Christa Wolf Feminism

The way a message or work is presented has always been recognized as one of the key factors in delivering that idea to an audience. Choosing a medium to present one’s work is often just as important as other key factors like an author’s exigency, current socio-political climate, or dependency on archetypes. Because the way a work is delivered directly impacts an audience’s ability to receive or interpret a work, it may mold or distort a message through that medium and change due to said presentation. This idea, that the medium through which a writer presents and controls their work dictates how an audience receives a idea, holds true throughout our own interpretations in the Humanities program. While we saw, read, and heard a number of poems,

Dominated by a stream of consciousness organization, Wolf reveals her interpretation of the life of Cassandra “flashing before Cassandra’s eyes” as she is prepares for her death at the hands of Clytemnestra. By using an established myth of Cassandra from the Homer’s Iliad, Wolf channels the idea of Cassandra, a heroine who can see the future, but no one will believe her. A jumble of events, emotions, impressions, and conclusions, Cassandra provides confusion and connection stretching far beyond its pages to Wolf’s own experiences and emotions in East Germany during the Berlin Wall. Through usage of readers’ hindsight for Cassandra’s honesty, Wolf promotes the bias of trust to support her journey. This usage is seen in this inner monologue which seeks to develop both Cassandra and Wolf’s journey. This type of monologue is “closely connected with the growing "psychologization" of the novel”(Struve,1109). In “Monologue Intérieur”, Gleb Struve argues its use is different than dramatic dialogue because it is used to develop the psych rather than come to a conclusion. By promoting the belief in Cassandra’s honesty, this development is both better respected and received instead of rejected as a ramble of words and emotions. Furthermore, the form of a novel becomes justified with the usage of this interior dialogue. The nuance between this sort of

She writes “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”(Szlay,171). This claim seems to be based on the passage “I wanted this criminal body, where the voice of death had its seat, to starve, to wither away. Lunacy: an end to the torture of pretense.”(Wolf,60). Here Cassandra wrestles with her knowledge of prophecy and curse of being unable to effectively communicate it. Feeling a separation from this “voice” of prophecy and her literal body, her dialogue comes to represent that conflict. As she literally descends to lunacy only this dialogue can offer tangible material as any other medium looking in would only view a “crazy lady” with, at best, some informed narration. Later, when imprisoned in the tomb of heroes for refusing to comply with the secrecy of a plot, Cassandra seems to go through an intellectual liberation of sorts. Szalay writes that “only in her state of total physical confinement is Cassandra able to confront her psychic and physical self-imprisonment: her cooperation with her father, the palace, and the dominant patriarchal powers these institutions