Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz (Hamilton College)
This paper takes up the organizers’ aim of “investigat[ing] the reception of the Amazon myths in various queer contexts, broadly defined.” In it, I’ll be looking at both lesbian and queer contexts in Christa Wolf’s mixed-form text: Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984). In both narrative and essays, she looks back to Greek literature and the Trojan War.
What makes a queer context is complicated, given ever-expanding definitions of queer. The narrative’s opening sets up a lesbian intertext, with an epigraph from Sappho: “Once again limb-loosing love shakes me, bitter-sweet, untamable, a dusky animal” (3, L-P 30). While not explicitly about women’s desire, citing Sappho would have been enough to suggest lesbianism in 1982, when Wolf was writing. She later critiques the dominance of male authors, offering Sappho as an example of one of few early women writers, and citing 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’ (296, citing Sappho 16 L-P)”—which sets love against war, heroic masculinity and its value system.
Sappho and Amazons were both signs of lesbian feminism in the 1970s, but Wolf does not endorse either entirely. Wolf has a long section on the Amazons, but sees them as not going far enough. They are lovers of women to be sure, but as warriors they are not necessarily better than the men they fight. Therefore, Wolf uses the Amazons in her critique of patriarchy and the literary form of epic, but she stops short of embracing them. Wolf’s problems with lesbian feminist ideology appears again when she makes fun of a couple of feminists who are relentlessly tracking down every labrys in Crete (195)—even though she too comes to believe in a pre-Mycenaean culture dominated by women (200-1). Wolf creates a matriarchal community of outsiders on the outskirts of Troy (who might be relatives of those women); unlike the 1970s-style lesbian separatist utopias, it is open to all who oppose the dominant society, men as well as women. I would call this space queer rather than lesbian; she prefers it to a more simply Amazon one.
Current queer studies’ interest in temporality offers another way to look at Wolf’s queer context. Wolf challenges feminism’s search for forebears, asking “why women today feel that they must derive part of their self-esteem and a justification of their claims from the fact that civilization begins with the worship of woman” (195). But why then does she herself turn back? What is her desire? As an East German writing shortly before re-unification, Wolf herself stood very much at a border between “then” (the Trojan War? the Holocaust and WWII?) and “now” (fear of nuclear war, the Cold War), but also the future. The Trojan War gives her a cautionary tale, which relates to Germany, and the Amazons are part of it, not a solution.