Revenge and Violence in Cassandra :: Cassandra Essays

Revenge and Violence in Cassandra In Mycenae Lookout, Seamus Heaney tells the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Cassandra after the fifth column war. Cassandra is the second part of Mycenae Lookout and chronicles Cassandra, Apollos ill-fated prophetess, who is captured by Agamemnon at the wars sack and brought back to Mycenae as a slave. The fates of Cassandra and the House of Atreus collide with Agamemnons return to Mycenae, where his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus plot his murder. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra both seek revenge Clytemnestra for her daughters sacrifice and Aegisthus for the abolish of his father and the sins of Agamemnons father Atreus, of which Aegisthus was the only survivor. While Heaney probably drew from umteen classical sources for his poem, the section entitled Cassandra seems especially drawn from Aeschylus play Agamemnon. Heaney compresses the events of Agamemnon into a mere 64 lines but still retains, partially by uses of t he binaries which atomic number 18 contained in the play, the classic and timeless story of revenge and a dotty vicious circle. Cassandra begins with Cassandras description. She is described as a prisoner of war tycoon look, soiled (4), devastated (6-7) and camp-fucked (12), rather than marble smooth and serene, as one tycoon expect a classical Greek figure to appear. Heaney focuses on her look and describes her clothing, her little breasts and the state of her head in lines four through ten. It is not until he gets to line 11, though, that he comments on what may have happened to her as a prisoner of the Trojan War. Camp-fucked, with its feel of sexual violence, implies that, along with somatic abuse and enslavement, Cassandra has endured rape as well (12). In lines eight through thirteen, Heaney chooses words, such as punk, char-eyed and gawk to illustrate succinctly Cassandras position in the House of Atreus she is an alien, traumatized by the destruction she has witnessed and stunned to awkwardness by her root from princess of Troy to slave of Mycenae. The speaker says, People / could feel / a bewildered / trueness in Cassandra (14-17). This paragraph comes to a point with the word focus, which is use as a verb.