Emily Hudson, University of California, Santa Barbara
I propose to consider Euripides' Cassandra through the lens of queer possibilities offered by Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and The Queer Art of Failure. By reading Cassandra as “wild” and a “failure,” in Halberstam's terms, we free her from heteronormative expectations for subjectivity and can read her refusal of sexuality, her prophetic frenzy, and her speech that exceeds regular signification in new and productive ways. She knows and declares that her relationship with Agamemnon will result in death and not new life. Yet for her this queering of familial and reproductive norms is desirable. Moreover, she destabilizes the binary between failure and success with her incoherent predictions, the meanings of which can never be deciphered by those around her, but that nevertheless always come true.
While the increasing popularity of queer theory in Classics has sparked an abundance of scholarship focusing on the “queering” of tragic characters, Cassandra has so far been largely left out of the mix. Scholarship on Cassandra often focuses on the poetics of prophecy, such as Catenaccio's 2011 article on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Pillinger’s recent book on the subject. Pillinger states, “her language is cogent, but bafflingly inappropriate to the point of incomprehensibility; she projects a kind of emotional illiteracy” (Pillinger 2019). I aim to explore this illiteracy further, illustrating that Cassandra’s inability to communicate constitutes a queer experience. Additionally, this paper is indebted to the approach in the recent volume, Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy. In particular, I draw on the essays by Melissa Mueller and Carla Freccero, both of which consider the role of the future in queering Euripidean themes and characters, an idea that is particularly relevant to Cassandra.
As a prophet who cannot communicate the future to any others, Cassandra’s ability becomes an inability which forces her to the outskirts of society. Although she speaks, she is always misunderstood. She tells Hecuba and the Chorus that, τοὺς γὰρ ἐχθίστους ἐμοὶ // καὶ σοὶ γάμοισι τοῖς ἐμοῖς διαφθερῶ (Tro. 404-5). Yet she is met with confusion and pity, rather than understanding from her companions (Tro. 406-7). She is consequently labeled with the Bacchic epithet, μαινάς (Tro. 349, 415), and her words are disregarded as insane ramblings. Although she knows she is not being understood, she insists on speaking what she knows will ultimately be proven to be true, thus embracing and redefining with Halberstam the notion of failure. Moreover, her experience of heteronormative marriage and family is intensely perverted. While Andromache and Hecuba’s identities in the play are constructed around their sons and husbands, Cassandra instead looks forward to her marriage ἐς Ἅιδου (Tro. 445). She demonstrates no sadness over being excluded from motherhood, but instead eagerly sets out for her marriage with Agamemnon, knowing it will result only in the end of life.