Wistful Witch of the West
A Review of Madeline Miller’s Circe
Madeline Miller, Circe. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Pp. 394. ISBN 978–0–316–55634–7. $27.00.
In the Greek myth of the sacrifice at Mekone, Hesiod recounts that Prometheus attempted to trick Zeus by offering the king of the gods a choice of two portions: the flesh of the sacrificial ox disguised by its stomach or the bones wrapped in glistening fat. Zeus chooses the bones (leaving the flesh for humans), but he knows he is being tricked — and in his anger dooms Prometheus to horrific punishment. A casual reading attributes Zeus’s anger to some kind of inattention on his part, but the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant once asked the most salient question: what in the world would Zeus do with meat? As an immortal, why would he want that most ephemeral portion of a beast? The fat will provide the aroma…and the bones offer the most enduring part of a creature, the portion that contains the sēma, the seed of life. Zeus knowingly selects the portion that is closest to the divine, and Prometheus can have the flesh for his humans.
I always have loved Vernant’s interpretation of this myth, because no story illustrates more strikingly the difference between the mortal and the immortal. When we are surprised that Zeus knows Prometheus’s trick and makes the “bad” choice anyway, we reveal all too clearly our anthropocentric reading of the Theogony. But what if we tried to imagine an entire life from this kind of theocentric perspective?
If you are interested, Madeline Miller’s Circe offers an ideal changing room in which to try on immortality. The novel details the life of the immortal nymph, known best from her appearance in Books 10 and 11 of Homer’s Odyssey. Homer’s Circe uses magical powers to transform some unwanted visitors into pigs and to seduce others. She lives alone on a lush island paradise, but is connected enough to the rest of the world to prophesy about far-flung events. And though she ultimately directs Odysseus to the Underworld (and thus on to the rest of his journey), she is not typically given much consideration — she is another of the adventures, a female (like Calypso) offering pleasure (like the Lotus Eaters) who diverts his mind from thoughts of Ithaca.
Miller takes this small episode and from it weaves an entire life. From the first we witness through Circe’s eyes the many ways that god-time is different from mortal-time. Circe begins her story “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” We are in a world before the Olympian gods reigned, a world where — at least for Circe and her relatives — humans are of no concern. She tells of an infancy that spans only a few hours, a mother who quickly abandons her for more interesting pursuits, and a life of divine sameness — the daily journey of her father Helios (the Sun) through the sky, and the feast in his halls every evening. More children are born to her parents, intrigues and backbiting abound: it appears much like life in a middle school cafeteria, stretching on into eternity. If that sounds horrible, it’s because it is, and Miller reveals incrementally both the beauty and the despair of divinity: that gods are changeless.
The first inkling that there may be hope for the gods — namely, the power to change — comes early in Circe’s life when she witnesses the torment of Prometheus for that trick at Mekone. The rest of the gods view the spectacle of his torture and the promise of his eternal punishment as dinner entertainment, which holds their interest only for a short time. Even as the other Titans fret over whether this will spell a new war with the Olympians, Helios quickly quells discussion: “There is no lesson here for a Titan.” And indeed, that is how most gods respond to all fluctuations in the world.
Circe, however, is moved by her uncle Prometheus’s anguish, and in a daring move speaks to the chained and wounded god, offering him a drink. The mystery of Prometheus is one that haunts Circe — that a god of foreknowledge would assist mortals, knowing what it would cost him, seems inexplicable. Yet Prometheus shares a bit of wisdom with the nymph that will carry her through the rest of the novel: “not every god need be the same.” And so, like her uncle, Circe will spend countless years straining against the stasis of immortality, piecing together a way to be a different sort of god.
Eternity gives one scope to know the difference between what is truly changeless and what is not. Circe observes that humans might look at the natural world on her island home and call it “changeless, eternal, but the island was always changing, that was the truth, flowing endlessly through its generations.” Not every god is willing to stop and look, but Circe’s situation makes her the exception, as she learns from the shifts she witnesses around her. One advantage she has is her status as a lesser female god, which Miller reveals at times in a flicker and at others in a conflagration. Circe’s tentativeness in her relationship with her powerful sun-god father, cluelessness with her first crush, and first experiments with magic both show her capacity to learn and reveal why she needs to — because she is weaker and less honored than others around her. Part of this has to do with her status as a nymph, and Miller’s dexterity is nowhere more in view than when she tosses Circe into the midst of a group of nymphs, who seem indistinguishable from one another. Each vies for position, flirts with the gods at banquet, and jockeys for the most advantageous marriage. Circe’s ultimate exile to Aiaia, the island where she welcomes Odysseus and his crew, comes about when she confesses her power of witchcraft to her father. She is punished not for the spell she cast, but for asserting her power in contradiction to her father who denies it. Helios, arbitrary and autocratic, cannot impose death on another god, but that doesn’t mean he can’t make her suffer.
Yet, even more than her status, Circe’s sex defines and limits her, in ways that she can only grow to understand. From the beginning she knows that her father would have preferred a son, a first lesson in the gender dynamics of the ancient Greek world, where even the celestial female serves as object and servant. The grasping and in-fighting of females who are willing to sacrifice each other to maintain what little power they have finds it clearest example in Pasiphaë, Circe’s sister who marries Minos, a mortal king of Crete but son of Zeus. Circe expects her sister to rage at betrothal to a human: “But when I looked, she was smiling. What that meant I could not say.” Yet, Pasiphaë is more willing to speak years later, when she summons Circe to help ease a particularly difficult childbirth (I will leave you to guess which offspring causes her such anguish). By this point we can see that Minos “old and puffed” bores her, and she delights in toying with whoever has been “caught between [her] claws.” But in a moment of honesty Pasiphaë reveals the bitterness that being female has cost her:
Let me tell you a truth about Helios and all the rest. They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power. It is not enough to be an uncle’s favorite, to please some god in his bed. It is not enough even to be beautiful, for when you go to them, and kneel and say ‘I have been good, will you help me?’ they wrinkle their brows. Oh, sweetheart, it cannot be done. Oh, darling, you must learn to live with it.
Magic becomes Circe’s way out of this double bind of lesser goddess and lesser gender. Sorcery allows her to transform herself (into the shape of a man in a daring escapade against a sea monster) and others (all those sailors turned into swine!). When she confesses that magic is mostly a force of will, it comes as no surprise that most of the conjurers in this tale are female, for they more than males must make magic to survive. Miller’s version of Circe is not a Shakespearean Weird Sister in league with sinister powers, but a vulnerable female who must use what she has at hand to protect herself and those she loves as best she can.
And magic, too, offers a consolation; it combats the loneliness that is a part of Circe’s traditional tale, and the fate surely of many women over the centuries who have found themselves similarly isolated. Magic is craft and employment — herbs needs to be harvested fresh every season, tinctures made anew, spells cast and recast. Miller reveals the weight of Circe’s eternal isolation in a way that makes you grateful for mortality. The witch’s occasional encounters with the outside world leave her vulnerable, stuck in past moments, unable to connect to the present. Miller exquisitely crafts these small, aching moments of disconnection — as when Circe’s favorite brother, Aeëtes, stops his ship at Circe’s island while on the hunt for his daughter, Medea. Circe has not seen him for centuries, and first confirms that his daughter has been to visit her, then pauses:
“I met Daedalus,” I said.
He frowned. “Daedalus? He has been dead for years. Where is Medea? Give her to me.”
There is so much in her three words — a whole story from a lifetime ago that she needs to share, that is still so present for her. To Aeëtes it is ancient history. If her exile physically anchors her to Aiaia, her magic compels her to notice change — and to welcome it when given the chance.
The only time the novel falters is when Miller feels compelled to finish a myth that she has incorporated into Circe’s tale. Recounting the fate of the Cyclops, for example, feels less necessary to Circe’s story than to Miller’s readers who want to see fidelity to the Odyssey. Yet, in most instances, Miller’s adoption of other myths is a true reweaving of them, where she repurposes them to show Circe’s ongoing sorrow at watching mortals who are dear to her pass from the earth, or invents a new history for them by causing Circe to wriggle into stories where we wouldn’t expect her. Those moments are delightful — watching the arc of her friendship with Hermes, who appears as the original island-hopper, or comparing her reaction to Odysseus’s tales to that of the Phaeacians in Homer’s Odyssey. Myths you probably know by heart feel brand new when viewed from Circe’s vantage point — female, vulnerable and immortal.
The centerpiece of the novel is, of course, her year with Odysseus, but it would not be Circe’s story if the novel ended there. Circe’s struggles go on — in ways that bring her in greater contact with humanity and the mortality that we bear, and that become increasingly difficult for her to endure:
The best that I could hope for would be to watch his body fail, limb by limb. To see his shoulders droop, his legs tremble, his belly sink into itself. And at the last, I would have to stand over his white-haired corpse and watch it fed to the flames. The hills and trees before me, the worms and lions, stone and tender buds, Daedalus’ loom, all wavered as if they were a fraying dream. Beneath them was the place I truly dwelt, a cold eternity of endless grief.
Yet Circe’s greatest gift is her capacity to learn, change and grow. She allows us to eavesdrop on her monologues over centuries where she begins to apprehend the beauty and gift of mortality, even amidst its sorrows. Her divine knowledge bears little resemblance to the wrathful omniscience of Zeus, or the tactical know-how of Athena, but then “not every god need be the same.” Thank the goddess for that — and for Madeline Miller, who has shared with us a god whose wisdom we all need.
For news about Madeline Miller’s books, her (frequent) public appearances, and more, visit the author’s fine website.
Elizabeth Manwell teaches Classics at Kalamazoo College.
