaps Cassandra’s dilemmas and self-reflexivity can be a kind of model of a way to look at others who are different from ourselves.

In the end, Cassandra and Wolf celebrate the ordinary people leading ordinary lives under the radar in a crisis. As someone who had grown up under Naziism, Wolf was very suspicious of nationalism and its attendant emotions. What is the relevance of Wolf (and Homer) in our time of crisis? War in Ukraine is very much on my mind as I write this (2022–2023). There is once again a credible nuclear threat; according to the UN Chief Guterres (2022): “Humanity is one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation” (YouTube August 2, 2022).²¹

Wolf’s strategy was to write and participate in the peace movement and to fight the nuclear disaster she was facing. In this essay, I am using Wolf as a way to think about lesbianism vs. queer sexuality. The Amazons as warriors are not the answer for Wolf, nor are they for me. But I don’t want to participate in the erasure of lesbianism. We must find a way to retain multiple possibilities as we move through this warmongering, homophobic and transphobic world. Wolf chooses Cassandra for her protagonist because as a member of the ruling class who is loyal to that class, she has a hard time speaking up against the regime. Perhaps she would have failed in any case, given the curse that no one believed her. But she did not try soon enough or hard enough. Wolf is also intensely aware of the problems of language that we face in the academy today: what words are forbidden to us? Intellectuals and writers are in a similar position to Cassandra and Wolf. Like them, we may be divided in our loyalties, yet Wolf would encourage us to speak up. The issues of war and militarism have not disappeared—far from it.

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Notes on contributors

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/

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, 2001, p. 265) and her emphasis on subjectivity (on which see Kuhn, 2015; Rabinowitz, 2019). 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 (2022) 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 (1988, p. 111).

6 The censored edition of the book is analyzed by Graves (1986).

7 In contrast, Kuhn (2015, 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 (2001, 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, 2000, p. 195, citing Wolf, 1990, 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, 1988, 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 (2021). 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 (2016).

14 Wilson (2000, 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 (2019, 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.