| Within the critical context of feminist revisionist mythmaking and psychoanalysis, this dissertation examines the story of the mythical Cassandra, the mad priestess of Apollo doomed not to be believed, first as it has been constructed by classical Greek literary tradition---especially Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides---and then as it has been revisioned and retold by Florence Nightingale's Victorian autobiographical essay "Cassandra" (1850) and Margarita Karapanou's modern Greek mythistorema (novel) Kassandra and the Wolf (1974).; Part I discusses how the classical representations, by reducing Cassandra to a babbling, hysterical figure, have veiled the intricate relationship between patriarchy and female sexuality, language, and power; how the Greek texts ultimately fail to explain her reduction to the stereotypical disempowered prophetess. Thus, I propose that her lyric song, spoken through her body, is not a passive performance of Apollo's word but rather a rebellious song against patriarchal oppression; a song that transposes her back to what Kristeva, in her psychoanalytical theory of language and the constitution of the (female) speaking subject, calls the semiotic: a pre-oedipal, unspoken and unrepresented mode of signification associated to a female, maternal language. Cassandra speaks not from a position of Apollonian ecstasy but rather from ek-stasis, from outside patriarchal control, as an emerging speaking subject. Cassandra's ability to move easily from "female" to "male" language is read as a narrative performance that balances the tension between symbolic and semiotic and allows her not only to speak to but also to be heard by her male audience.; Part II examines Nightingale's and Karapanou's texts as they retell Cassandra's story. By recontextualizing and rethinking her, they do not simply declare the death of the myth/the father. Defying daughters of the father's master narratives, both authors seduce their literary forefathers' text, deconstruct it, and then reinvent it. Nightingale's essay transforms the mad priestess to a female prophet protesting social injustice and prophesying the coming of a female Christ while Karapanou's novel explores the painful "emancipation" of the woman writer from an oppressive patriarchal past while searching for a female voice. |
