'Cassandra at the Wedding'

A surprising discovery of an American classic

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.

I recently came across a novel I hadn’t heard of before; one of those happy accidents after a lazy browse in the stacks of my city library.

The blurb of Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker states that it is a ‘classic of American literature’, which made me surprised that I had never come across either the book or its author before.

The novel features a difficult narrator in Cassandra as she travels from Berkeley, California, where she is attempting to write a thesis, back to her father’s ranch in Nevada to attend the June wedding of her twin sister, Judith.

 "I told them I could be free by the 21st, and that I'd come home the 22nd. (June)."

She is sad and lonely as she recalls, along the five hour drive, the way her twin had gone to New York nine months ago, leaving their shared apartment, only to meet a young medic and plan to marry him.  Cassandra had clearly hoped that the pair of identical twins would never be separated, and wants to ensure that this wedding does not go ahead.  She has at this point not yet met her sister’s fiancèe.    

Cassandra comes across as neurotic and her narration is acerbic, ironic, and witty.  Although some readers have found her a ‘difficult narrator’ in that she is often negative and narcissistic, I found her voice unique and interesting, as well as darkly funny.  Her voice, in fact, reminded me very much of Esther Greenwood’s in The Bell Jar.  Written in 1962, it unsurprisingly reflects an increasingly materialistic era in American history and suggests similar struggles faced by a young female graduate student as is portrayed within Sylvia Plath’s novel.  

But Cassandra is also a unique voice: gay, anxious, heartbroken, pedantic, a genius, and totally miserable.

“As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.”

Her plan on the long drive home is clear: she means to sabotage identical twin Judith’s wedding plans, as she battles with her complex feelings around her sister whom she views owes it to her to remain her alter ego for all time.  She is often spiky and can be quite unkind: she refuses to acknowledge the name of her sister’s fiancèe, pretending she cannot remember it.  Judith, meanwhile, is kind to her sister, who she realises is struggling with their separation, whilst also remaining keen to assert her own independence.  

Photo by Tom The Photographer on Unsplash

The other characters who populate the narrative are her brandy-soaked, ex-professor of philosophy father, and her loving and formidable grandmother, as well as their dead writer mother, whom they lost several years earlier, and to whom both girls refer by her first name.  

If this sounds like a strange set up for a novel: it is.  Apart from a couple of dramatic episodes within the narration, the book is far more about character than it is about plot.  Cassandra in particular is a complicated young woman, who, in order to find her own way, must ultimately begin to make peace with the only life she has to live: her own.

The book’s author was also a mystery to me; as always, I wanted to know more about her story.

Dorothy Baker (1907–1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, as Dorothy Alice Dodds in 1907, but raised in California.  She graduated from UCLA and, after travelling to France, she began her first novel.  

Marrying Howard Baker, a poet, in 1930, the couple moved back to California, where Baker completed a Masters in French and began teaching at a private school.  She began to experience some publishing success with a few short stories, and eventually turned to writing full time.  

Dorothy Baker

Her first novel appeared In 1938, Young Man with a Horn, which tells the story of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, and draws on her lifelong love of jazz music.  The novel won her the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, as well as receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942.  

"Jazz music was one of the very few things I knew much about, and the only thing, except writing, that I had a consistent, long-term interest in".  

The character of Amy in Young Man with a Horn was Baker’s first attempt to portray a female character with an ambiguous interest in women, and Baker’s own sexuality throughout her life was unclear.  She did comment that she felt a kinship with the character of Amy, claiming that she would have been “happier as a boy”, and the following year, Baker published Trio, a novel which portrayed a lesbian relationship.  The novel depicts the rivalry between a female French professor and a young man for the attention of a female graduate student, and was deemed scandalous at the time.  Baker and her husband adapted the novel as a play in 1944, but were forced to shut the play down because of protests.  

Cassandra at the Wedding was Baker’s final novel.  Although like her other novels, this, too, contained themes around lesbianism, it portrays same-sex relationships as more of a background to the character of Cassandra, who must emerge from her psychological stupor into an independent life.   

Although Baker herself was an only child, the novel’s portrayal of siblings has been remarked upon as being acutely accurate, according to critics.  Her husband claimed that the exceptionally close relationship within it was based on both Baker herself and the couple’s two daughters.

Sadly, Baker died in 1968 of cancer at the age of 61.  

After discovering her novel and wittily acerbic central narrator Cassandra, I am left wondering what other books she may have been capable of leaving the world.

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