She’s the one who unintentionally transforms Scylla into the horrifying sea monster we know, the one whose six heads snap up Greek heroes from their ships.

Much of the delight of reading Circe is recognizing just how many other Greek myths Circe finds her way into, informed by ancient texts or Miller’s own imaginings and woven into a coherent shape by Circe’s perspective. “Had I really spent ten thousand years ducking like a mouse?”

“Had I truly feared such creatures?” she thinks of her catty cousins. There are satisfying scenes in which she roams the island’s lush forests, defies a threatening (male) boar, summons a majestic (female) lion familiar, develops her witchcraft, and finally comes into her own. When she’s eventually banished on some spurious charge to a small island named Aiaia, Circe finally disavows marriage, family, and all the trappings of confined female life. She falls in love with a humble mortal fisherman named Glaucos and turns him into a sea god once changed, he promptly rejects her for the most attractive nymph he can find. Her father, the sun god Helios, literally burns her when she defies him. Miller’s Circe, fully fleshed-out, is a towering, passionate figure whose life seems to be an unceasing stream of men failing her: Her brother Aeëtes, who she rears from birth, grows up and leaves to rule a kingdom without a backwards glance. That’s the grand, praiseworthy project of Madeline Miller’s new novel Circe: to take on the vast canonical text of The Odyssey, and the overpoweringly male world it describes, by telling the story from a woman’s perspective.Įven the bare sketches we get of Circe in The Odyssey already outline a potential feminist icon: a witchy woman who lives alone, turning men into pigs. At its heart, storytelling is a tool: from rewriting history books to having your press secretaries lie for you, shaping a narrative to suit your own ends is one of the most powerful cudgels an aspiring despot can wield.īut storytelling can subvert norms as well as establish them.

The works that form the bedrock of our canons - Christianity, Western lit - often erase women by not allowing them to speak, or casting doubt on them when they do. She dubs it Western literature’s “first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up.’” The first example she gives in Women & Power is from The Odyssey: Telemachus only truly comes into his own as a man, she says, when he tells his mother Penelope that talking is men’s work. Last year, British classicist Mary Beard published a slim book that aimed to chronicle how power, in Western civilization, has been set up from the very beginning to shut out women. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

Circe novel