Having spent most of the academic year trudging through what felt like masses of Euripides’ convoluted verse and Ovid’s morally questionable expressions of love, reading Circe felt like dunking my head in a bucket of ice water. Madeline Miller, to me, is an author who can take the most ‘overdone’ stories, like books of the Iliad or Odyssey, and make them into something so refreshing and thought-provoking that it almost seems like she has insights into the texts that no-one else has.
Her previous best seller, The Song of Achilles is famous for its raw and heart-rending depiction of Achilles’ and Patroclus’ relationship, told through the voice of the latter, an innovative new perspective for an age-old tale. Circe is no different. The character of Circe is barely touched upon in the works in which she features, namely the Odyssey of Homer, the tenth book of which sees her as nothing more than a feature, yet another obstacle in Odysseus’ homecoming. Miller has managed to breathe more than just new life into Circe, by combining elements from not only the Odyssey, but Hesiod’s Theogony, the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
From the moment Circe is born, to her exile from the halls of her father on account of her cursing of Scylla, it is apparent that she is the odd one out among her family. Miller seems to run with this idea, creating a fully fleshed-out story from the glimpses of Circe in other works and the implications of her genealogy; the complicated interactions imagined between her and her siblings who spread to Crete, Babylon and Colchis.
Circe’s attitudes towards herself, her power and her treatment at the hands of others are tumultuous, to say the least. Miller is able to depict the experiences and emotions of a woman at the pinnacles of pain, love and fear without sacrificing the integrity and intrigue of the plot, a feat which is often lacking in many ‘feminist reworkings’ of classic stories. The plot itself is packed with twists which ensure that the reader is held captive, not just by their investment in Circe’s own character development, which pervades each page, but the rapid changes of theme, interacting characters and motives.
The ‘female experience’ is brought to life in Circe, albeit in a hyperbolic way, just as dramatised as the epic poems from which its inspiration is drawn. However, the very fact that Circe’s tale is expressed by Miller in a manner so deeply rooted in mythological fantasy means that the expression of the pain which so often streaks the life of the protagonist does not feel out of proportion to its epic context. Overall, Circe is like a Russian doll, fiction nestled within epic, in turn based in mythology, against a backdrop of Miller’s artful presentation of suffering, redemption and what it means to be a woman discovering her own strength after years of oppression.