"I, the seeress, was owned by the palace." The Dynamics of Feminine Collusion in Christa Wolf's Cassandra

Hailed as a symbol of resistance and heroine, and in other instances decried for her lack of power, Christa Wolf's Cassandra remains a controversial figure. In choosing death over other alternatives, her action at once haunts and troubles contemporary interpretation. Drawing on Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic account of ideal love and feminine complicity in domination, this article examines central conflicts determining Cassandra's final gesture by tracing the dynamics at work in her apparent inability to survive destruction. This reading seeks to facilitate a critical understanding of Cassandra's profound identification with paternal authority and repudiation of the (m)other, as part of her collusion with patriarchal structures of domination. (ELS)