All 4 Uses of
Cassandra
in
Absalom, Absalom!
- She seemed to stand, to lurk, behind the neat picket fence of a small, grimly middle-class 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.†
Chpt 1
- puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness in which Miss Rosa's childhood (that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandra-like listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayed her to overtake the precocity of convinced disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes) was passed.†
Chpt 3
- 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 natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read) When he returned home in '66, she had not seen him a hundred times in her whole life.†
Chpt 3
- mad he wouldn't have had to nail himself up and die and if he hadn't died he wouldn't have left her an orphan and a pauper and so situated, left susceptible to a situation where she could receive this mortal affront and right about the brother-in-law because if he hadn't been a demon his children wouldn't have needed protection from him and she wouldn't have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April's compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry;†
Chpt 6 *
Definition:
Greek mythology: a prophet in Troy during the Trojan War whose predictions were true but were never believed
or:
anyone whose accurate prediction of doom is ignored
or:
anyone whose accurate prediction of doom is ignored