Cassandra Complex

The first of Tennessee Williams's full-length plays to receive a professional production, Battle of Angels (1940) has long been overshadowed by its significantly reworked and more famous revision, Orpheus Descending (1957). Williams, who spent a great deal of time over the intervening seventeen years working on what he called "the trail of [his] sleeve-worn heart" (Volume 3, 220), made several notable changes in the path between revisions; one of the most obvious of these was his choice to sublimate much of the overt symbolism from Battle, which critical consensus generally views as suffering from what Judith Thompson termed "excessive symbolism, extraneous anecdotes, and theatrical pyrotechnics" (Thompson, 95).

However, Williams's choice in eliminating the overt references to Greek mythology in the text of Orpheus Descending (excepting the title of the play itself) did not eliminate or dilute the usage of those same symbols established in Battle. In fact, by examining the evolution of Cassandra Whiteside/Carol Cutrere in terms of this mythic sublimation, it can be argued that Williams did more than just make this particular symbol more potent in terms of its mother myth (the character of Cassandra). In his reworking of the character, he made her not only more relevant to the play's underlying themes of isolation and non-conformity, but also was able to broaden her narrative strength by connecting her symbolically with other characters, while simultaneously downplaying the flash and sizzle of her first incarnation.

The reader's introduction to Cassandra Whiteside takes place within the first couple of pages of Battle of Angels, and as illustrated by Williams's stage directions, it is clear that her character was intended to resemble the Greek prophetess of fable in more than name only. The etymology of the name Cassandra derives from the Greek for "she who entangles men" (Mythica), and Williams draws her in very particular fashion, seemingly with this knowledge in mind: "She is dark and strikingly beautiful...with clear translucent skin and luminous eyes as though burnt thin by her intensity of feeling." (Volume 1, 12).

Her introduction to Val Xavier in Act One is forward in a way that other conversations happening in scene are not, and boldly addresses the subject of sex that would not have been the stuff of everyday talk in the South of the era:

VAL: A broken axle stopped me here last night.

SANDRA: You'd better mend it quick and move along.

VAL: Why's that?

SANDRA: Why? Why? Don't you know what these women are suffering from: Sexual malnutrition? They look at you with eyes that scream "Eureka!" (Volume 1, 20).

In this exchange, Williams not only plays up the sexual parallel between the etymology of the name and the character, he establishes a connection between the two that will become more apparent as the play moves on; namely, that how the Cassandras deal with sex will help determine their eventual fates. The mythic Cassandra was dealt her uniquely cursed status when she declined relations with Apollo after accepting his gift of prophecy, to which Apollo responded by robbing her of the ability to persuade others that her visions would come to pass, which indirectly led to her rape and eventual murder (Mythica). By play's end, Cassandra Whiteside, for reasons that are in the main stemming from her sexual choices (as one of the characters says about her in Act One, "[Her father] had to send her out East where morals don't matter."), will end up ostracized from her home town, rejected by Val and in the climactic storm that overruns Two Rivers, Mississippi, drowned in the overflowing river, her body never to be found.

However, the sexual element is not the only parallel drawn between the mythic Cassandra and Williams's creation. Whiteside, like her forebear, is a "prophetess of doom whom no one takes seriously," (Bray, 26) and Williams plays with our expectations in illustrating this aspect of the symbol. Shortly after Sandra and Val's meeting, she steps outside the mercantile store where Val will soon end up working and fires two shots into the sky. Val disarms her, whereupon Myra enters the picture and accuses him of firing the shots:

VAL: No ma'am, it wasn't me. It was this young lady here.

SANDRA: Yes, I fired it, darling.

MYRA: What at?

SANDRA: A bird of ill omen was circling over the store.

MYRA: Yeah? One of those imaginary things that people see in a certain condition. (Volume 1, 21)

Of course, the reader knows from the heavy foreshadowing of Battle's prologue that Sandra's sighting was indeed an omen of things to come, and things do indeed happen that validate Sandra's claim, which Myra and the others easily dismiss. Thus, Williams establishes both Sandra's prophetic ability and the fact of the townspeople's dismissal of her word. In a play that is decidedly symbol-heavy, this line of symbolic weight runs true throughout, reaching the most overt statement in Act Three, when Sandra comes into Myra's mercantile store and says, in a reference almost post-modern in its self-awareness of its import, "Behold Cassandra, shouting doom at the gates!" (Volume 1, 96). Sandra's warning of "a law against passion" and the threat of being "burned like witches" (Volume 1, 99) again stands as a prophecy ignored, presaging Val's death by fire, the very thing he fears most.

Finally, when Sandra tells Myra and Val, "Damnation! You see my lips have been touched by prophetic fire," (Volume 1, 99) the connections are complete; Williams has fully resurrected the Cassandra of myth, the one who foresaw the sacking of Troy by the Greeks and her own death to no avail, and cast her as a Southern belle gone to seed. If this were the only incarnation of the mythic seer as symbol, or if the story simply ended here, the comparison would be worthy of note but would have no significance beyond that.

However, in his quest to revise and perfect a play that had great personal significance to him, Williams created a framework with which the reader can examine his handling of mythic symbols within character. In Orpheus Descending, Williams takes the basic character and mythic template, but in keeping with the aforementioned sublimation of overt referencing, reconstructs Cassandra Whiteside into Carol Cutrere, and manages to retain the mythic parallels from the first play, while layering in another parallel that works to the second play's advantage.

Our introduction to Carol Cutrere in Scene One of Orpheus Descending, in comparison to Cassandra, is curiously subdued; she enters the store to make a phone call, but does not do anything to call direct attention to herself as in Battle; stage direction and the other characters do that for us. Far from the heated melodrama of the 1940 version, he underplays Carol, relatively speaking, right from the start: "She is past thirty and, lacking prettiness, she has an odd, fugitive beauty" (Volume 3, 236).

The forwardness of speech and flamboyance are still there, but we see in Carol a certain gravitas her previous incarnation lacked. Or, perhaps more accurately, what we see in Carol is simply a conscious awareness of defeat, a hard-won experience gained from a time when she was, in Carol's own words, a "Christ-bitten reformer...a kind of benign exhibitionist," (Volume 3, 251), which has left her defiant but relatively more tempered in her outward demeanor. In Carol's past, unlike Sandra Whiteside's, there was a time when her focus was on exterior issues other than her own exhibitionism, when she "tried to be a messiah, a savior for causes, civil rights, free clinics, equal justice for all" (Matthew, 185), an experience which gained her an arrest for "lewd vagrancy" and, like Cassandra, the approbation of the townsfolk.

The irony in this aspect of the play is more historical than narrative, in that many of the causes that Carol marched for and was derided, arrested for and eventually banned from overnight stay in the county over have, in some sense, come to pass, thus lending additional credence to the idea of Carol as a prophetess rejected in her time. Whether or not Williams believed these things would come to pass is irrelevant to the functioning of Carol in this symbolic fashion; the construction of Carol's circumstance works in either case. The underlying strains - a woman who spoke out and was ignored and ridiculed for speaking and/or acting - remain in place.

At the same time, we see a more subdued approach to the subject of sex than with Battle's incarnation of the Cassandra character; sexuality is still an integral part of the characterization, but the shift has come in its import. In the case of Cassandra Whiteside, sexuality is part and parcel of her basic makeup, and is part of her rebellion against conformity. Thus, it has symbolic weight, but does not carry any particular psychological heft in and of itself. With Carol, sexuality is also part of her rebellion, but it also serves to highlight her loneliness, the separation from others that her "gift" has brought to her:

VAL: Little girl, you're transparent, I can see the veins in you. A man's weight on you would break you like a bundle of sticks...

CAROL {gazes at him, startled by his perception}: Isn't it funny! You've hit on the truth about me. The act of lovemaking is almost unbearably painful, and yet, of course, I do bear it, because not to be alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and danger. (Volume 3, 282).

Of the parallels with the mythic forebear of the Cassandra/Carol characters discussed so far, there is one that Williams plays a subtle change on in Orpheus Descending that needs to be discussed. While both incarnations of the character are shown to bear some prophetic power within the terms of the play, Cassandra is limited to only that; her utility in that regard is strictly superficial. In fact, her symbolic importance can be argued to be essentially linked to the name Cassandra, and possessing no psychological depth beyond that. What is interesting, and ultimately why Carol is a more successful character in terms of the narrative function, is that Carol is in touch with other forms of mysticism as well, as symbolized by the character of the Conjure Man.

The Conjure Man, literally the first character we see in Battle of Angels, is used more or less as backdrop in the earlier play; he serves as a sounding board for the sisters to introduce the events of the play, and has no real function other than as a catalyst for the story. In Orpheus Descending, he has a more active role, even if as only a symbol in the Southern Gothic vein; he stands in for mysticism and magic, a way of life that is both part of daily life to the white people of Two Rivers and a deep mystery. The only one of them who is able to touch this vein of mystery in any fashion is Carol, who like the Conjure Man, is both integral scenery and outsider to the town.

This connection is delineated early in Act One of Orpheus, when the Conjure Man enters the mercantile store, bearing a charm of some kind. Dolly, who is pregnant, cries out in fear, and while Beulah tries to calm her with reassurances, it is Carol who moves forward and speaks to him:

CAROL: [very high and clear voice] Come here, Uncle, and let me see what you've got there. Oh, it's a bone of some kind. No, I don't want to touch it, it isn't clean yet, there's still some flesh clinging to it.

[Women make sounds of revulsion]

Yes, I know it's the breastbone of a bird but it's still tainted with corruption. Leave it a long time on a bare rock in the rain and sun till every sign of corruption is burned away from it, and then it will be a good charm, a white charm, but now it's a black charm, Uncle. So take it away and do what I told you with it... (Volume 3, 239-240)

In her willingness to speak with the Conjure Man, and her usage of vocabulary that indicates at least a passing familiarity with magic, Carol demonstrates a functional bridge between herself and the Conjure Man. This bond between the two, both within and without the world of Two Rivers, is strengthened and shown to have a little history in the next few lines, where Carol asks him to give the "Choctaw cry," a rising series of bark-like sounds that unnerves the other women in the store.

With this interpretation in mind, can it be any coincidence that Val Xavier walks in right then, as though "the cry had brought him" (Volume 3, 240) to that place? Magic and prophecy, all within the first few pages. The entire exchange, ending when Carol hands the Conjure Man a dollar, would seem to indicate a prior understanding of some kind, which makes a certain degree of speculation on how much Carol knows about what is to come seem inevitable.

The Conjure Man's next appearances are brief, but in conjunction with Carol, they take on a weight beyond simple appearance. In Act Three, he appears, gives the Choctaw cry and leaves, setting the stage for Carol to give Val a warning:

CAROL: Something is still wild in the country! This country used to be wild, the men and women were wild and there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts, for each other, but now it's sick with neon, it's broken out sick, with neon, like most other places...I'll wait outside in my car. It's the fastest thing on wheels in Two River County! (Volume 3, 327)

And in his last appearance, he gives Carol Val's snakeskin jacket after his execution by the townsmen. Carol then gives him Val's ruby ring, and as Carol walks off, the seemingly ritual exchange of tokens complete, the play ends with only the Conjure Man on stage, the sturdy symbol of mysticism and the unknown, giving the audience "a secret smile as the curtain falls slowly." (Volume 3, 342)

In this light, examining the parallels with the myth both characters share and the additional one that is only explored in Orpheus, what's apparent is that in the incarnation of Carol, the symbolic import of Cassandra is more suited to the underlying theme of the play: the oppression of an individual or individuals by a society unwilling or unable to allow them to not fall in line with the prevailing norms.

Williams himself said in the 1957 introduction to Orpheus that underneath the surface, the play was about "unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people and the difference between continuing to ask them...and the acceptance of prescribed answers that are not answers at all" (Volume 3, 220), a conclusion that critical consensus has readily accepted, and a condition which provides Carol a role within the play's thematic structure that the earlier incarnation did not, and could not, have. By being both, as mentioned before, a part of and apart from the universe of Two Rivers, Mississippi, Carol can fulfill the symbolism required by the theme, yet allow the audience a narrative observer from which the audience can access the story.

When looking at the play in this light, Carol's fate may appear less overtly drastic than the other major non-conformist characters in Orpheus, but it can certainly be argued that it is crueler; the other characters pay for their attempts to break away with their lives, but in a narrative sense, their stricture is over. Carol's continues, and is compounded by her failure to warn the doomed Val:

CAROL: You're in danger here, Snakeskin. You've taken off the jacket that said: "I'm wild, I'm alone!" and put on the nice blue uniform of a convict! ... Last night I woke up thinking about you again. I drove all night to bring you this warning of danger...[Her trembling hand covers her lips.] - The message I came here to give you was a warning of danger! I hoped you'd hear me and let me take you away before it's - too late. (Volume 3, 283)

But, as seen time and again in both myth and play, the prophecy is ignored. And, again as before, the play ends in tragedy for our hero and his paramour, but this time, Carol is left alive, to mark the events and provide a final commentary to the audience in her silent ignoring of the local authority and her defiant laughter in the night. In this, Williams closes Orpheus with a neat reversal of symbolic roles: this time, the ignored take the initiative, and give the town, through the person of the sheriff, a taste of their own callous behavior. In this moment, Carol fulfills the symbolic role of Cassandra, and transcends it.

Works Consulted

Bray, Robert. "Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending." Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Ed. Philip C. Kolin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 22-33.

"Cassandra." Encyclopedia.com. Columbia Encyclopedia, 6^th Edition. 18 April 2004. http://encyclopedia.com/html/c/cassandra.asp.

Clum, John M. "The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth." The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Ed. Matthew C. Roudan�. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 1999 (Revised). 128-146.

Hirsch, Foster. "The Battle of Angels: Puritans and Cavaliers." A Portrait of the Artist: The Plays of Tennessee Williams. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979. 18-34.

Hunter, James. "Cassandra." Encyclopedia Mythica. 18 April 2004. Encyclopedia Mythica. http://www.pantheon.org/articles/c/cassandra.html.

Matthew, David C.C. "Towards Bethlehem: Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending." Tennessee Williams: A Tribute. Ed. Jac Tharpe. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. 172-191.

Thompson, Judith J. "Orpheus Descending." Tennessee Williams's Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. 83-98.

Williams, Tennessee. Orpheus Descending. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 3. New York: New Directions, 1971. 217-342.

Williams, Tennessee. Battle of Angels. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 1. New York: New Directions, 1971. 1-122.