Medea: Voices

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Medea: Voices is a 1996 novel by Christa Wolf . Events from the context of the Greek Medea myth are told in monologues by individual actors . After her story Kassandra , Wolf is devoting himself to another female figure from Greek mythology .

Medea is portrayed by Christa Wolf as a headstrong, strong woman, not as the murderer of her children and her brother, as she went down in mythology. The formation of the myth itself is questioned by reinterpreting the events (partly based on sources before Euripides ) and retelling them from the point of view of various protagonists .

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Jason fights for the Golden Fleece with Medea's help; Relief from a sarcophagus, second half of the 2nd century. before Chr.

Jason , the son of the half-brother of the king of Jolkos, takes the ship Argo to Colchis on the east coast of the Black Sea to reclaim the Golden Fleece , which his uncle Phrixus had previously given to Colchis as a gift while on the run. In this way he wants to consolidate his father's claim to the throne of Jolkos over his brother Pelias . He is amazed at Colchis, which he imagined as the location of the valuable Golden Fleece as more splendid. Colchis seems wild and barbaric to him, the customs in Colchis alienate him. The dead men are kept in animal skins and hung on trees and not buried, as is customary in his home country.

Jason meets Medea, who drinks water from a fountain, and is captured by her beauty. At his request, she leads him to her father, King Aietes . He thinks about Jason's request to let him have the fleece. The following evening he gives him the task of fighting his way to the Golden Fleece. The way there leads through a herd of angry bulls, a dragon must be defeated that guards the tree on which the fleece hangs. Medea helps Jason with her magical power to cope with the tasks, and in the process deceives her own father and the Kolchians. In return, she asks Jason to take her and other Kolchians willing to travel on the Argo and leave with her.

Medea's motive for betraying her father lies in the family history: Aietes had his son Absyrtus , Medeas' younger brother, killed for fear that he might dispute his throne. This became necessary when his wife and some of her followers, tired of Aietes' rule, referred to an old law according to which the king could only be elected twice for seven years. An opposing candidate had to be chosen for election; the loser was killed to ensure the stability of the rule of the chosen winner. According to this rite, Aietes had his son Absyrtus killed on the day of his coronation ceremony and was thus able to maintain his power. Aietes chose power and against love for his son. According to the ritual, Absyrtus' corpse is dismembered by "hysterical old women": Medea collects the body parts and throws them into the sea during her escape on the Argo in front of her father, who is chasing the Argonauts with his fleet.

Despite the successful acquisition of the Golden Fleece, Jason is unable to ascend the royal throne of Jolkos, so that the entire entourage becomes refugees. The king of Corinth, Creon , takes Jason, the heavily pregnant Medea, the Argonauts and the Colchian entourage of Medea into his city.

The wealthy Corinthians behave arrogantly and rather disinterestedly towards the newcomers. Gradually the differences between Colchians and Corinthians become apparent; the attitude of the self-confident Kolch women, especially Medeas, which is perceived as presumptuous, is badly received by the Corinthians. Only a few Kolkians succeed in being recognized and valued in Corinth. Presbon, who organizes the games and festivals in Corinth, is one of them. Medea, who gained a reputation for her healing arts, was initially one of these few, as was her former student Agameda.

The action in the book begins at a festival of the king. Medea accompanies Jason, although the couple has now drifted apart. Medea has been driven from the palace; she has drawn the Corinthians' displeasure with her pride and arrogance. Jason, however, stays and does not defend Medea. Under the influence of Creon, he increasingly became a Corinthian. Creon's wife, Queen Merope , who is rarely seen and who lives secluded in a wing of the palace , also takes part in the festival . Suddenly she gets up from the table and leaves the room, an affront to the king and his guests. Medea follows her unnoticed into a secret passage in the palace. She discovers the queen staring whimpering at a spot on the wall. As Merope leaves, Medea goes to this spot herself and feels a child's skeleton there. It is the skeleton of the Iphinoe, the first daughter of Creon and Merope.

Medea has been meeting Glauke, the younger daughter of the royal couple, who is suffering from epileptic seizures , for some time . Medea helps the unloved Glauke to research her memory in order to find the cause of her epileptic seizures, which she finally succeeds with with Medea's help. Glauke remembers one night when she woke up to a noise and saw her older sister Iphinoe. Iphinoe wore a white dress and was accompanied by armed men and their wet nurse. Medea concludes that Iphinoe was killed that night. Medea wants to keep this secret to herself, but Agameda had observed at the festival that Medea had followed the old queen. Out of hatred for Medea, she allies with Presbon and together they go to the king's first astronomer, Akamas, who has a great influence on the king. He is known for wanting to harm and get rid of Medea. They forge a plan to further spoil Medea's reputation with the Corinthians. All three begin to spread the rumor that Medea herself killed her own brother Absyrtus and therefore had to flee Colchis.

While Iphinoe, invoking ancient customs, was supposed to replace her father as regent and was then killed by the queen, Akamas and Creon as well as other initiates, including Leukon, the king's second astronomer, had told the people of Corinth that the girl was kidnapped and taken as his wife by a powerful young king of a distant kingdom. As in Colchis, the cause of the daughter's death in Corinth was the attempt by the queen to wrest power from her husband in order to change the political and social situation of the citizens.

The astronomer Akamas Medea tells all of this during a conversation, but she doubts that there was no alternative, which makes him angry and her final enemy. Medea regrets not staying in Colchis.

In Corinth, after an earthquake in which not all corpses could be buried, the plague broke out and many people died, a fertile breeding ground for further agitation against the strange, suspected sorceress Medea. Medea, the "witch", is the cause of all misfortune and becomes a scapegoat . A mob of Corinthians rushes them through the city, possibly paid for by Akamas: Medea can escape to the workshop of her lover Oistros. Leukon, a good friend and interlocutor of Medea, tries to explain to her that it is best for her to leave Corinth because much worse is to be feared. However, she doesn't seem to want to understand him.

Medea appears at the Artemis festival in Corinth, while the other Kolchians stay away and celebrate their own festival. She hopes to be able to reconcile herself with the Corinthians. She mingles with the Corinthians and watches the bulls being sacrificed for the goddess Artemis. Medea does not join in the Corinthians' praises of Artemis. When she meets Agameda, she openly hurls the word “monster” in her face, which in the eyes of the Corinthians is proof that the Kolchians now also hate Medea, and again she turns the masses against her. She turned down the possibility of fleeing to an exclave of Kolch women in the area around Corinth.

When prisoners break out of prison and start ransacking the graves of the rich, the Corinthians get angry and try to satisfy their lust for revenge by executing refugees who found refuge in the temple. Through Medea's intervention, she achieves that only one of the refugees is sacrificed and not all. After she leaves the festival, a lunar eclipse occurs . While the moon is darkening, Medea goes to the festival of her Kolchians and celebrates the festival of their goddess with them. But the Kolch women also react hysterically when their party is disrupted by the felling of one of the trees in their sacred grove. They begin to look for the culprit and push Medea with them. When they catch Akama's assistant Turon red-handed, they cut him off as a punishment. Then the Kolch women disappear, while Medea stays. She and Oistros take care of the unconscious Turon, but Medea is finally captured and accused by Turon of having led the Kolchians in this outrage. There is a trial against Medea - the verdict is banishment from Corinth. Her two sons are to stay with their father. Jason wants to marry Glauke and become King of Corinth. On the day of exile, Glauke commits suicide. She had been confused and insecure since the trial she was present at. Before the trial, Medea gives Glauke a white dress as a wedding present. When Glauke puts on the dress, she can think clearly again, she lures her bodyguards and wet nurses to the fountain in the palace courtyard, cleverly distracts them and jumps into it. Akamas portrays this suicide to the people as the poisoning of Medea.

Medea now lives in exile with her wet nurse and friend Lyssa. The Corinthians stone Medea's sons with stones. Years later, Arinna, Lyssa's daughter, brings this news to the women and tells them that in Corinth it is said that Medea had killed her own children. Every seven years the children from Corinth are supposed to commemorate Medea's dead sons for a year. So you will believe forever that Medea was a child murderer.

characters

The story is told from the perspective of six different people: In addition to Jason and Medea, Glauke, Creon's epileptic daughter, has a say. She is torn between the affection for Medea, who tries with her healing arts to take Glauke's fears and make her a self-determined person by building more self-confidence, and her rejection of her, which her through the influence of Court is persuaded. These three people are also known from ancient Medea, while Agameda, Akamas and Leukon are characters in fiction. Agameda, a Colchian and former student of Medea, who is highly regarded as a healer in Corinth, lets her good contacts with the powerful and does not shy away from intrigues to destroy Medea. She hates them because Medea did not give preference to Agameda, who was driven by the thought of social advancement, in her youth when she was her student, even though she was her best student. In addition, Medea withheld the orphaned Agameda the love and attention she thirsted for. Agameda cannot forgive her for this and is now trying to harm her by all means, even if it would lead to her own ruin. Akamas, Creon's first astronomer and real, hidden power holder of Corinth, and Leukon, Creon's second astronomer and close friend of Medea, complete the story and contribute their biographies and reasons for acting against Medea or not standing up for her.

Background and reception

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Christa Wolf rejected the motif of the infanticide of a healer, first introduced by Euripides in the Medea drama, contrary to her socially recognized task of keeping the strains. She resorted to versions before Euripides that knew neither the murder of the brother nor the child of Medea. She considered the early Medea myth to be matriarchal, which was reinterpreted by later male adaptations according to the later applicable patriarchy. Christa Wolf asks in whose interests Medea, as a formerly wild woman , was declared a murderer. Her story of Medea is also an autobiographical key novel of personal and political experiences of Christa Wolf, whereby the modest Kolchis without reforms alludes to the German Democratic Republic and Corinth, which is interested in gold, alludes to the Federal Republic of Germany . Partly a self-portrayal of Christa Wolf is seen in the figure of Medea. Another issue is flight, xenophobia and being treated as a scapegoat. The success of the reworking of the ancient material is rated very differently.

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Translations

Secondary literature

  • Marianne Hochgeschurz (Ed.): Christa Wolfs Medea. Requirements for a text. Myth and image. DTV, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-12826-7 .
  • Corinna Viergutz, Heiko Hollweg: “Kassandra” and “Medea” by Christa Wolf: utopian myths in comparison. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-2733-8 . (on-line)
  • Volker Krischel: Christa Wolf: Medea. (= King's Explanations and Materials. Volume 415). Bange Verlag, Hollfeld 2003, ISBN 3-8044-1779-5 .
  • Stefan Neuhaus : Christa Wolf, Medea and the Myth. In: active word . 53 (2003), H. 2, pp. 283-294.
  • Michael Scheffel: Marked by myth? Medea between 'Sexus' and 'Gender' in Euripides, Franz Grillparzer and Christa Wolf. In: active word. 53 (2003), H. 2, pp. 295-307.
  • Martin Beyer: The system of misunderstanding: Christa Wolf's work on the Medea myth . Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3376-6 . Excerpt online books.google.de
  • Jürgen Joachimsthaler: Medea. Interpretations. Christa Wolf's examination of a “New Mythology”. In: Sabine Fischer-Kania, Daniel Schäf (Hrsg.): Language and literature in the field of tension between politics and aesthetics. Christa Wolf on her 80th birthday. iudicium, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-86205-029-1 , pp. 52-62.
  • Lothar Bluhm: Christa Wolf's “Medea. Voices ”and the aesthetic of the reservation. In: Carsten Gansel (Ed.): Christa Wolf - In the stream of memories. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8471-0249-6 , pp. 139–150.

University publications

  • Alena Janke: Ancient myth and modern literature, on the problem of tradition and innovation in the work of Christa Wolf (" Kassandra " and "Medea. Voices") , Hamburg 2010, DNB 1006374507 (online dissertation Universität Hamburg 2010, full text online PDF, free of charge , 218 pages, 820 kB).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quake in Santa Monica . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25/1998 , June 15, 1998 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 29, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Manfred Wolf: Radical correction of the Medea picture . In: Berliner Abendblatt . May 5, 2018, p. 4 ( abendblatt-berlin.de [PDF; accessed on June 29, 2019]).