Review: Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra at the Wedding [1962] – ★★★★

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student who is supposed to be finishing her thesis and enjoying her student life. Instead, she is an emotional and mental mess, a state that no one sees and only her twin sister Judith guesses. When the date of Judith’s wedding approaches near, Cassandra drops everything and goes back home to attend the event, but the homecoming is not altogether joyful as Cassandra (packed with her bitter-sweet memories, unrealised hopes, deep attachments and her neurotic fears of betrayal) starts to spiral out of control. Judith’s impending wedding may be a catalyst for Cassandra’s final unravelling. Baker’s novella is direct and unrelenting; a book that examines closely one unbreakable bond and one fractured mind, all from the point of view of one subversive, unforgettable narrator.

A Cocktail of Unresolved Issues

“Nothing man naturally loves need go unhallowed, if only it can be in part sacrificed, and in part redeemed” [Dorothy Baker, 1962/2012, NYRB Classics].

When Cassandra arrives back home, she realises she must navigate a tricky familial dynamic, and the uncertain feelings of her sister regarding her wedding and the boy she chose to marry: a medical school graduate. Cassandra’s kind, doting grandmother and her philosophising father provide some relief and ease Cassandra’s tension somewhat, but the true enemy to vanquish on the day preceding the wedding is still Cassandra’s own state of mind, especially as she watches Judith, who sends her mixed signals. Initially.

Mixing memories and emotion, the narrative slowly establishes Cassandra’s psychological make-up that is rather complicated. First, there is the twin girls’ sheltered childhood and Cassandra’s closeted nature, then, there is their mother’s untimely death that happened just three years prior, and, before that, their mother’s writing career and Cassandra’s own feeble attempts at it that only culminated in the fear of comparison. Then, there is Judith, and her “brilliance” in swimming and music, and, finally, Cassandra and Judith’s previous “pact” of living together in Paris or some other “interesting” place, maintaining their special bond and independence (from “outsiders”) forever. It is the irreversible loss of the latter that is threatened on the day just before Judith’s wedding.

Half-way through the book there comes the turning point for our heroine, a certain revelation filling her with dread for things to come. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it best: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is to stare blankly.” Cassandra’s inner world that always included her sister and what efforts she made to forget the bond or keep them separate in her mind are soon no match for the factual reality. “I was beginning to understand that ever since I’d arrived, I’d been climbing two steps and falling back five. Very uphill work with stubborn material” [Dorothy Baker, 1962/2012, NYRB Classics], confesses Cassandra. Baker’s prose slides intermittently into poetic, dreamy and even humorous passages. There is no single phrase or sentence that captures or reveals the essence. One has to go through paragraphs to find the feeling, down the rabbit hole of the narration that sustains interest and intrigue.

Twinship & Identity

“I wanted to be what we are, at its best all the time – the way we were brought up, the way we were born – something very exclusive and very very rare” [Dorothy Baker, 1962/2012, NYRB Classics].

Cassandra’s identity is so wrapped up with that of her sister (she “felt the ancient oneness”) that any hint of their possible disentanglement, either emotional or mental, is inconceivable for her. It is like separating the inseparable: “I could wake her and she would look up at me looking down at her and we’d know again who we are and how it has to be and what a fool’s game it is to try to split it” [Dorothy Baker, 1962/2012, NYRB Classics]. The piano they once bought through an ad is half Judith’s, half hers; the same goes for their car. The obsession goes deep, for example, there is this line where Judith describes speaking on the phone with her sister: “it was so full of life, the line between her mouth and my ear after she stopped instructing and waited for me to hang up. It was so charged up, so open, so electric, that I couldn’t bring myself to kill it, and I know she wouldn’t quit until I did” [Dorothy Baker, 1962/2012, NYRB Classics]. Now that Judith apparently chooses marriage, stability and suburbia over Cassandra’s dreams of their special union and independence, the balance of power shifts, threatening catastrophe.

The merit of Baker’s novel is its ability to spurt out the truth in bursts and thrusts, and to do so so insidiously, reminding me of the writing of Patricia Highsmigh, Sylvia Plath and Shirley Jackson, especially their novels Edith’s Diary (1977), The Bell Jar (1963) and Hangsaman (1951) respectively. Baker’s novel has the same quality as these books do – a mentally unstable narrator navigating a treacherous, ambiguous environment, with paradoxes upon paradoxes emerging in their minds, circling around truth constantly, while dealing with the most banal domestic or workplace events. They either deal with suffocating personal attachments or with misunderstanding, misalignment between their internal goals and their immediate environment and its expectations: “It doesn’t even take courage [to take your own life], because you don’t give up anything if you have nothing left to expect”; “I wanted to tell her that I didn’t need much. Just a few essentials – faith in something and a little sense of location…” [Dorothy Baker, 1962/2012, NYRB Classics]. They never quite arrive at the resolution of their internal dilemmas or grasp the core reality – because what is it, really? The thing you feel inside or the thing that happens outside? And what if both clash so drastically and so irreconcilably…?

Baker does stumble around her characters many a time, especially in the dialogue sections which slightly detract from the depth of her overall vision regarding Cassandra’s mind. The book’s final part is where Judith takes over the narrative, and it feels more like an exercise in urgency to “tidy up” the story, rather than one final opportunity to unfold it further or dig deeper into the issues. That is, until Cassandra takes the narrative back again, and we see the clear difference in the manner of speaking between the two girls – it is nicely done.

💒 Cassandra at the Wedding is disturbing and fascinating at the same time, but what really makes this novel stand out is the voice, intense, intriguing, offering an uncanny psychological insight into a mind torn between the self and the other.