Medea

Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf explodes this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle.

Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider-and then she discovers the appalling secret behind the king's claim to power. Unwilling to ignore the horrifying truth about the state, she becomes a threat to the king and his ruthless advisors; abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and a murderess.

Long a sharp-eyed political observer, Christa Wolf transforms this ancient tale into a startlingly relevant commentary on our times. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, and yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, her Medea is a stunningly perceptive and probingly honest work of fiction.

With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood.??Translated from the German by John Cullen.

Pity poor Medea--at least, that's what German novelist Christa Wolf would like you to do. True, the woman's reputation is not good: she stands accused of betraying her father, killing her brother, and then serving up her own children as the main course to their unsuspecting father when he divorces her for another woman. Still, the story of Medea has always been told by men; in Wolf's version, she finally has a woman as her advocate. And advocate Wolf does--in this revisiting of the old tale, Medea is truly a doomed and tragic heroine, closer to the subject of Wolf's previous book, Cassandra than to the murderous slave to passion she has always been portrayed as. Though many of the plot points remain the same--Jason's journey to Colchis to claim the golden fleece, his subsequent flight with Medea, and the death of her brother, Apsyrtus--the circumstances are turned on their heads. Medea's betrayal of her father, Ae?tes, for example, and elopement with Jason have less to do with wreckless passion than her secret knowledge that Apsyrtus died at Ae?tes's hand, the victim of dynastic competition.

In Wolf's retelling, Medea is no mere tale of scorned passion and bloody revenge but rather a complex weave of power and politics. In it Jason is the pawn in a greater struggle between King Creon, who harbors his own nasty secret, and Medea, a wise woman who knows too much about what goes on in Creon's kingdom. In limning the life and death pas-de-deux of these two strong characters, Wolf also examines themes of loyalty, sacrifice, and the effects of political oppression on personal relationships. Interesting enough in its own right, Medea takes on added piquancy when read in light of revelations in the wake of German reunification that Wolf was, for many years, a Stasi informant. In revisiting the much-maligned Medea's motivations, Christa Wolf may, in fact, be offering an accounting of her own.