Cassandra at the Wedding

Dorothy Baker

2 ideas

1. Twinship as a shared single self

   Cassandra has built her identity on the premise that she and Judith are two halves of one person, so she measures her selfhood by their closeness rather than by anything she is alone. When Judith chooses a husband, Cassandra does not experience it as a sibling moving on. She experiences it as losing half of herself, and that is why an ordinary life event becomes an existential threat.

2. Switching narrators exposes one-sided unity

   Most of the novel is told by Cassandra, but a middle section shifts to Judith's first-person voice. That section reveals a separate interior life with its own reasons, fatigue and loyalties. The structural break shows the reader that the fusion Cassandra described was partly her projection, because 'identical' people do not share one consciousness.

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