Redeeming the Witchy Greek Goddess that is ‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller

 

Author Sophia Alexander holding her copy of Circe by Madeline Miller

I had asked Odysseus: “What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?”

He’d smiled in the firelight. “That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”  

-p. 272, Circe

Circe, daughter of the Greek Titan Helios and granddaughter of the Titan Oceanus, is infamous for turning sailors into pigs when they land on her island. However, in this tale by incredible storyteller Madeline Miller, this much-maligned goddess’s situation is revisited so convincingly—from her perspective—that one wonders how her situation and actions were always so ill-depicted before. Miller has me convinced, as what else would be so likely to bring a nymph living alone on an island to do such a thing?

That said… even as Miller subtly points out the misogyny of extant myths by correcting them in Circe’s interests, I find her protagonist to be rather misogynistic in her own right, for all that I didn’t sense that Miller meant her to be. In Circe’s millenia or so of life, she never has a truly close female friend. During her exile on a deserted island, which lasts for centuries, she is finally sent other nymphs for attendants/company, but she never makes a single friend among them, nor does she seem to really try. The people who matter most to her are always male.

Circe even hates her mother, and her mother hates her.  Miller somewhat rectifies this offense to mothers later in the story, but even that is with regards to a mother’s relationship with her son, not a daughter.

Meanwhile, the story drips with lush, poetic descriptions and brings to life a number of the Greek gods and heroes in all their vanity and cruelty and beauty and self-interest. I was gripped by the tale from beginning to end and highly recommend it for its power and prose—and, of course, for its educational value in helping us to get a slightly better grip on those Greek myths. Madeline Miller holds a Master’s degree from Brown University in the Classics, and so within this novel we can absorb select drops of her coalesced Classical brilliance and understanding. All it takes is sacrificing just a few short, exquisite days of our mortal lives on this, Miller's altar to Circe. Totally worth it.