Escribiendo a Casandra: personajes dramáticos en la narrativa contemporánea

Christa Wolf’s Cassandra is the landmark for refigurations of the Cassandra myth in the contemporary novel. Yet close to its date of publication, Ursule Molinaro (1979), Christine Brooke-Rose (1984) and Hilary Bailey (1993) published their own novelistic reworkings of the Cassandra myth. The presence of the Cassandra myth in the British novel is in contrast with the fruitful reworkings of the Trojan princess in poetry and drama. From the nineteenth century onwards, refigurations of Cassandra in prose writings in English range from the feminist essay to the novel of customs and the fin-de-siècle New Women utopias. Works such as Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra, for example, show how the words of Priam’s daughter can be adapted to social vindications and develop into an obscure discourse which results in Broke-Rose’s postmodernist deconstruction. This chapter seeks to analyze Cassandra’s prophetic language in the three novels in contrast with other refigurations of the myth in English which reveal the cultural processes behind the construction of the narratives.