Figlie di Medea

Abstract

Starting with the figure of Medea and, in particular, her rewriting in the novel Medea: Voices (1996) by Christa Wolf, this essay focuses on Olga, the protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) and interrogates the abandonment-female identity nexus. It identifies the experience of abandonment as the catalyst for a crisis that leads the female subject to discover herself as “other”. In both Wolf’s and Ferrante’s characters, one can notice a procedure of reinterpretation of myth akin to that advocated by Adriana Cavarero in Despite Plato (1999). Indeed, the philosopher hypothesizes that “a new thought and a new unusual subject demand ‘new figures’ appropriate to female subjectivity insofar as they are thought by women”. Wolf’s ‘other’ Medea and Ferrant’s Olga come to understand the power structures on which society is based, they discover the crime perpetrated against the feminine, its silencing. This discovery leads to the fragmentation of identity that splinters into a polyphony of voices because, “I’ is a layered structure, made up of co-present voices”. In order not to fall into the “void of meaning”, the protagonists must find the strength to watch over themselves, to pay attention to themselves. No longer the Medea handed down to us from myth, then, but daughters suited to new thinking: though constrained, in telling themselves, by the limit of language, Wolf’s “other” Medea will make sense of herself by believing in her own intuition, while Ferrante’s Olga will pretend to believe in that social construction that is love.