Circe
by Madeline Miller
First Posted on May 2018
I don’t remember reading this, but I remember having read it, if that makes sense. Sometimes a book finds itself as a part of a particular time in your life, and sometimes a book feels like you’ve always known it. Circe is the latter, for me. It seemed to kick off a renewed goldrush to find and rewrite literary women done dirty by their contextual appearances and rebrand them into core, sympathetic, often titular, protagonists. I still have Ariadne on the shelf: that one seems more like turning a plot device into a person than an antagonist into the POV protag, so I am intrigued.
Circe was great, though.
“Please,” I said. “I do not want them here, truly. I am not being funny.”
“No,” [Hermes] said, “you’re not. You are being very dull. Use your imagination, they must be good for something. Take them to your bed.”
“That is absurd,” I said. “They would run screaming.”
“Nymphs always do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at getting away.”
At a feast on Olympus such a jest would have been followed by a roar of laughter. Hermes waited now, grinning like a goat. But all I felt was a white, cold rage.
This is a good characterization of a shitty dude and makes a strong case for top synecdoche of the book; woman of power still gets pelted by rape jokes while being unable to avoid systemic disenfranchisement by someone above her in the established social hierarchy.
Left alone it is a fine—perhaps fine-plus—scene: extremely apropos for the 2018 Zeitgeist. It is subtle without being gauche. But we know Circe is the witch, the one who turns men into pigs—I do not believe anyone goes into the book not knowing that. Even DuckTales cites her power.
So I maintain we all know the way this story goes:
“Mistress?” the leader would say. “Do not tell me that such a beauty as yourself dwells all alone?”
“Oh, yes,” I would answer. “Quite alone.”
He would smile. He could not help it. There was never any hear in him. Why should their be? He had already noted for himself that there was no man’s cloak hanging by the door, no hunter’s bow, no shepherd’s staff. No sign of brothers or fathers or sons, no vengeance that would follow after. If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.
The bench would scrape, and he would stand. The men watched with bright eyes. They wanted the freeze, the flinch, the begging that would come.
It isn’t pretty, nor are the details of the the swinifications that follow. A few pages after the first excerpt and a few paragraphs after the second, this leapt out:
Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.
Circe isn't turning its titular character into the new Morgaine le Fay because she isn’t a villainess reshaped into a fallen yet sympathetic character. Nor is she a lyrical side-story where the context of the novel creates a renewed vision of a woman formerly designated as wicked.
Circe isn’t misunderstood—she’s perfectly understood; she turns men into pigs because men see her body as their property and try to claim her with their strength. She needs no narrative overhaul for us to understand her actions; she needs no revamp to be sympathetic. The system is, and always has been, designed to quite literally fuck her over.
The gods do it, and have always done it, and won't stop until someone with power equal to their own challenges their depravity. It is always a game or all a joke to those who hold the power. But not so to the ones “so very bad at getting away.” This is a direct indictment of a system and has the overarching and amorphous quality of a parable. Which is good, because that's what myths are. Circe is jerked around by a society that lets those in power say and do things that are fundamentally revolting; myths represent humans trying to understand the world, and this particular understanding is relevant now more than ever.
Circe has been received exactly how it should—a debut at number one on the New York Times Best-seller list. It has mass appeal in both its structure and its message, so if you’re a one- or two-fiction-novel-per-year kind of person, this should make your list.