SOURCE: “Christa Wolf's Cassandra: Parallels to Feminism in the West,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 149–57.

In the following essay, Pickle examines Wolf's feminist perspective in Cassandra and notes both similarities and differences between Wolf and feminist writers in the West.

In the workbook-diary she kept while writing her novel Cassandra, the East German writer Christa Wolf called the tale a “roman à clef” (264).¹ What is encoded in this work? Cassandra, the scorned prophetess, is stripped of the tragic, mythic elements associated with her in the Western cultural tradition. She appears as a fully rounded figure in an historical and personal setting that seems realistic to the reader. But she is also representative of the modern writer: a truth-sayer, engaged to the moment of her death in a search for (self-)knowledge and the realization of her autonomy as an individual. It is no...