Cassandra

Early in //Absalom, Absalom!,// Rosa Coldfield is twice described as "Cassandralike" (15, 47), which links her to a classical, mythological history, and emphasizes her status as a sort of doomed, unheeded woman who has predicted and witnessed the falls of families and empires.

Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, is at tragic figure from Greek mythology, doomed by Apollo to have the gift of prophecy but the curse of her prophecies never being believed or acted upon. She predicted the fall of Troy and, her warnings unheeded, later watched it. She also warned of and subsequently watched the destruction of her own family, as recounted in Aeschylus's //Oresteia,// and knowingly went to her own death at the hands of Clytemnestra.

In Aeschylus's //Agamemnon,// Cassandra mourns:

Apollo, Apollo! God of all ways, but only Death's to me, Once and again, O thou, Destroyer named, Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!

Her keen of "Apollo, Apollo!" neatly parallels the title of //Absalom, Absalom!//, although that has been given a more biblical bent. However, the content of the cry, and its grief, is the same - the grief over destruction and love turned to violence and evil. In linking Miss Rosa to this mythological history, Faulkner emphasizes her status as a figure of doomed history. She may be a shut-in, ranting to the grandson of a man who once wronged her family, but on another level she is witness to a now-past, much grander history. In turn, her family history becomes elevated to that of Greek tragedy, and the history of the south and the Civil War becomes kin to the fall of Troy, stories that, like the family history at the heart of //Absalom, Absalom!//, are to be told and retold again and again by different people.

In addition, replacing Cassandra's "Apollo, Apollo!" with "Absalom, Absalom!" as the novel's title reconfigures the mythology while also retaining its associations. The title of the novel combines Cassandra's plaint of doomed clairvoyance and familial destruction with the biblical story of Abraham, with its associations of a young man rebelling against his own father, who then mourns his death.

In "The Signifying Abstraction: Reading "the Negro" in //Absalom, Absalom!//," Thadious Davis writes that "In linking both Clytie and Rosa to Cassandra, Faulkner reiterates that his characters flow into one another and merge with historical or mythological figures as well." They not simply merge with these historical figure, but also with their tragedies of prophecy, compounded misery, and powerlessness to change the course of history. This use of Greek myth to elevate his characters to the broader status of history is consistent with Faulkner's general approach in this and other works (//The Unvanquished; The Sound and the Fury//) to tell broad histories through the use of smaller individuals. It also provides an interesting comparison with a moment in //Light in August//, in which Faulkner criticizes Hightower for reading and losing himself in Tennyson's Arthurian mythologies. In contrast, classical mythology lends cultural and historical credibility to Faulkner's histories.

"She seemed to stand, to lurk, behind the neat picket fence of a small, grimly middleclass yard or lawn, looking out upon the whatever ogreworld of that quiet village street with that air of children born too late into their parents' lives and doomed to contemplate all human behavior through the complex and needless follies of adults--an air Cassandralike and humorless and profoundly and sternly prophetic out of all proportion to the actual years even of a child who had never been young." (15)

"...Miss Rosa's childhood (that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandra-like listening beyond closed doors..." (47)

(Of Clytemnestra) "Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name her Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake..." (48)

[K Montgomery]