Should Women Support Men? Circe by Madeline Miller
In Madeline Miller’s second novel Circe, Miller retells familiar Greek myths from the point of view of a previously peripheral character: Circe, the enchantress of Homer’s Odyssey. Like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Christa Wolf’s Medea, Miller’s retelling augments the myths by dimensionalising female caricatures. As Molly Hite writes in The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives, this sort of reorientation does not necessarily change the story’s sequence of events, but it can give those events ‘an entirely different set of emphases and values’. Previously peripheral characters are brought to the fore, and with them: previously peripheral issues, such as, in the case of Circe, the effect of heroic ambition on one’s companions/ family (a common theme in both of Miller’s books).
In Greek mythology, many men die trying to get their name immortalised, and even if they succeed, it is usually at the cost of those closest to them. Achilles loses Patroclus, Hercules loses his wife Megara. But there are non-fatal losses too: Odysseus must leave his wife and newborn baby, Ajax loses his mind, and several supporting characters are used and abandoned when their usefulness expires. This is what happens in the story of Medea, which is featured as a sub-plot in Circe’s narrative. Medea, who is Circe’s niece, famously aids Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece. But when he successfully completes his quest and returns home, he leaves Medea and their two sons for a woman named Creusa. Out of revenge, Medea kills Creusa, and then gruesomely kills her own children — ostensibly to spite Jason.
Aside from the infanticide, this pattern is repeated throughout Circe. Woman helps man; man succeeds then leaves woman. It first occurs between Circe and a poor mortal fisherman named Glaucus. Circe, who is an immortal witch-goddess and daughter of the sun-god Helios, falls in love with Glaucus, but her father forbids a relationship between them due to Glaucus’ lowly status. To circumvent this, Circe creates a potion to turn Glaucus into a god. It works, but she cannot tell anyone she was responsible for fear of her father’s retribution, but also to avoid injuring Glaucus’ pride: ‘I longed to tell him that it was I who had given him such a gift, but I saw how it pleased him to believe his godhead wholly his own and I did not want to take that from him’.
When Glaucus joins the court of Helios, he forsakes Circe for the sycophantic nymphs:
“I have loved you since that first day I saw you sailing,” I said. “Scylla laughs at your fins and green beard, but I cherished you when there were fish guts on your hands and you wept from your father’s cruelty. I helped you when — ”
“No!” He slashed his hand through the air. “I will not think on those days. Every hour some new bruise upon me, some new ache, always weary, always burdened and weak. I sit at councils with your father now. I do not have to beg for every scrap. Nymphs clamor for me, and I may choose the best among them, which is Scylla.”
Circe is scorned and exacts revenge on Scylla by transforming her into a grotesque monster — an act she will forever regret.
This experience makes Circe jaded. When Medea and Jason arrive on her island, she sees that this pattern is likely to be repeated with her niece: ‘In his mind, he was already telling the tale to his court, to wide-eyed nobles and fainting maidens. He did not thank Medea for her aid; he scarcely looked at her. As if a demigoddess saving him at every turn was only his due’. Circe tries to warn Medea, but she refuses to listen (just as Circe refused to listen to the warnings against Glaucus): ‘You are blind not to see what a weak reed [Jason] is. He flinches from you already. And you are what, three days married? What will he do in a year? He is led by his love for himself — you were only expedient. In Iolcos your position will rest on his goodwill’.
Of course, Circe turns out to be right about Jason. He leaves Medea. And later, the hero Theseus leaves Circe’s other niece Ariadne, after she helps him defeat the minotaur. The pattern appears inexorable. Despite her experience, Circe cannot help repeating the pattern in her encounter with Odysseus. When they first meet, she is enamoured with his charm:
Moment by moment, his vitality had returned. His eyes were bright now, storm-lit. When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world. It was not just his words, though they were clever enough. It was everything together: his face, his gestures, the sliding tones of his voice. I would say it was like a spell he cast, but there was no spell I knew that could equal it. The gift was his alone
She notices but chooses to ignore signs of his other side; his cruelty, his deceitfulness, his vanity: ‘I had seen him in such moods. Every petty defect of the world enraged him, all the waste and stupidity and slowness of men […] Even at his best he was not an easy man’. Circe aids Odysseus and he too abandons her — and does the same to Calypso afterward. As his son Telemachus says of him toward the end of the novel: ‘All these gods, all these mortals who aided him. Men talk of his wiles. His true talent was in how well he could take from others’.
The irony of these pilfering heroes is that the accolades they fight for are never worth it in the end. As Circe tells Telemachus, even Achilles regrets his Faustian pact:
Achilles, once Best of the Greeks, who chose an early death as payment for eternal fame. Your father spoke to the hero warmly, praising him and assuring him of his reputation among men. But Achilles reproached him. He said he regretted his proud life, and wished he had lived more quietly, and happily
Odysseus too, anticlimactically returns home after ten years struggling to do so. Not only is he dissatisfied with domestic life, he is also overcome with paranoia:
my father brooded. He was sure they were plotting against him. He wanted sentries posted all around the palace, day and night. He talked of training dogs and digging trenches to catch villains in the dark. He drew up plans for a great palisade to be built. As if we were some war camp. I should have said something then. But I… still hoped it would pass
Telemachus’ decision not to follow in his father’s footsteps, to instead live the quiet life, defies fate and, in a sense, makes him a true hero. Athena tries to dissuade him, but, as Penelope says, ‘his father’s blood was always stubborn’:
“There will be no songs made of you. No stories. Do you understand? You will live a life of obscurity. You will be without a name in history. You will be no one.”
Each word was like the blow of a hammer in a forge. He would give in, I thought. Of course he would. The fame she had described was what all mortals yearn for. It is their only hope of immortality.
“I choose that fate,” he said.
Telemachus breaks the pattern and chooses to stay with Circe. In his book, Along Heroic Lines, the literary critic Christopher Ricks describes the ‘hero’ as one who lives with ‘a greater-than-usual-refusal to grant the world’s insistence that such-and-such is impossible (or indisputable or inescapable or inevitable…)’. This refusal is what makes Telemachus a true hero — and the same can be said of Circe, who refuses to submit to her own cynicism. There is danger in exposing oneself to love, but Circe seems to suggest that there is danger in closing oneself off to it too. As it is suggested throughout the novel, above and beyond her divinity, Circe’s resilience is her true power.
