Presenters
Abstract
Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel Circe reimagines the iconic witch Circe from The Odyssey, altering her story to transform it into a feminist narrative. Circe, infamous for turning Odysseus’s men into pigs, went on to become one of literature’s first femmes fatales, alongside Scylla, Medusa, and other women in Greek mythology. This paper examines the role of family, female power, and self-actualization in Miller’s Circe by comparing the novel to the original Greek myth. In her novel, Miller takes what is essentially a minor character in Greek mythos and transforms her story into one of female power in a world dominated by men. Miller follows Circe’s life from her early days in Helios’s palace to her exile on Aiaia, to the birth of her child and her marriage to Telemachus. Throughout this, there are three defining points in her story: Circe’s assistance in the birth of the Minotaur, the arrival of Jason and Medea, and her encounter with Odysseus. In her juxtaposition of Circe with other infamous Greek women, Miller humanizes Circe to the reader, transforming her from a cold-hearted witch to a victim of abuse in unfortunate circumstances. Throughout the novel, Circe attempts to connect with her existing family, but when rejected, she seeks to create her own. Miller uses these experiences as development for Circe, allowing her to establish a distinction between her natural and created families. Overall, Madeline Miller’s Circe reimagines Greek mythos through a feminist framework to show how new understandings of female power and the role of family give rise to Circe’s self-actualization.