SOURCE: “The Hysteric and the Mimic: Reading Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T.,” in Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture, edited by Suzanne W. Jones, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 233–58.

In the following essay, Voris examines the construction of female self-identity and aspects of alienation in The Quest for Christa T., drawing attention to the representation of women as creative agents—both biologically and intellectually—and the narrative's appropriation of bildungsroman literary conventions.

But for this reason I fancy that I am seeing myself lying in the coffin, and my two selves stare at each other in wonderment.

—Karoline von Günderode

Man likes woman peaceful—but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like a cat, however well she may have trained herself to be peaceable.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

To compare woman to a cat is banal. Yet the comparison is found in numerous texts of...