Woman's Heterosexual Experience in Christa Wolf's Kassandra: A Critique of GDR Feminism

Shortly after fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, Christa Wolf was relentlessly attacked in West German media for her publication of Was Bleibt (What Remains, 1990), a novella recounting an author's sense of persecution when spied on by Stasi, secret police of former German Democratic Republic. (1) German journalists castigated Wolf for her decision to remain in East Germany, accusing her of supporting an oppressive regime--something they had long imputed to East German in general--and of being too weak to criticize that regime until it no longer entailed any personal risk. (2) Needless to say, her disclosure in 1993 that she had in fact collaborated with Stasi between 1959 and 1962 added grist to mill, and Wolf once more became subject of intense criticism. She has been variously defended by prominent German intellectuals such as Gunter Grass, Heiner Muller, and Wolf Biermann (her former compatriot expelled from GDR during a West German concert tour in 1976) and by literary critics who emphasized Wolf's regular, albeit implicit, criticism of GDR and of herself in her later (post-1976) literary texts. Gail Finney, for example, compares genesis of novella Was Bleibt to that of Sommerstuck (Scenes of Summer, 1989) and argues convincingly that latter critical of the privileges and self-indulgences of East German intelligentsia and that it is thus an indirect comment on guilt Wolf felt for not publishing Was Bleibt(108). (3) Written at about same time as initial drafts of both Was Bleibt and Sommerstuck, novel Kassandra (1983) was rarely invoked in early debates about Wolf's complicity in problematic power structures. (4) Recently, however, Karen Jacobs has underscored its relevance to such debates, arguing that Wolf uses Cassandra's mythic utterance to mediate and construct her relationship to political regime of former German Democratic Republic in its final years, collusions and resistances of which made Wolf a broadly controversial figure (285). (5) The essay at hand joins this ongoing dialogue about Wolf's relationship to former GDR by focusing on a hithertofore overlooked ambivalence on part of Kassandra to women's heterosexual experiences in both pre-war and warring Troy. (6) This pervasive ambivalence points to Wolf's unease with official version of GDR's relationship to women and feminism. While Kassandra has long been read in tandem with Frankfurt poetic lectures as an experiment in feminist poetics (or anti-poetics), as a kind of ecriture feminine that might challenge patriarchy, and thus as a work with an unmistakable feminist bent, some of more concrete aspects of its feminist critique gone unnoticed. (7) In novel, women are victims of a variety of sexual abuses, ranging from ritual deflowering to rape and necrophilia. Secondary literature to date has invoked one or more of these as symptoms or reflections of increasing political oppression of women in Troy. In general, critics postulate a significant discontinuity between status of women in pre-war Troy and their status in warring Troy. (8) Jenkinson, for instance, speaks of pre-war Troy in terms, as a place where women have no need to fear sexual harassment from men (245). (9) To emphasize discontinuity between pre-war and warring Troy, between Greek and Trojan males, ignores, however, a marked instance of continuity vis-a-vis woman's position before and during war, namely a continuity of sexual oppression that, in pre-war Troy, veiled by woman's relative political freedom. Wolf's critique of sexual oppression of women in this novel extends beyond spatial and temporal limitations of warring Troy to utopian pre-war Troy, as well as to Wolf's then-contemporary GDR. (10) To be sure, early parts of Kassandra's retrospective narration involve clear binary distinctions that suggest accuracy of readings strongly distinguishing between past and present Troy. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.