Charlotte Kersten

“He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”

So What’s It About?
“In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.”

What I Thought

Circe‘s most immediate success, as a retelling of Greek myths, might be that it made me deeply about stories that I’d previously found to be somewhat dry and distant. There are some people who devoured mythology as kids, and that was never me. But Circe brings legendary figures to vivid life, from Daedalus to Medea, Odysseus to Athena. As soon as a new character was introduced I would myself Googling them to learn as much as I could about their stories and how Miller’s interpretation differed from other people’s.

One of the most interesting characters in this regard is Odysseus himself. Initially Circe is so starved for companionship that all she sees is his vitality, intelligence and intensity, and it is only later that she comes to understand his cruelty, ruthlessness and paranoia. As someone who knew little about the character before this book, my opinion of him slowly evolved and altered as Circe’s did. One of the most telling moments is Penelope’s revelation about his experiences in the war:

‘The war did not break him; it made him more himself.”

Needless to say, take all of this with a grain of salt in consideration of the fact that I know nothing about classics. That being said, I also liked how the book views the dichotomy between mortals and immortals. Circe grows up knowing the cruelty of the gods, and their wanton vice and spitefulness are reinforced over and over again over the course of the story. As she states, the gods can are destructive rather than constructive because of the ease that their immortality brings to everything they do:

“But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.”

I did wonder if there are any other immortals who are kind and compassionate like Circe is – surely not ALL of them are vindictive, cruel beings! However, I do think the divide between mortals and immortals becomes less stark when Circe meditates upon the evils that are universal to both kinds of beings.

One of my favorite parts of the story is when Circe first explores her island, and begins to fall in love with the freedom it offers her. She finds meaning in the limits that have been imposed on her:

“I learned to braid back my hair, so it would not catch on every twig, and how to tie my skirts at the knee to keep the burrs off. learned to recognize the different blooming vines and gaudy roses, to spot the shining dragonflies and coiling snakes. I climbed the peaks where the cypresses speared black into the sky, then clambered down to the orchards and vineyards where purple grapes grew thick as coral. I walked the hills, the buzzing meadows of thyme and lilac, and set my footprints across the yellow beaches. I searched out every cove and grotto, found the gentle bays, the harbor safe for ships. I heard the wolves howl, and the frogs cry from their mud. I stroked the glossy brown scorpions who braved me their tails. Their poison was barely a pinch. I was drunk, as the wine and nectar in my father’s halls had never made me. No wonder I have been so slow, I thought. All this while, I have been a weaver without wool. a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.”

She is a beautifully realized character in her vulnerabilities, imperfections and the process by which she gradually grows in power and agency, learns to live with her magic and with herself. As I’ve said before, I will read again and again about a woman who is treated as nothing and valued for nothing by the world but nevertheless insists that her life does have meaning; that she has meaning. This is the transformative power that is at the heart of Circe’s magic.

Sexism pervades both the mortal and immortal worlds. There is a backdrop of sexual violence and oppression against women: they are simply valued for their abilities to marry off and/or bear children, and throughout the story there are many stories of expendable, powerless women dying for the whims and vices of ruthless, powerful men. My eternal argument, though, is that including egregious violence against women isn’t actually that feminist unless you really say something about it or examine it in depth…which I don’t think Miller does a very good job of.

Circe’s reaction to her own rape is not very effective. Her anger and reactionary vengeance against men are both shown a bit and one of the aspects of her reaction that I value the most was the way that she forces herself to keep sleeping with men to try to prove to herself that she is in control of her body:

“It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own. And did I like the answer I found?”

Other than that it really doesn’t feel like the sexual assault is addressed very thoroughly, actually. For a little while it’s a part of the story and then it sort of just isn’t anymore, until Circe decides to release all the men kept as pigs on her island.

I think another big flaw in the book from a feminist perspective is how the different phases of Circe’s life are so deeply dependent on and shaped by her relationships with various men. In contrast, her relationships with women are generally very poor until she meets Penelope. I suppose that this could be a commentary upon the way that Circe’s patriarchal world divides women from having deep relationships with each other, but I would have loved it if more of Circe’s process of self-development and growing into power/agency had involved constructive rather than destructive relationships with other women. Maybe this would be asking Miller to stray too far from the original stories, but I assume that other alterations and liberties made the cut. There are hints of what could have been in Circe’s relationship with her sister, and one of my favorite moments in the book was the following conversation between the two of them about what the world demands of women, when she realizes that her sister contains depths she never could have anticipated:

“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. They take what they want, and in return they give you only your shackles.”

I’m also not sure how I feel about the strange arrangement of family and romantic relationships that concludes the book. Even if you make the argument (again) that Miller had to be true to her source material, I would still argue that the relationships develop extremely quickly and don’t feel very effective.

So, to summarize…I don’t necessarily feel that the elements of feminism and trauma are especially well done here, but I still think the book is beautifully written and engaging with a very strong main character in Circe. Take it or leave it!