Circe, the female hero. First-person narrative and power in Madeline Miller’s Circe

Abstract

Introduction — women’s mythological rewritings

In the last decade, we have been witnessing what is probably the biggest revival of ancient mythology in novels written in English. Ever since the publication of Madeline Miller’s Circe in the USA (2018) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls in the UK (2018), women writers have populated the anglophone publishing industry with rewritings of ancient myths from women’s point of view. Thus, authors like Madeline Miller, Pat Barker, Jennifer Saint, Natalie Haynes, and many more¹ have been retelling the Graeco-Roman myths from their female characters’ perspective, usually marginalized in the ancient versions of these stories. Within this trend, I distinguish two sub-categories: the ‘choral novels’, whose most representative text is Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which address women’s isolation and disempowerment as a communal experience and alternate between multiple women’s points of view,² and the ‘heroic novels’, which see Miller’s Circe as their most exemplary text. These heroic novels focus on one main character,³ who monopolizes the narrative and is often constructed in opposition to the other characters, including the other women.

Despite their variety, these novels constitute a cohesive trend, characterized by a close adherence to the ancient storylines, but with a switch in perspective, from the male heroes to the marginal female characters, whose psychology and inner life are carefully analyzed throughout each novel. These narrative and stylistic choices have led critics and scholars⁴ to associate this trend with Alicia Ostriker’s concept of ‘feminist revisionist mythmaking’, which consists in ‘the challenge to and correction of gender stereotypes embodied in myth’ and ‘hit-and-run attacks on familiar images and the social and literary conventions supporting them’ (Ostriker 1982: 73–4). Ever since the publication of Circe and The Silence of the Girls, these novels have become immensely popular and received awards and public acknowledgements from mainstream outlets,⁵ which consistently describe them as ‘powerful’, ‘kickass’, ‘sympathetic’, and even ‘feminist.’⁶ Reviewers appreciate novels giving marginalized characters a voice and regularly list them as ‘Editor’s Pick’ on platforms like Goodreads or Amazon.⁷

This article addresses two fundamental questions: how form and narrative style influence these novels’ ideology (and vice versa), and which kind of feminine models these texts construct for the contemporary audience. In particular, I will focus on the ‘heroic novels’, since they constitute in my opinion an interesting contradiction: on the one hand they support female emancipation and empowerment; on the other hand, they construct an isolated female hero,⁸ who progressively withdraws from the social scene.⁹ This progressive isolation feeds into the idea of the solitary rebel who opposes an oppressive regime and speaks up for herself; yet, it perpetuates systemic violence against women, and even seems to suggest that socio-political isolation is the best action to take vis-à-vis women’s oppression. Once I bring out and explore these tensions, I will discuss the ideological implications of these texts’ popularity with respect to classical reception as a discipline and ideological practice.

For the sake of my argument, I will focus on Miller’s Circe only, because it is the most explicitly ‘heroic’ novel, constructing a female hero constantly at odds with the rest of the world. Moreover, it is both the most popular and influential among the ‘heroic novels’. I hope to offer a more systematic examination of the peculiarities of each novel and sub-category in the future, but it is crucial to remember here that these texts constitute a trend that needs be analysed and considered on its own.

Circe between feminine writing and masculine ideology

Circe is a first-person novel that reconstructs Circe’s own myth from her childhood in Helios’ halls to her marriage with Odysseus’s son, Telemachus.¹⁰ About ten chapters out of twenty-seven are dedicated to Circe’s life as an exile in Aeaea, for which her childhood constitutes a backstory. A powerful witch, she is exiled by her father Helios because she used magic against the nymph Scylla, turning her into a monster out of jealousy over her beloved Glaucus. Once on the island, Circe encounters many gods and humans over the centuries, including Odysseus, with whom she has her son Telegonus. Eventually, she breaks free from her father’s authority and ends her exile; after her liberation, she decides to give up her power and renounces her divinity and immortality to raise a family with Telemachus. The whole novel is constructed as a first-person Bildungsroman, where Circe’s recollection of her own adventures and encounters is meant to justify her final decision to give up her immortality.

This novel is rightly associated with the ‘feminist revisionist mythmaking’ movement theorized by Alicia Ostriker’s 1982 article The Thieves of Language. In her article, Ostriker describes this literary movement as the appropriation of old stories by women writers, who overtly challenge and subvert their underlying misogynistic values. According to Ostriker, this renovation cannot happen without formal experimentation, ‘because new meanings must generate new forms’ (Ostriker 1982: 87) to ‘draw attention to the discrepancies between traditional concepts and the conscious mental and emotional activity of female re-vision’. Ostriker’s considerations prompt interesting questions: can we consider Circe’s novelistic form as ‘innovative?’ How should form affect our ideological understanding of this novel?

The focus on the development and inner life of an otherwise marginalized character, as well as the choice of the first-person narrative, is what makes Circe a subversive and empowering novel in the eyes of public opinion and critics alike. However, as Rosalind Coward notes (Coward 1980: 56), even novels apparently displaying a commitment to the feminist cause should be scrutinized in relation to the kind of femininity they portray — the mere fact that Circe rewrites Circe’s story in the form of a first-person novel rather than a third-person epic does not necessarily qualify it as subversive; similarly, Circe’s appropriation of traditional novelistic forms does not imply the rejection of such forms, but rather results in the construction of a ‘female hero’ instead of a ‘heroine’. As I will show in my analysis, Circe’s narrative structure rather reaffirms the ideological assumptions underlying the ‘masculine’ Bildungsroman, where the female character’s individual experience is defined by sexual experience and romance and she is ultimately excluded from the social scene.¹¹ The novel’s ending, where Circe’s liberation coincides with her decision to give up her power and raise a family, is a case in point. Regardless of whether this could be considered a ‘feminist’ act or not, this innovative transformation of the mythical storyline requires a critical assessment of the politics of representation of femininity that the novel pursues, as well as of the ideological implications of marketing this text as ‘feminist’ and ‘empowering’. This is in fact the public opinion regarding Circe and the other novels — as soon as Circe was published, many critics¹² connected the book’s subversive potential and modern taste to its novelistic form, which constitutes an alternative space for Circe’s story to be heard. This position subsumes scholarly attempts to rehabilitate the subversive potential of the novel as a genre¹³ with Michail Bakhtin’s influential position that the novel is a ‘polyphonic’ genre, where contrasting voices are represented (Bakhtin 1982: 301–31). It follows that Circe and the other novels are considered subversive as novels, since they oppose the polyphony of the novelistic form to the monophony of epic. Miller herself, similarly, declared her debt to many women novelists writing about female lives.¹⁴

My analysis in the following paragraphs will focus on two aspects — Circe’s relationship with the Bildungsroman and the use of the first-person narrative — in order to question its subversive potential as acclaimed by mainstream newspapers and marketing campaigns. I am interested in understanding which kind of femininity is promoted by the mainstream discourse as ‘subversive’ and ‘empowering’, and how Graeco-Roman antiquity is appropriated and reused by the contemporary publishing and cultural market. Rather than deciding if Miller’s Circe is ‘feminist enough’ for today’s world,¹⁵ I aim to use a feminist lens to read this text in relation to contemporary power structures to see how one influences the other. Here, I was inspired by Susan Lanser’s feminist narratology, which points out that a narratology for feminist criticism ought also to look at the experience of reading, as well as the semiotics of narrative, and consider the socio-political and historical circumstances under which a text was produced in addition to analyzing its formal aspects (Lanser 1986: 346). In my analysis, feminism will therefore serve as a methodological lens given its attention to ‘the material effects of images and words and the oppression or resistance which can be involved in them’ (Coward 1980: 64). Moreover, reading Circe with an eye on the contemporary publishing industry and the debates around the role of classical education begs the question which kind of Graeco-Roman antiquity this novel promotes, and how such versions of antiquity affect contemporary debates about radical movements like feminism. As suggested by Miriam Leonard and Vanda Zajko, feminism itself proves to be ‘a particularly rigorous and self-aware model for negotiating presentist concerns and their investment in the past’ (Leonard and Zajko 2008: 11) because of its ‘simultaneous aim of exposing generalized structures of power and their particular manifestations in personal politics’. In this spirit, rather than evaluating the novel’s content against a given version of feminism, I will analyze how the popular narrative form of the Bildungsroman and the first-person narrative are deployed to create a more ‘sympathetic’ kind of femininity, which simultaneously neutralizes the more radical instances of female empowerment in the public discourse and undermines the transgressive potential of Graeco-Roman mythology. As a result, Circe can be considered an example of contemporary ‘mainstream classical reception’, where diluted instances of radical social movements are used to create a ‘more benign’ version of Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Circe as a First-Person Bildungsroman

In one interview,¹⁶ Miller defines Circe a coming-of-age novel, since it explores the main character’s identity development from childhood to adult life. In its most traditional form,¹⁷ the Bildungsroman tracks the main character’s transition from childhood to maturity through a series of challenges and encounters culminating with their integration into society (Graham 2018: 1). As Franco Moretti notes (Moretti 1987: 6), the Bildungsroman revolves around a conflict between relentless youth and the social constraints imposed by maturity; such conflict is represented by the main character’s leaving home to a journey, along which they collect encounters and experiences. In the end, the hero is ready to take their place within society. Given the tight connections between the main character’s self and society, the Bildungsroman has been the experimental ground for female writers¹⁸ — as Nancy Miller notes (Miller 1980: 4–5), the eighteenth-century bourgeois novel reserved for the female character only the choice between marriage or death, a choice which was contested and subverted in nineteenth-century female fiction. However, even rejecting the marriage-death dichotomy, to appropriate the Bildungsroman from a female perspective poses serious ideological challenges, since it imperfectly transposes the male societal values of quest and apprenticeship onto the female self, who is structurally not afforded the same mobility as the male self (Felski 1989: 25). As a result, many female Bildungsromane end up being a ‘voyage in’,¹⁹ where the heroine constructs her own identity through an inner journey rather than physical displacement.

Circe, rather, constitutes a case of a ‘masculine’ Bildungsroman whose main character is a woman. The narrative rests on the premise that the public scene is no place for a woman, which Circe’s heroic self-fashioning endorses. In fact, Circe’s self-fashioning as a rebel hero not only accepts the patriarchal premises of the traditional Bildungsroman, but even obscures the socio-political implications of her exile, which is romanticized throughout the novel and ultimately even appears to be the best course of action vis-à-vis women’s oppression. In Circe’s narrative, her exile is described as an act of rebellion rather than the product of the patriarchal regime, which is never seriously questioned in the novel. To this end, Circe’s encounters with alternative, proactive types of femininity — women in power, like her sister Pasiphaë, or rebels like Medea — portray women’s attempts to subvert the patriarchal order as dangerous and morally despicable. This is due for the most part to the first-person narrative, which forces the reader to empathize with Circe and therefore to ignore every other instance that might contradict her perspective. As a result, by the end of the novel Circe appears to be a transgressive hero who subverts the social status quo, when in fact she adopts the same misogynistic mentality as every other character. After finally breaking her exile, Circe decides to renounce her immortality and divinity to devote herself to her family and husband. This conclusion ultimately marks Circe’s integration into society according to the most traditional Bildungsroman plot,²⁰ which makes personal realization coincide with the nuclear family and confines the female characters to the emotional sphere.

James Phelan’s rhetorical analysis proves an effective tool for uncovering Circe’s ideological agenda. In his 1989 book Reading People, Reading Plots, Phelan singles out three character functions, the mimetic, the synthetic, and the thematic (Phelan 1989: 12–13): the mimetic function focuses on the character’s emotional dimension as a potential person; the synthetic function pertains to the character as a narrative tool in the plot’s progression; and the thematic function explores the character’s relation to the cultural and ideological issues raised by the narrative. To break down Circe into these three components enables the reader to see how much more attention the author devotes to developing the mimetic aspect over the others. In many reviews,²¹ Circe’s humanness is indicated as one of the book’s strongest points: the readers’ identification with Circe creates the emotional ground on which the thematic dimension develops. A lot of this traction is acquired by the use of the first-person narrator and internal focalization, which sets Circe up as an omniscient narrator. This is apparent from the very first sentence of the novel:

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins.

(Circe: 1)

Circe starts her story by singling herself out from all the women around her. Saying that there was no name for her, she highlights her uniqueness and makes her story worth being listened to. Moreover, she implicitly corrects what everyone else assumed about her, suggesting that she narrates from a position of knowledge. Mimetic and synthetic components then cooperate to construct the thematic one — since Circe is a relatable and reliable character, her statements deserve credit. This is de facto an attestation of authority: as Lanser notes (Lanser 1995: 171), by the mere fact of bringing the story into existence the narrator ‘always stands at a level “above” the narrated events’. Presenting Circe’s story as a ‘correction’ of the myth, one would expect — as DuPlessis points out (DuPlessis 1985: 108) — that the narrator’s authority would help destabilize established narratives and preconceptions, and ultimately challenge the very ideological premises of the original version. On the contrary, Circe uses her narrative authority to reject political power as intrinsically negative in favour of a more generalized abstention from the public scene. Her Bildung in fact leads her to the paradoxical conclusion that it is impossible for a woman to hold positions of power, and that the only way to live a fulfilling life is to give up any authority and focus on the emotional sphere instead. Even if framed as a heroic and rebellious decision, this conclusion has concerning implications, since it ultimately reaffirms the patriarchal logic of the traditional Bildungsroman and confines the female experience to the private dimension.

In fact, a few passages in the book contradict both Circe’s empowerment and her questioning of the social status quo. More specifically, her encounters with Pasiphaë and Medea show how Circe often adopts against other women the same abusive attitude that she criticizes at length throughout the first chapters. Furthermore, Circe’s encounter with Prometheus shows that the narrator associates herself with the rebel Titan to cover the sentimental and sexual motivations that guide her own rebellion. Finally, I will address the question of Circe’s final choice in relation to her own journey of self-discovery and the novel’s broader ideological agenda.

Pasiphaë, Medea, and the Logic of Abuse

Although Circe often criticizes systemic violence against women, she never really entertains the possibility of reversing this power dynamic. During her time in Aeaea, she ends up building a world according to the same logics of oppression that she criticized in her early life. Even if Circe frames her exile as the chance to start anew,²² she simply transposes the logic of abuse onto her island. For example, when she first starts practicing magic in exile, she creates a false analogy with Zeus’ acquisition of power:

For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.

(Circe: 72)

At a first reading, this is a statement of emancipation. Yet here, Circe buys into the patriarchal mentality of abuse (‘Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will’), which she implicitly considers the golden standard against which to measure someone’s power; her claim to such power also sounds out of place, considering that she is speaking from an island where she was confined by her own father. Circe then constructs an alternative narrative of rebellion to compensate for the impossibility of taking part in the same violent ideology which she allegedly rejects.

Circe’s troubled and antagonistic relationship with her sister Pasiphaë is a clear example of the ideological paradoxes underlying Circe’s narrative. From the very beginning, Circe sets herself in opposition to her sister: as much as Circe is shy and naïve, Pasiphaë is fierce and reckless. Throughout the story, Circe describes her sister as only interested in pursuing personal gain, which culminates with Pasiphaë’s becoming queen of Crete. Circe’s narrative implies that becoming queen is the obvious evolution of Pasiphaë’s path, given her mean character. This analogy becomes clear when Pasiphaë summons Circe from Aeaea to assist her during childbirth. When Pasiphaë’s ambassadors arrive at Circe’s island, she finds out that her sister ordered her own subjects to take the most dangerous route just out of spite for her:

How could I have forgotten who my sister was? She would never just ask a favour, always she must have a whip to drive you to her will. I could see her bragging and laughing to Minos. Circe’s a fool for mortals, I hear. I hated her more than I ever had. It was all so cruelly done.

(Circe: 91)

Circe describes Pasiphaë’s order as a cruel display of authority—by making her royal status an intrinsically negative attribute of Pasiphaë’s character, Circe presupposes an analogy between political power and abusive behaviour. Consequently, Pasiphaë is villainized throughout the narrative because she is too powerful. From this perspective, Circe’s narrative not only romanticizes her own political disempowerment, but simultaneously rejects the very possibility of female political authority, since it would reflect moral corruption.

The tension between power and moral corruption is clearly displayed in the encounter between Circe and her niece Medea. Medea comes to Aeaea to ask her aunt to cleanse her and her husband Jason from her own brother’s murder. Impressed by Medea’s ferocity, Circe asks her to stay on the island with her, offering to train her to become a powerful witch. Medea’s answer disturbs Circe’s narrative focalization and highlights another point of view:

‘I see’, she said. ‘Like you? A pathetic exile, who stinks of her loneliness?’ She saw the shock on my face. ‘What, do you think because you surround yourself with cats and pigs, you are deceiving anyone? You do not know me for an afternoon, yet you are scrabbling to keep me. You claim you want to help me, but who do you really help?’

(Circe: 150)

This is the only place in the novel where Circe’s emancipation is questioned — Medea describes the powerful sorceress as lonely and miserable, and Circe herself is deeply shaken by these words. On one level, Circe tries to dissuade Medea from getting married and giving up her life for Jason — from a narratological perspective, Circe attempts to deviate Medea’s story from the marriage plot, which can be considered a subversive move. Yet Medea is not only eager to spend her life with Jason — like Circe, she was also subject to her father’s authority, which she escaped at the cost of her own brother’s murder. Yet, unlike Circe, she refuses to withdraw from the world — from her perspective, the island is a prison²³ and the real obstacle to her empowerment. Medea thus functions as Circe’s antagonist, as she promotes an alternative kind of femininity, more interventionist and interested in structural change.²⁴ However, Circe the narrator intervenes to rectify this worldview. Later in the novel, Circe finds out about Medea’s fate, which she attributes to her cruelty²⁵ — Circe notes that Medea’s desire to ‘set the world on fire²⁶’ is a shared trait with her abusive father, Circe’s brother Aeëtes, and her tragic epilogue is therefore a well-deserved punishment for her behaviour. As she did with Pasiphaë, Circe explains Medea’s desire to actively participate in the world as a form of moral abjection, therefore discouraging every form of social intervention.

Circe’s encounters with Pasiphaë and Medea contrast two different kinds of femininity: to a more ‘interventionist’ and proactive woman, the narrative prefers a more ‘isolationist’ type, on the grounds that there is no power without moral corruption. On the other hand, Circe never rejects abuse as a system, but in many places actually replicates the same abusive logic which she criticizes. For example, after she turns her beloved Glaucus into a god, she finds out that he wants to marry the nymph Scylla, and therefore transforms her into a monster out of revenge. Scylla’s transformation causes Circe’s exile, and therefore is referenced many times throughout the novel as the beginning of Circe’s rebellion against her father’s authority. This moment is inspired by Prometheus, whom Circe elects as her role model early in the book.

Circe and Prometheus

Miller invented an encounter with Prometheus at the beginning of the book, when Circe is still a child, that is presented throughout the story as the start of her own ‘revolt’. Miller thus directly associates Circe with Prometheus’ traditional attributes, namely a love for humankind²⁷ and rebel spirit. Circe’s constant association with Prometheus differentiates her from the rest of the gods, whom she perceives as representatives of the logics of abuse. Their stories, however, are very different. Prometheus’s revolt aims to give humanity a livelihood denied by Zeus, while Circe goes against authority for personal gain. This association thus creates a false equivalence between Circe’s and Prometheus’ stories, and indirectly attributes to Circe’s endeavour the subversive potential of Prometheus’ revolt. Circe uses Prometheus to create a narrative of structural change that she never fulfils throughout the book, and to justify her own logics of abuse. Moreover, the analogy with Prometheus turns attention away from the fact that Circe perpetuates a feminine cliché: her ‘revolt’ is in fact triggered by sexual jealousy, for which another woman pays the price. By confining her agency to the emotional realm and using this agency to disempower another woman, Circe perpetuates the misogynistic logics at the basis of the whole narrative, and uses Prometheus as a smokescreen to cover her own disempowerment.

Circe first meets Prometheus in her father’s halls, where the Titan awaits his punishment after the fire theft. After all the other gods leave, Circe, impressed by Prometheus’s boldness, offers him some nectar as a relief from his pain. The two then have a conversation which deeply affects Circe:

‘Is it true that you refused to beg for pardon? And that you were not caught, but confessed to Zeus freely what you did?’

‘It is.’

‘Why?’

His eyes were steady on mine. ‘Perhaps you will tell me. Why would a god do such a thing?’

I had no answer. It seemed to me madness to invite divine punishment, but I could not say that to him, not when I stood in his blood.

‘Not every god need be the same,’ he said.

(Circe: 17-8)

Circe sees in Prometheus an alternative model of god that escapes the logics of abuse with which she was raised. Circe is so impressed by Prometheus’s behaviour that she thinks back to their conversation when she confesses to her father that she turned the nymph Scylla into a monster:

I was not like them.

‘Are you not? The voice was my uncle’s, resonant and deep. Then you must think, Circe. What would they not do?’ [...]

‘Father’, I said, ‘it was I who made Scylla a monster.’

All around me, voices dropped. I cannot say if the very furthest couches looked, if Glaucus looked, but all of my uncles did, snapped up from their drowsy conversation. I felt a sharp joy. For the first time in my life. I wanted their eyes.

(Circe: 52-3)

Circe compares herself to Prometheus in opposition to the rest of the gods, when in fact she also acts for personal interest. She helps Glaucus because she is in love with him, whereas she turns Scylla into a monster out of jealousy, since Glaucus asked for Scylla’s hand. Her behaviour simultaneously replicates the misogynistic logic which she criticizes — she has Scylla pay for her beloved’s infidelity — and reflects the Bildungsroman’s feminine cliché that female development is confined to the sentimental sphere. The comparison with Prometheus gives Circe’s endeavour political legitimacy, just as when she compares herself to Zeus as soon as she arrives at Aeaea. However, the mere fact that she needs to recall male figures of authority to shape her own confirms that Circe’s narrative never opposes the novel’s male-dominated logic, but rather tries to transfer it onto a female character. As she cannot act in the same realm as her male models, she uses them to ‘masculinize’ the private and emotional sphere in which she operates.

A voice to be heard in private

Circe only rejects masculine models at the end of the story, when she decides to give up her divinity. Although she emancipates herself from the logics of abuse, she surrenders to the social status quo by accepting her role of caretaker in the nuclear family. This conclusion is unexpected, given Circe’s narrative tendency to single herself out from her kin; in the novel’s very first page, for example, she explicitly disassociates herself from the analogy between nymph and bride:

That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

(Circe: 1)

Given this narrative premise, one would expect Circe to reject the social role of bride and create an alternative scenario for herself. However, from the perspective of the traditional male Bildungsroman, this opening very clearly sets up the conflict between the main character and the society in which they live, which is expected to be resolved by the end of the story. In Circe’s case, such resolution coincides with her fulfilling her maternal and familiar role; in the final dream sequence, in which she describes the mortal existence awaiting her, she fantasizes about her life with Telemachus and wishes for them to be ‘ignored’ by the gods (Circe: 331). This clashes with Circe’s desire to have her voice heard, a recurrent theme in the novel and the narrative justification for her first-person narration.

From the very beginning, Circe complains that her fellow gods do not like her voice, and hence ask her to speak as little as possible (Circe: 7). This situation has of course many thematic implications and Circe the narrator organizes her whole story around her own attempt to make her voice heard. Later in the book, she finds out from Hermes that she has a mortal voice:

‘It is not common’, he said, ‘but sometimes lesser nymphs are born with human voices. Such a one are you.’

‘Why did no one tell me? And how could it be? There is no mortal in me, I am Titan only.’

He shrugged. ‘Who can ever explain how divine bloodlines work? […]’

In a minute he had unravelled one of the great mysteries of my life. I raised my fingers to my throat as if I could touch the strangeness that lay there. A god with a mortal’s voice. It was a shock, and yet there was part of me that felt something almost like recognition.

(Circe: 82)

Having a mortal voice makes Circe more human and brings her closer to the readers. This, and the parallel with Prometheus, make Circe a subaltern figure who struggles against authority, as she makes clear in a conversation with Apollo:

He held up an elegant hand. ‘My brother warned me about your voice. I think it will be better if you speak as little as possible.’ […] ‘I will not be silenced on my own island’.

(Circe: 200)

Circe’s refusal to be quiet implies her refusal to submit to the gods. Yet, as I mentioned above, her agency is confined to Aeaea, which becomes the only place where she can find her own voice (‘I will not be silenced on my own island’). Her island thus becomes the privileged space where Circe can tell her own story, since it is the only place where she has agency. From this perspective, Aeaea is a sort of ‘non-place’, where Circe does not have to comply with the societal expectations imposed on her sex, and she can fantasize about being as powerful as Zeus.

The end of this fantasy coincides with her terminating her exile. After falling in love with Telemachus, she decides to confront her father and leave Aeaea:

‘And if you don’t see my exile ended, I will expose you again. I will tell Zeus what I did [helping Prometheus].’

His face contracted. For the first time in my life, I had truly shocked him. ‘Zeus will destroy you’.

‘Perhaps he will,’ I said. ‘But I think he will listen first. And you are the one he will truly blame, for you should have kept better check on your daughter. Of course, I will tell him other things as well. All those tiptoeing treasons I heard you whisper with my uncles. I think Zeus would be glad to know how deep the Titan mutiny goes, don’t you?’

‘You dare to threaten me?’

These gods, I thought. They always say the same thing.

‘I do.’

(Circe: 312)

Even though Circe finally stands up against her father, she ends her exile only on the condition that she will not report to Zeus her support of Prometheus. She rejects the male models about which she had fantasized throughout the novel in exchange for her freedom. To be free, she has to give up any heroic pretention and embrace her role of wife and mother. Circe’s behaviour supports rather than challenges the misogynistic logic of the novel — the only place where she can have some sort of agency is her island, but in order to leave it she needs to keep silent about any possible political dissent. Moreover, once she is free, she even decides to renounce her divinity to lead a mortal life.²⁸ The ending thus confirms the whole novel’s underlying implication that it is inappropriate for women to participate in the socio-political scene — the few exceptions, as we saw, are villainized and progressively excluded from the narrative. On the other hand, Circe describes herself as the rebellious hero who breaks free from her father’s authority only to eventually give up her power.

From a narratological perspective, Circe’s reintegration into society coincides with her fulfilling the marriage plot, which brings her Bildungsroman to an end. All in all, her first-person narrative of subversion is rather a tale of integration, which suggests isolation or assimilation as the only possible paths for a woman’s fulfilment. From this perspective, Circe is no different from any traditional Bildungsroman.

Conclusion — critical classical reception in mainstream culture

Having concluded that Circe supports rather than subverts the social status quo, it is now crucial to wonder what the broader social implications are of promoting and marketing this novel as ‘subversive’ and even ‘feminist’. As I mentioned in the beginning, Circe can be considered an example of ‘mainstream classical reception’, namely a piece of reception that reaches popularity in mainstream culture.²⁹ As Noam Chomsky noted (Chomsky 1997), mainstream culture is a direct expression of the power relations underlying contemporary corporate society, since it relies on a very specific ideological agenda set by the ‘elite media’, namely big corporations like The New York Times or CBS. This obviously extends to the publishing industry, which responds to the crisis of their sector by ‘restyling’ canonical literature: as Jeremy Rosen notes, to promote the consumption of literary products which focus on canonical minor characters is a well-established marketing strategy by the publishing industry ‘for its capacity to facilitate profitable re-workings of canonical material’ (Rosen 2016: 119). From this perspective, a novel like Circe is providential, as it revamps the ‘all-time-classic’ Homer while simultaneously responding to pressing contemporary issues around women’s position in society; not surprisingly, Circe was endorsed not only by all the elite media, but also by the big market platforms like Amazon and Goodreads. Hence, it is imperative for the classical reception scholar to acknowledge and address the socioeconomic circumstances under which Circe was produced and marketed, as well as its impact on its audience. To do so, as Johanna Hanink notes (Hanink 2017), it is necessary to embrace ‘critical classical reception’, namely a reception scholarship aware of the role of Graeco-Roman antiquity in the construction and preservation of systems of oppression.

By electing Circe as ‘Book of the year’ or ‘Editor’s pick’, mainstream outlets categorize as ‘feminism’ what Andi Zeisler calls ‘marketplace feminism’, namely ‘a place where most of the problems that have necessitated feminist movements to begin with are still very much in place, but at the same time there’s a mainstream, celebrity, consumer embrace of feminism that positions it as a cool, fun, accessible identity that anyone can adopt’ (Zeisler 2016: xii–xiii). Moreover, by making this version of feminism the mainstream one, these outlets reiterate the association of female authors with a more intimate form of writing, thus fabricating the expectation that they should make the canon more ‘romantic’ and ‘introspective’ in order to succeed in the publishing market. These literary attempts, as Rosen notes, ultimately preserve and even celebrate the classical canon, which thus becomes more ‘inclusive’ and therefore even more worthy of its leading role in the cultural domain (Rosen 2016: 121). As I showed through my narratological analysis, Circe in fact positions a female character in essentially patriarchal structures, using a first-person narrative to foster the illusion of female empowerment while leaving these structures in place. In this sense, Circe functions as what Kristen Warner defines as a ‘plastic representation’, that is a kind of representation that privileges the visual component over the structural. In her study of representations of people of colour on screen, Warner notes that the mere fact that marginalized communities are shown tends to obscure both the kind of characterization they are given and the structural inequalities that marginalized communities undergo (Warner 2017: 35). In Circe’s case, the fact that a female character speaks in the first person is considered sufficient to market the novel as ‘empowering’, without negotiating the kind of characterization which Circe receives. Moreover, the aggressive marketing campaigns about Circe’s feminism adopt a universalistic conception of empowerment, which relies on the assumption that ‘fixing’ Graeco-Roman antiquity will also address structural inequalities in the contemporary world. In this endeavour, these marketing projects are intimately ‘antifeminist’, feminism being, as Sara Ahmed puts it, a way to ‘make everything into something that is questionable’ (Ahmed 2017: 2).

Finally, we must also consider which repercussions this approach has for mainstream conceptions of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The generalized narrative of ‘revisionist mythmaking’, in fact, provides a ‘correction’ of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and suggests we use this revised version of classicism to repair today’s power imbalances. Such an approach not only perpetuates the problematic assumption of the Classics’ exemplary value, but ultimately attempts to rehabilitate Graeco-Roman antiquity without calling into question the ways in which classicizing discourses are still used to propagate social oppression.³⁰ In conclusion, mainstream classical receptions like Miller’s Circe exploit the well-established exemplary value of Graeco-Roman antiquity to offer a new version of the classical canon which accommodates feminist critiques. At the same time, they appropriate such movements to secure a broader audience while in fact leaving power imbalances unquestioned. Only a feminist reading can bring out these tensions.

Acknowledgements

Parts of this article were presented at ‘Ambiguity and Narratology: An Interdisciplinary and Diachronic Workshop’ in Tubingen, April 22–24 2021, and at the Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World (AMPRAW) at Yale University, November 3–5 2022; on both occasions, I received extremely valuable feedback by the participants, for which I am grateful. I would also like to express my gratitude to Helene Foley, Nancy Worman, Emma Ianni and Joseph Coppola, as well as to my two anonymous referees, for their precious comments and criticisms.

Works Cited

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Valeria Spacciante is a PhD candidate in Classics and in the Institute of Comparative Literatures and Societies at Columbia University. She is interested in the social implications of canon formation both in the ancient and modern world. Her first book project explores how literary tropes of physical violence in the ancient novel differently affect characters based on their identity in order to favour the Graeco-Roman elite; her second project focuses on the relationship between contemporary receptions of Graeco-Roman antiquity and radical social movements, in particular, how these movements are co-opted and watered down by the contemporary cultural industry to expand these antiquity-inspired products’ market.

Footnotes