Revenge and Violence in Cassandra :: Cassandra Essays

punish and Violence in Cassandra In Mycenae Lookout, Seamus Heaney tells the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Cassandra after the Trojan war. Cassandra is the blink of an eye part of Mycenae Lookout and chronicles Cassandra, Apollos ill-fated prophetess, who is captured by Agamemnon at the wars end and brought moxie to Mycenae as a slave. The fates of Cassandra and the raise of Atreus collide with Agamemnons return to Mycenae, where his wife Clytemnestra and her devotee Aegisthus plot his murder. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra both seek revenge Clytemnestra for her daughters sacrifice and Aegisthus for the overthrow of his drive and the sins of Agamemnons father Atreus, of which Aegisthus was the only survivor. While Heaney probably drew from many chaste sources for his poem, the section entitled Cassandra seems especially drawn from Aeschylus play Agamemnon. Heaney compresses the events of Agamemnon into a unadulterated 64 lines but still retains, partially t hrough uses of the binaries which are contained in the play, the classic and timeless story of revenge and a violent malign circle. Cassandra begins with Cassandras description. She is described as a prisoner of war might look, foul (4), devastated (6-7) and camp-fucked (12), rather than marble smooth and serene, as one might assume a classical Greek figure to appear. Heaney focuses on her appearance and describes her clothing, her secondary 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 physical contumely 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 de struction she has witnessed and stunned to awkwardness by her descent from princess of troy to slave of Mycenae. The speaker says, People / could feel / a missed / commitment in Cassandra (14-17). This paragraph comes to a point with the word focus, which is used as a verb.