Universiteit van Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities
MA Literary Studies Literature, Culture and Society MA Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Nick Carr
MA Thesis Second Reader: Dr. Suze van der Poll
Limited to the Body:
Madeline Miller’s
Circe
as a Feminist
Revisionist Myth
Sydney Laseter 12573191Date of Submission: June 25 2020
Acknowledgements
To say thank you to Nick Carr, my thesis supervisor, would be simply inadequate. In a year where supervising a thesis had added problems of time and space with the logistics of writing in a pandemic, he went above and beyond to guide me through this process. A thousand words of gratitude to you, Nick, the greatest mentor and teacher, and a steady guide through the realities of writing this thesis.
My parents are the foundation of my life and my thirst for education, and I say thank you to them for making it possible for me to move thousands of miles away to pursue my love of literature. The reason I am here is because I was never told that I didn’t need another book. Thank you for teaching me the world is smaller than it seems.
My partner, Dylan, was the best work from home buddy throughout this entire process. Thank you for your endless love and support, for reading Circe so you could understand when I was talking myself through my arguments, for taking conference calls in our room during a pandemic so I could have the dining room table, for taking Ty on walks so I could have a minute of quiet to think. I love you.
Table of Contents
Introduction ………. 3
Chapter One: Circe’s Body……….. 6
1.1 Nymph as Bride ………... 6
1.2 Circe’s body and the discovery of pharmaka ………... 11
1.3 Circe’s Body in Isolation ………. 13
1.4 Conclusion ………. 15
Chapter Two: Goddess with the Human Voice - Practicing Magic………... 17
2.1 Silencing Circe ……… 17
2.2 Pharmaka & Voice ……….. 19 2.3 Singing in Isolation ………. 21 2.4 Conclusion ………..24
Chapter Three: Female Power & Limitations of the Body ……… 25
Chapter Four: Heroes & Pigs: Encountering the Patriarchy……….. 33
4.1 Circe & Medea ………34
4.2 The Rape of Circe ………...39
Chapter Five: Revisionist Mythmaking - Limitations of the Body of Work ………..51 Conclusion ………..55 Works Cited ………58
Introduction
Most students of Western school systems and literature classrooms have vague memories of Circe from their time studying The Odyssey; she was the witch who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs, and then became one of the many women he seduced while providing lip service to the fact that he just wanted to get home to his wife Penelope. Never the focal point, her powers and character are critical for a number of Greek myths as service for a male character. Madeline Miller’s novel Circe is a revisionist myth that puts the famous witchy pig herder in the limelight, weaving together the background stories into one cohesive narrative that examines what it means to be a woman grappling with power. Circe was published in 2018 as her sophomore novel, following her critically acclaimed Song of Achilles as another revisionist myth that read the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles as explicitly queer and examined their love in the context of The Iliad. Circe was a New York Times #1 Bestseller and felt by many to be
particularly apt as the timing of its publication followed the #MeToo movement in the USA. Alexandra Alter interviewed Madeline Miller for the New York Times, and Miller explained she wanted to write about Circe because she “is the embodiment of male anxiety about female power. Of course she has to be vanquished” in the original myth of The Odyssey (Alter). Miller discusses how she uses the original myths of The Odyssey, The Telegony and the Argonautica to develop the full narrative of Circe’s “life” in her novel. The NPR review of the novel by Annalisa Quinn also brings up the way Circe’s “human voice” and her “braided hair”, both of which are identifiable attributes from The Odyssey, are reimagined as tools for Circe to build relationships and power instead of just using them as physical descriptors such as in the original text (Quinn).
As a teacher of literature for secondary school students, I used excerpts of Circe in comparative analysis with The Odyssey to have students question what it means to be powerful and heroic in one’s own story. This thesis will follow that line of thinking into more critical analysis, as I examine the novel Circe through feminist analytical frameworks, focusing on topics of the female body, power and transformation as creation versus destruction and the use of magic. Cixous is crucial to the understanding of the female body in this novel, as well as Foucault and Freud, who will be part of the larger framework in discussions of power, sex and
pharmakon. Iris Marion Young’s work, which will be used to examine the space women’s bodies take up, with Ann Cahill bringing crucial details about the rape and violations of women’s bodies in that particular way. Miller imagines her heroine, a background goddess in the masculine tales of Homer and Ovid, having taken a position of power in the patriarchy in her novel. Because she explores the development of Circe’s magic and how she came to play this background role, and why she was acknowledged as having a part to play in so many of the patriarchal original myths, at first glance it would seem she is successful in giving this witch a feminist escape from the power structures of her world.
I will begin by analyzing the role of nymphs in the story as the premise for the role of women and the treatment of the female body by the characters within the novel, and how Circe’s magic seems to allow her a chance to abandon this position. I will examine how her treatment of the monster Scylla, a retelling of a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, demonstrates that for a woman to be powerful and a threat in this society she must exist outside of it, either disembodied and therefore awe-inspiring in her power, or isolated and rejected, made other. I will then discuss the discourse of magic, the way that female bodies are made both more powerful by magic and also more othered because of this power, through examining Circe’s development of her pharmakeia in isolation and her confrontation with Medea, a retelling of the Argonautica. Finally I will end
with an analysis of Circe’s most defining calling card, turning men into pigs in The Odyssey, and Miller’s justification for this “evil” trickery based upon a particularly female form of trauma. She eventually does use her magic as a way to push back against the patriarchal discourse and against mortal men’s views on her body as female and therefore dominatable for men’s wishes, but Miller’s heroine never works her way out of the power structures of her world. Any and all power and perceptions of power she holds in the novel remain within the patriarchal discourse due to the fact that this is a retelling of patriarchal myths - even as it pushes back against a discourse of patriarchy, both the character and the novel itself cannot escape it. Though she becomes powerful through learning to wield her voice in Miller’s novel, she remains a woman first and foremost and is not outside of the traditional power patriarchal discourse. Therefore Miller’s Circe is not actually a disruption of the power structures of the ancient mythologies or of today’s, but a story of a woman developing her voice within the patriarchal systems that
prioritize her as body first and therefore limited to always pushing against the patriarchy, not escaping it.
Chapter One: Pharmakis or Nymph
1.1 Nymph as Bride
The female body is examined thoroughly as Circe’s body goes through transformations and becomes a source of power and a weapon used against her. Her relationship with her body and her power is a crucial theme of Miller’s novel, and therefore the female body is a crucial concept for the theoretical lens. Iris Marion Young’s article “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality” is crucial for developing the way women view their body and the space their body occupies and indeed is taught not to occupy in the world. The female body is situated not only in a socio-historical set of circumstances, but Young also asserts that it is placed within “its surroundings in living action” (Young, 139). Young’s article focuses on the actual bodily movement of women in the world. Young begins by examining a study done by Strauss in the 1960s which argues that the difference in how little girls and boys throw a baseball is based on a biological difference in their genders which makes boys more apt at throwing. But the feminist Young argues that there is absolutely no biological reason for why boys and girls throw a baseball differently, but rather because of societal expectations of how these children are taught to handle their bodies. “Every human existence is defined by its situation; the particular existence of the female person is no less defined by the historical, cultural, social, and economic limits of her situation” (Young, 138). Women often view themselves as at odds with their own bodies, not trusting their body’s ability to achieve a goal, but rather viewing it as a hindrance. Young argues that women do not take up space the same way that men do, whether it is in sports, walking, carrying books, or sitting
because they’ve been conditioned by society to hold themselves in. She writes“women tend not to put their whole bodies into engagement in a physical task with the same ease and naturalness as men” (Young, 142). This is because women’s bodies are not seen as the embodiment of a human, but rather
patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies. An essential part of the situation of being a woman is that of living the ever present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject's intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention. (Young, 153)
If a woman’s body does not exist for her own actions and intentions, she lives at odds with the body she was given at birth as she navigates the world and is therefore limited to the access she will have to the world and her goals and ambitions within it. This is certainly the framework in which Circe is raised.
From the beginning, Circe’s determined position in the godly power structure as a nymph makes her prey in the most specifically female way. She begins the novel saying,
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. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride. (Miller, 1)
The daughter of Helios and Perse, Circe inherited her mother’s position as nymph and future bride rather than her father’s position of all powerful Titan and Sun God. Her parents’ marriage was demonstrative of the bridal position of the nymphs, a bargaining chip for their fathers and prize for gods deemed important enough to need to bribe. Perse’s own father, Oceanus, just gives her away to Helios when he questions who she is, stating, “She is yours if you want her”
(Miller, 2). Helios first takes this as permission to try to bed Perse, but Perse holds her own and manipulates Helios into marriage; she seems to force his hand and gain her own power and position, but in reality Helios views her only as amusing in her demands and allows her to take on the role of bride and wife under his terms (Miller, 2). Circe’s own birth is a disappointment to her mother, who did not want a nymph, a future bride. But her father “did not mind his
daughters, who were sweet-tempered and golden as the first press of olives. Men and gods paid dearly for the chance to breed from their blood, and my father’s treasury was said to rival that of the king of the gods himself” (Miller, 3). From her birth she is viewed by the men in her life as a commodity, something to trade for their own power but without any agency of her own. She is not even deemed the most worthy of commodities, only as an immortal daughter who would marry a mortal prince and not another god, as she had “a sharpness to [her] that is less than pleasing” (Miller, 3). Her brother Aeetes says, “Even the most beautiful nymph is largely useless, and an ugly one would be nothing, less than nothing. She would never marry or produce
children. She would be a burden to her family, a stain upon the face of the world. She would live in the shadows, scorned and reviled” (Miller, 61). Circe’s voice is horrific to other immortals and she clearly does not have the physical traits needed to make a satisfying wife. It makes sense then later in the text it is revealed Circe is not actually a nymph. She discovers her ability to perform
pharmakon, making her a pharmakis, not a nymph. Jacques Derrida writes extensively on the
relationship between pharmakon and writing in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy”, but I will only be referencing part of his work here as it is the applicable section: “pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural habitual paths and laws” (Derrida, 429). As she develops her magic, she seems to remove herself from a powerless position she should have been confined to, if the patriarchal norms were followed. Her magic, this ability that is both good and evil, has reshaped her natural self and morphed her into something else. She cannot exist as a nymph because she is
intrinsically different, though unaware. She was made to be something else. She was labeled as a bride from her birth because the idea of one of these nymphs should be able to have more strength and power than she was intended to is unfathomable to the power structures she resides in. Yet it is within her own search for a husband that she discovers the powers which lay within her.
In examining the historical development of the discourse of magic, marginalized groups were often demonized for claiming power. Magic became something dangerous, especially in the hands of “assertive women and communities with different religious practices or beliefs ...thus assertive women are frequently portrayed as lustful and domineering witches” (Stratton, 3). Miller’s portrayal of Circe is built upon the legacy of this discourse, as she begins her own quest for power and magic as a woman in her correct place who asks too many questions and wants what she is not entitled to. In Stratton’s language choice it is crucial to read into the words “lustful” and “domineering”. Both words have connotations of the body, specifically as how the body is during sex. Instead of decisive or in command, as women who are taking power they “should not” have witches are seen as arrogant and controlling, asserting their presence where it was not supposed to be. Any woman who was taking agency over their identity and their role in society as a witch was also named as deviant for having individual wants and desires of their own, and sexual or not their assertiveness was intertwined with their bodies. Circe plays into the stereotype of women using their physicality in conjunction with the power of pharmaka as she becomes determined to learn where the herbs required to create pharmakeia are. When she realizes she has the answer to where gods’ blood has fallen in her father’s halls, she uses her femininity and her body to coax the answer to her prayers out of her uncles. Circe says,
I had learned something from my mother after all. I bound my hair in ringlets and put on my best dress, my brightest sandals. I went to my father’s feast, where all of my uncles gathered,
into their eyes and wreathed my arms around their necks. (Miller, 39)
Though she is unappealing physically to them, she still occupies a feminine body and has been taught by her mother how to wield a specific type of power to manipulate male gods. These gods assume her adoration and devotion is simply their due, but as she flatters their vanity and their assumed power she asks questions that lead her to the herbs she needs. She uses their
perceptions of her in a subversive way to gain what she wants, in fact becoming the stereotypical witch that Stratton discusses. She is motivated by her selfish desire to have Glaucos deemed worthy of her in Helios’ eyes, to change him so she can finally fulfill her destiny as nymph bride. But in her search for pharmaka and an untold power, she is actually rejecting the name of nymph and becoming something the immortals had not yet seen.
Nymphs are discussed between the gods as indistinguishable except when one is less physically appealing than the others, as in Circe’s case. When Scylla is turned into a monster and Glaucos is robbed of his wedding, he consults with Helios about his situation:
I heard Glaucos’ low voice: ‘Can she not be changed back?’ Every god-born knows that answer from their swaddles. ‘No,’ my father said. ‘No god may undo what is done by the Fates or another god. Yet these halls have a thousand beauties, each as ripe as the next. Look to them instead.’
I waited. I still hoped Glaucos would think of me. I would have married him in a moment. But I found myself hoping for another thing too, which I would not have believed the day before: that he would weep all the salt in his veins for Scylla’s return, holding fast to her as his one, true love.
‘I understand,’ Glaucos said. ‘It is a shame, but as you say there are others.’ (Miller, 51)
Helios’ choice of adjective, ripe, really underscores the objectification of women’s bodies by the gods. Ripe means ready to be picked; ripe is not a word used to describe something active but rather something that will be consumed by the active body. To ripen is not an active verb, it is something that simply occurs passively over time. Female bodies are seen as the objects of a
motion rather than the perpetrators of that motion. The nymph body secondly is being looked at while she is doing the motion, and therefore she spends energy on the appearance of the body in motion and not simply the motion. “As lived bodies we are not open and unambiguous
transcendences which move out to master a world that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions and projections” (Young, 152). These nymphs and goddesses are there for the gods’ selection, without consideration for their choices. This is the world Circe is raised in, and as her appearance makes her faulty she is damaged goods, her father unable to make a marriage match for her with even mortals. When she falls in love with Glaucos, it is completely
unfathomable to both Glaucos himself and her father that she would have any agency in
deciding whom she would be marrying, let alone that she made Glaucos into a god so she could be with him forever as immortals. In her life in Helios’ halls, her body is simply there to serve her father and uncles and as an object of ridicule for the immortals who occupy the same space as her.
1.2 Circe’s body and the discovery of pharmaka
Circe’s first attempt at pharmakeia is fascinating because she is motivated by something selfish, but positive - her love for Glaucos and her desire to “thank him” for his affection for her (Miller, 41). But when she brings him to the flowers that contain the necessary herbs and tries to change him, she is unable to bend the herbs to her will. It is only when she becomes angry that she is successful in her first attempt at wielding power.
I hated them. I seized a handful and ripped it up by the roots. I tore the petals. I broke the stems to pieces. The damp shreds stuck to my hands,and the sap bled across my skin. The scent rose raw and wild, acetic as old wine. I tore up another handful, my hands sticky and hot. In my ears was a dark humming, like a hive. It is hard to describe what happened next. A knowledge woke in the depths of my blood. It whispered: that the strength of those flowers lay in their sap, which could transform any creature to its truest self. (Miller, 42)
Only in her rage, as her hands tear up the Earth and are used for destruction, is she able to understand how to manipulate these herbs for her own gain. Circe is able to use nature to alter Glaucos, making him into an immortal by channeling her anger at her own body’s initial failure to do so, both literally and figuratively in the metaphor of the flowers. She is unsuccessful when she just assumes the body of the flowers, and her body in turn, will be able to grant her desires, but when she leans in and feels her fury, knowledge of how to use her magic ignites in mind and she is able to make her body respond, generating new power. The knowledge comes from inside of her own self, innate and feminine, this certainty of how to use these herbs not for magic generally, but specifically to transform. Out of her body’s visceral reaction to not being powerful enough, her own power actually becomes manifested. It is interesting to note Circe has the knowledge “in the depths of my blood” and the transformational power lies in the sap of the flowers. The magic Circe uses then is actually based in her mind, an intrinsic knowledge she is not aware of, but is channeled through her body, her blood. Something is being created internally and then brought to life through her body. Alicia Ostriker argues many female revisionist mythmakers use traditional images for the female body (flower, water, earth) but transform their symbolism “so that flower means force instead of frailty, water means safety instead of death, and earth means creative imagination instead of passive generativeness” (Ostriker, 71). Miller is using a delicate and feminine flower as the vessel through which Circe can wield highly potent and rage-induced magic. This is a trope common in the discourse of magic, as witches in particular, not men who practice magic, are written about as wild and out of civilization. Spaeth writes, “witches are not merely associated with nature, they are identified with it….their connection with nature, however, extends even beyond this identification with nature to actual control of natural phenomena” (Spaeth, 45). Her feminine body, and the flowers, are the vessel through which a typically masculine feeling is able to alter another body. It is this
ability to control and change other bodies that ignites fear in the godly power structures and leads to her isolation on Aiaia. Even when she begins experimenting with pharmakeia, she does not believe in her body’s ability to transform in her first few attempts. She assumes she has failed because she has no faith in what her body is capable of. It is not until she is banished to Aiaia that she begins to grapple with how to live inside of her body and to use her body as a tool for her ambitions, not a hindrance.
1.3 Circe’s Body in Isolation
Circe’s isolation on Aiaia allows her to experience the world as an embodied woman without the problematic patriarchal discourse created by others’ objectification of the female body, therefore giving her the freedom and space to develop her magical abilities through her connection with the natural. Circe’s development of her power only occurs when she is isolated, furthering the notion that Miller presents that women can only exist as powerful without the threat of bodily harm.When Helios first brings her to the unnamed island, she is overwhelmed by the unknown forest:
I hesitated. I was no wood-nymph. I did not have the knack of feeling my way over roots, of walking through brambles
untouched. I could not guess what those shadows might conceal. What if there were sinkholes within? What if there were bears or lions? I stood there a long time fearing such things and waiting, as if someone would come and reassure me, say yes, you may go, it will be safe. (Miller, 68)
She assumes her body will not be able to handle the woods; she does not believe she is capable of walking without hurting herself. She even admits that she waits for someone else with power and authority to come and give her permission to use her body, to exert herself in a real way in the woods, on an island that is now actually her domain. As she ventures into the house where she will live both without restrictions and completely imprisoned, she sees she is just a pawn, an object in the game between the male gods. Her body is propped up within this exile as only a
symbol of a man’s power: “Zeus had demanded the discipline of Helios’ blood. Helios could not speak back openly, but he could make an answer of sorts, a message of defiance to rebalance the scales. Even our exiles live better than kings. You see how deep our strengths run? If you strike us, Olympian,
we rise higher than before. That was my new home: a monument to my father’s pride” (Miller, 69).
The power structure she has existed in for all of eternity has never viewed her as autonomous and in her own body, a body that was valid on its own for creating and living and achieving. Once she is alone, seemingly outside of the world, she is finally able to come into her own body and her own power. Her sense of self is restored as she lives in a feminized world of nature on the island where her body is not subject to anyone’s gaze except her own. Circe’s power of
pharmakeia is able to flourish in her isolation as a result of her return to her own body. She
completely immerses herself in the island and ceases to see the forest as something foreign, rather as something she is a part of.
Pharmakon is different from the powers the Olympian gods are blessed with, both in Miller’s Circe and in the original Greek translations. In Miller’s novel, Circe is born with an innate understanding of magic and can access this knowledge through her feelings, as she does with her transformations of Glaucos and Scylla. But Miller makes it clear Circe’s powers in her novel are not at their full capacity upon birth like the other gods of Olympus - she wasn’t born like Apollo or Athena with the greatest capacity in the world for lyre playing or weaving. Circe will have to learn how to develop this innate knowledge through building her skills. Having always been taught her body’s purpose was to please and be supplicant to men, her immediate thought as she talks with Aeetes is to request his help. She does this even though she has successfully
transformed two beings in unimaginable ways. Aeetes, in his response being unhelpful and condescending, inadvertently reinforces this: “‘Sorcery cannot be taught. You find it yourself, or you do not.’ I thought of the humming I had heard when I touched those flowers, the eerie
knowledge that had glided through me” (Miller, 59). She knows she has the ability to practice pharmakeia within her own mind and she does not actually need someone else’s help, but she has been conditioned to ask for it as a lowly woman, a nymph. It is only when she is alone, exiled to Aiaia that she is able to free herself of this conditioning. She fully occupies her island,
climbing the hills and exploring the caves, “drunk, as the wines 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” (Miller, 71). Circe becomes intoxicated with her solitude when it is presented to her, as she is finally able to live as herself without the prescribed roles of femininity she was failing to live up to. She “did not mind the emptiness either. For a thousand years I had tried to fill the space between myself and my family; filling the rooms of my house was easy by comparison. I burned cedar in the fireplace, and the dark smoke kept me company. I sang, which had never been allowed before” (Miller, 71). She finds everything about her that was lacking in Helios’ halls is enough to fill her house in isolation. And she notes when she began to have lonely thoughts, she turned to the forest for comfort. Miller is using the connection of the female witch to nature, as a place of comfort and connection.
1.4 Conclusion
I have examined how Circe was born into a world that limited her to her body, refusing to cede any possibility of power or even a sense of individual worth to a nymph. Her
understanding of her own power began to shift as she discovered pharmaka; in the Scylla episode, Circe realizes that the powers that be in her world will only acknowledge female power as monstrosity, and that they cannot imagine power residing in a female body and in their society simultaneously. Her initial wielding of magic limits her ability to exist in the Olympian power structures, because she will always be a body first and foremost, there to please the male gods. Interacting with the outside world, she has to grapple with the meeting of her mind and its ability
to use pharmaka and her body. When she is isolated on Aiaia as a punishment, she begins to liberate herself from this idea and the male gaze of her previous world. She exists in isolation not just as a nymph-body but finally as a pharmakis, a role in which her abilities are the defining feature, because the only definition that matters when she is alone is her own. A newly designed
pharmakis, Circe must learn how to embrace and use her knowledge to develop her powers, really
coming to understand the meaning of the word witchcraft, the bringing together of the mind and the body.
Chapter Two: Goddess with the Human Voice: Practicing Magic
2.1 Silencing Circe
In this section, I will examine the role of Circe’s voice in her development of pharmaka and the problematic process of asserting her power. Circe’s fundamental experience as a woman taught her from a young age to be seen and not heard, and it is only when she finds this magic within herself that she begins to utilize her voice as a vehicle for thought and thus for power. When Circe transforms Scylla, effectively ridding her from the world forever by taking away both her body and her voice, none of the immortals suspect anything has happened except for the intervention of the Fates. She gets away with this revenge, yet decides to confess to her father what she has done. It is so clear by his reaction to her that she is desperate to be
acknowledged. Her father and the other Titans and gods laugh at her, not believing she was able to transform Glaucos or Scylla. He says to her, “If the world contained that power you allege, do you think it would fall to you to discover it?” (Miller, 54) It is completely unthinkable that a nymph would gain access to this power that does not even exist within the current power
structures of the gods. Her tenacity in convincing him is further seen as insubordination, because when she maintains that she was the one who did this and that she does have these abilities her father chokes her and burns her from the inside out, assaulting her and specifically burning her throat (Miller, 54). The attack on her body is all encompassing to the point where she feels pain “such as I had never imagined could exist, a searing agony consuming every thought” (Miller, 54), and he specifically targets her throat and ability to breath, or more importantly her ability to speak, with which she is insisting on her powers; her autonomy is erased in the moment as she has no control over what is happening to her. The pain is so much that she relinquishes her hold on any sort of power by lying and calling herself just another nymph who overstepped her bounds. Her potential disruption to the power structures is dealt with violently and with the
elimination of her voice specifically because she is female and her father believes he has the right to her autonomy. This is a particularly feminine violation, as it is a man occupying her body and voice and dictating what she can and cannot do. Helene Cixous writes about the dangers of silencing women, especially when they are attempting to enact change in the power structures of the society they exist within, “where woman has never her turn to speak-this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (Cixous, 876). Circe has been violently silenced because to speak the truth of her abilities would challenge the patriarchy of the world she inhabits. This attack of her body and silencing of her voice is played out again later in the text in an even more violent and traumatic way, reaffirming that Circe exists within a power structure that even pharmakeia cannot get her out of. When her brother Aeetes comes to confirm her powers, a different exchange occurs:
‘I have come,’ he said, ‘because I heard of Scylla’s transformation, and Glaucos’ too, at Circe’s hands.’
‘At the Fates’ hands. I tell you, Circe has no such power.’ ‘You are mistaken.’
I stared, expecting my father’s wrath to fall upon him. But my brother continued. (Miller, 57)
Her brother tells Helios and the other immortals in his halls the same truth Circe had already tried to convey, the truth she was silenced for. But her brother is allowed to speak, is allowed even to show his ability to use pharmakeia to their father. Her father believes the truth about Circe only when it is from her brother’s lips, and it is Aeetes’ physical act of fixing her wounds that cements his belief in Circe’s ability to produce the same magic from her body. This is the first moment where Circe is really trying to challenge the authority of the Olympian power structures, and as a reader one might hope that this failure to do so and the domination of Circe
by her father is just a fluke, and that in this “feminist retelling” she would eventually be able to throw off the yoke of the patriarchy. But as we will see, for Miller to keep this story recognizable as myth she cannot have Circe play that part. The Olympians and the Titans have expected roles and realities that have been built into the foundation of our literary society, and there is little Miller can do to disrupt that completely - to do so would take her out of the role of “revisionist”. For Circe to stay in this world would mean no chance of growth and development of power from any sort of feminist persepctive, so she must leave in order for the story to move forward and to give Miller room to develop a feminist revision. As previously discussed, Helios later uses her loud insistence of her powers to justify sending her away from their society to Aiaia, as she sought out power for herself that she should not have.
2.2 Pharmaka & Voice
Within the text, Miller places pharmakeia, the magic Circe and her siblings are able to produce, as powerful enough to upset the order of the gods. When she has Aeetes provide the definition within the novel to his father, she clarifies she is referring to pharmaka as the herbs and the use of them as pharmakeia, or the art of using the herbs (Miller, 57). Derek Collins writes
The term pharmakon (plural pharmaka)...was notoriously ambiguous in Greek, because its range of meaning covered helpful ‘medicine’, harmful ‘poison’, as well as magical ‘drug’ or ‘philter’, all of which were plant based concoctions with
sometimes active psychotropic ingredients. In the context of magic, it is the pharmakon and its effects on the body to which Plato referred...when he mentioned the drinks, food or unguents that cause ‘harm by means of matter against matter according to nature’. The noun pharmakon gave rise to several other terms in Greek related to magic, including the noun pharmakeia ‘magic’ and the verb pharmakeuein ‘bewitch’. (Collins, 59)
In the original Greek, there is not a clear definition for the powers these herbs have. They are both positive and negative, helpful and harmful. Though based on working with nature, and the
fact that it is the root of the modern idea of pharmacy which is based in the study of herbs and plants as medicine, pharmakon first developed into the idea of magic, something unknown and seemingly unattainable for most. Evelyn Bracke in her essay “Of Metis and Magic: The Conceptual
Transformations of Circe and Medea in Ancient Greek Poetry” further develops the understanding of pharmakon as
(1) an indirect means of assailing one’s enemy, (2) used by a weaker person (here a female) at the right moment, (3) ambiguous inasmuch as they can be deadly or healing, (4) illusionary, as they can be disguised in a drink or food, and (5) either binding as they restrain people, or freeing from bonds, as they heal.
(Bracke,109-110 )
It is crucial to note that the first part of the definition has developed into a more violent connotation, and the second aspect of the definition is gendered and that gendering further connotes the skill as negative. Pharmaka is evidently something that is developed through the mind of the wielder but which impacts the body of the one it is used upon; this is the first time we begin to see the relationship of the mind and body as they pertain to Circe’s ability to develop power and wield it herself. Within this definition there is an admission that pharmaka can be healing, particularly in the phrase “freeing from bonds”. The idea of liberation through
transformation will be crucial to Circe’s development of power and pharmaka. Circe first learns of the word from her brother Aeetes and uses it for the first time herself in a conversation with her grandmother when she is desperate for a way to keep Glaucos, the mortal she is in love with, from dying. After her grandmother lashes out at her for asking about pharmaka, warning her to never “speak of that wickedness again,” (Miller, 39). Circe is fixated on this power and her desire to use it for her own gain.
I was too wild to feel any shame. It was true. I would not just uproot the world, but tear it, burn it, do any evil I could to keep Glaucos by my side. But what stayed most in my mind was the look on my grandmother’s face when I had said that word,
had seen Glaucos when he spoke of the levy, of empty nets, and of his father. I had begun to know what fear was. What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too. A power greater than their own. (Miller, 39)
Pharmakeia is introduced as something wicked and feared by the immortals. It also is something Circe wants to use selfishly and at the risk of destroying others and the world itself. This fits into the discourse of magic, where the development of mystical and misunderstood power as
marginalized people were wielding it was deemed evil and those who practiced it were nefarious. Kimberly Stratton traces the development of a “new discourse of alterity” (Stratton, 1) and the construction of the stereotypes of the witch and the magician. These stereotypes are built upon “ritual deviance and illegitimate access to sacred power” and “persisted as a marginalizing strategy until the modern period” (Stratton, 1). Circe’s desire for illegitimate power pushes her out of society and onto Aiaia, where she believes herself to be released from the constraints of the patriarchal expectations of power.
2.3 Singing in Isolation
Her isolation allows her to develop a sense of self she never had within the world of the immortals. She says, “I did not mind the emptiness either. For a thousand years I had tried to fill the space between myself and my family..I sang, which had never been allowed before, since my mother said I had the voice of a drowning gull” (Miller, 71). Circe’s singing voice is allowed to engulf the island, laying claim to the world she now inhabits. When she was in her father’s halls, she was not encouraged to speak, let alone sing. Her father attacked her throat and her voice when she tried to assert her individuality and power, silencing her. To sing is to be herself and to be without limitation, a true metaphor for her newfound identity as a witch on an island without anyone disrupting her life. In “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Helene Cixous writes about the relationship between a woman’s sense of self and her embodiment:
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display-the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard...An act that will also be marked by woman's seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. (Cixous, 880)
Circe is literally making her body heard with her singing, first just to fill the empty halls and then as she uses her voice to awaken the pharmaka she finds in her forest. Her body stops being a stranger to her as she begins to use it in every way she has been restricted from using it in the past. She plaits her hair back so she can move freely through the forest without being stopped by thorns, not caring how it appears as she would have in Helios’ halls (Miller, 71). She sings to hear herself and to keep herself company, her voice claiming dominion over her space. One of Circe’s common epithets in the original Greek texts actually references her voice; Emily Wilson’s
translation of The Odyssey describes her as “the beautiful, dreadful goddess Circe,/ who speaks in human languages” (Wilson, 266) and that from her came “some lovely singing” (Wilson, 266). She seems accessible to the mortals she encounters, which is what later in the novel entices many men to the island. In the original myths, she is able to lure them in using her normal, female singing voice with malice to achieve her ends, which will be discussed later. In Miller’s retelling, she first uses her singing for positive purposes, to freely be herself and not be silenced by any man. This is a crucial marker for Circe, and further develops the idea of her dominion over her island and her body. Evelien Bracke writes
In the absence of a male guardian who might function as bard, they sing themselves, thereby appropriating a typically male manner of expression... That Circe can be “heard” sets her apart from normal women who are constrained by their male guardian: in the absence of a guardian, Circe acts as her own poet. (Bracke, 92)
Circe’s failed femininity and bridehood seems to become irrelevant on the island, where she is finally able to sing her own song in her own voice. As she gains some comfort in her forest, her house, and her body, she begins the work of understanding pharmaka. In beginning to study the herbs and flowers of the forest, she realizes:
Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not. If my herbs are not fresh enough, if my attention falters, if my will is weak, the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands. By rights, I should never have come to witchcraft. Gods hate all toil, it is their nature. The closest we come is weaving or smithing, but these things are skills, and there is no drudgery to them since all the parts that might be unpleasant are taken away with power….Witchcraft is nothing but such drudgery. (Miller, 72)
Circe’s power, though the knowledge of how to harness it comes from within her as evidenced by her transformation of Scylla and Glaucos, does not occur naturally. Pharmakeia is not
something a god is blessed with, it inherently implies work. This work is the kind that takes a toll on the body, where experiments led to “errors and trials, burnt fingers and fetid clouds that sent me running outside to cough in the garden” (Miller, 73). Her body becomes a tool for work, because only through work will she have access to the power she has desired her entire life. She starts to live a life of drudgery, repeating the same bodily tasks in order to truly understand the knowledge she possesses. She has to hone the pharmakeia into a craft, combining her knowledge with the work of her body, and activated through her voice. When she realizes how much she will have to go through to harness her magic, she says, “I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands….that was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone” (Miller, 73). She
connection, the blood of her body working the same way as the sap of the flowers she uses for her magic (Miller, 73). Adrienne Rich, in her text Of Women Born, writes, “In biological
motherhood, as in these other activities, woman was not merely a producer and stabilizer of life: there, too, she was a transformer” (Rich, 101). Because she is existing outside of the power
structures, her power seems limitless even in its fledgling state. She harnesses her pharmakeia, her power over nature in small tricks: “If Aeetes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen-tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me” (Miller, 74). Though Circe is able to literally bring trees to harvest out of season and transform an acorn into a strawberry with her thoughts, her power is still womanly and weak, beneath what one would even call power. Discovering and cultivating this while in isolation is crucial to Circe, because building up her abilities in a world where she was already seen as insignificant would have crushed her initial magic.
2.4 Conclusion
I have examined how Circe’s voice is crucial to distinguishing herself from other nymphs as a pharmakis, and that this position of pharmakis is both powerful enough to be a threat but also in the magic discourse a way to demonize female power. When she attempts to use it to claim her power, she is literally violently silenced by the patriarchy. Again, just as with her body, her voice is only free to exist in an unproblematic way on her island in isolation. Her magic is the meeting of her body and mind, the drudgery of work meeting the knowledge conveyed by her voice. But as both her body and her voice are only free to exist in isolation, her magic is also limited to isolation and will not be fully realized in the patriarchal society of Greek mythology.
Chapter Three: Female Power & Limitations of the Body
Circe’s magic is problematic for two reasons: she exists in a female body that is always going to be at odds with a patriarchal society, and she is unable to use her power selfishly due to the internalized misogyny of the circumstances in which a woman should use power. The female pharmakis is almost an oxymoron, because the power associated with the magic of the
pharmakis is almost always at odds with the female body and its position in the world. Circe’s initial encounter with her magic finds her in a position that could disrupt the godly power structures, if only she can be acknowledged as having powers at all. When she transforms Glaucos, no one knows or suspects her, and Glaucos’ joy at thinking the Fates were on her side entreated her to keep her quiet. Circe it appears she is able to bend nature to her own desires, to transform, but in reality her powers of alteration are not the granting of wishes and
transformation, but exposing truth and revelation: when he awakens, Glaucos says, “See how I am grown into myself!” (Miller, 44) Circe’s ability to use pharmaka grants her powers of exposure and of transformation. When Glaucos is made into an immortal, he immediately assumes it was something of his own doing, not a gift from this goddess who he had led to believe he loved. Glaucos has been relatively powerless as his father beats him when he is not able to fill his fishing nets, able to bleed and to die unlike Circe and the other gods and goddesses. This supplicant position makes him adoring of a goddess who has truly embodied power in a way he has never before seen. He describes her as “a golden goddess, beautiful and kind” (Miller, 34). To his mortal eyes, her appearance is in fact enough because she has the glow of immortals; without other immortals to compare it to, like in her father’s halls, Circe has no comparison on Earth. In addition to his mortal and powerless perception of her physical beauty, she is able to convince her immortal grandmother, Tethys, the nurse of all great waters to ensure his nets would always be full and his father would not have reason to hurt him again. Circe holds the
power in their relationship when he is mortal. By re-awakening him as divine, she believes she is wielding her own power for her own gain, and their relationship will continue on now forever. But when Glaucos becomes immortal, he gains access to power he could not have imagined. His first action is to kill his father, he becomes self-obsessed as the nymphs clamor to be his bride, and becomes completely indifferent to the one who (unknowingly) gave him this power. When he selects a nymph to marry, Scylla, Circe entreats him to reconsider. As she tries to kiss him, he pushes her away: “his face was caught, half in anger, half in a sort of fear. He looked almost like his old self” (Miller, 47). To select a nymph to claim as his is simply another way for Glaucos to cement his power among the immortals. The thought of being with Circe is terrifying to him as his association with such a physically imperfect goddess would block his access to power - after all, the bride of a god is just another object to bolster their own status, and the more beautiful the conquest the more powerful a god could become. His rejection of her is so callous and such a physical response to her body: “I felt his power come around me. And with that same flick he had used upon the cushions, he sent me back to my rooms.” (Miller, 47) She becomes only an object to him to become discarded and tossed aside, irrelevant to him. The change in Glaucos that Circe performed was not actually the physical transformation it first seemed to be: in fact, it was her ability to expose his true nature, a man desperate for power and selfish in his desire to accumulate it.
Circe’s desire to be known as a threat to the power structures of the gods and not simply as a nymph becomes clear in her revenge on Scylla. But Circe’s rage does not turn on Glaucos, as one might expect. Miller uses the original tale of Ovid’s to narrate Circe’s next choices.
As soon as [Glaucus] saw [Circe], and words of welcome had been exchanged, he said: ‘Goddess, I beg you, take pity on a god! You alone can help this love of mine, if I seem worthy of help. No one knows better than I, Titaness, what power herbs have, since I was transmuted by them. So that the cause of my passion is not unknown to you, I saw Scylla, on the Italian coast, opposite
Messene’s walls. I am ashamed to tell of the prayers and
promises, the blandishments I used, words that were scorned. If there is any power in charms, utter a charm from your sacred lips: or, if herbs are more potent, use the proven strength of active herbs. I trust you not to cure me, or heal me, of these wounds: my love cannot end: only let her feel this heat.
No one has a nature more susceptible to such fires than Circe, whether the root of it is in herself, or whether Venus, offended by Sol her father’s tale-bearing, made her that way, so she replied: ‘You would do better to chase after someone whose wishes and purposes were yours, and who was captured by equal desire. Besides, you were worth courting (and certainly could be
courted), and if you offer any hope, believe me you will be too. If you doubt it, and have no faith in your attractions, well, I, though I am a goddess, daughter of shining Sol, though I possess such powers of herbs and charms, I promise to be yours. Spurn the spurner, repay the admirer, and, in one act, be twice revenged.’ To such temptations as these Glaucus replied: ‘Sooner than my love will change, Scylla unchanged, leaves will grow on the waters, and sea-weed will grow on the hills.’ The goddess was angered, and since she could not harm him (nor, loving him, wished to do so) she was furious with the girl, who was preferred to her. Offended at his rejection of her passion, she at once ground noxious herbs with foul juices, and joined the spells of Hecate to their grinding….There was a little pool, curved in a smooth arc, dear to Scylla for its peacefulness. When the sun was strongest, at the zenith, and from its heights made shortest shadows, she retreated there from the heat of sky and sea. This, the goddess tainted in advance and contaminated with her monstrous poison. She sprinkled the liquid squeezed from harmful roots, and
muttered a mysterious incantation, dark with strange words, thrice nine times, in magical utterance.
Scylla comes, wading waist deep into the pool, only to find the water around her groin erupt with yelping monsters. At first, not thinking them part of her own body, she retreats from their cruel muzzles, fears them, and pushes them away: but, what she flees from, she pulls along with her, and, seeking her thighs, her legs, her feet, in place of them finds jaws like Cerberus’s. She stands among raging dogs, and is encircled by beasts, below the surface, from which her truncated thighs and belly emerge.
Her lover Glaucus wept, and fled Circe’s embrace, she, who had made too hostile a use of her herbs’ powers. Scylla remained where she was, and, at the first opportunity, in her hatred of Circe, robbed Ulysses of his companions. (Ovid, book XIV)
Miller does not veer too far from the original text; Glaucus does reject Circe explicitly in both tales, and Circe is unable to bring herself to harm the one she thinks she loves. Typical of a myth about women written by men in a patriarchal society, Circe’s fury is towards the woman who “stole” this man from her, Scylla. Scylla did almost wield power in the pre-victim stage of life, as a beautiful nymph who was ripe for the picking by a god. Glaucos wanted her, and until he had her she maintained a semblance of control of herself and over Circe. She was able to seduce him and convince him to consider her for a bride instead of just a physical conquest, taking him away from Circe. Circe knew that Scylla was aware of this feminine power, and that she was using it for what Circe took to be a villainous purpose. Circe wants to expose the vitriol Scylla directed her way for years, so she decides to use her new powers against her rival. At this point Circe believes her powers are completely controlled by her own desires, and that exactly what she wishes for will come true.
I gathered those flowers of tre being and brought them to the cove where it was said Scylla bathed each day. I broke their stems and emptied their white sap drop by drop into the waters. She would not be able to hide her adder malice anymore. All her ugliness would be revealed. Her eyebrows would thicken, her hair would turn dull, and her nose would grow long and snouted. The halls would echo with her furious screams and the great gods would come to whip me, but I would welcome them, for every lash upon my skin would be only further proof to Glaucos of my love. (Miller, 48)
Circe believes the powers will turn Scylla into her equal, a nymph who is unattractive and therefore powerless. This is a huge divergence from the original myth, because Circe wants to keep Scylla as a nymph and in the same position as her - she thinks it is worse to be an unattractive nymph rather than a monster. Ovid’s tale is from his Metamorphoses, so it makes sense that his narrative features transformation, a knowing erasure of Scylla’s being from nymph into a monster. In the original myth, Circe no longer wants Scylla to be competition for Glaucos’
love and believes the best way to get her out of the picture is to transform her into a literal monster. Miller’s Circe is more nuanced, and thus she demonstrates a more nuanced
understanding of what it means to be a woman and a monster. Circe believes Scylla is already a monster, because she seduced Glaucos away from Circe: “it was not love, I had seen the sneer in her eyes when she spoke of his flippers. Perhaps it was because she loved my sister and brother, who scorned me. Perhaps it was because her father was a nothing river, and her mother a shark-faced sea-nymph, and she liked the thought of taking something from the daughter of the sun” (Miller, 48). But naming her monster admits to a sense of power as a woman, as someone who can disrupt Circe’s desires for her own motivations. This is a far more complex picture of Scylla and of Circe than Ovid paints. For Ovid, Scylla exists just to say yes or no to Glaucos - Circe and Scylla do not interact in any real way. Scylla cannot be transformed into as a monster in her same body because she exists only as an object of desire, not anyone with real motivations of her own. She has to be made into a monster, thereby developing the theme of transformation. In Miller’s rendition, this is a personal slight and makes Scylla a villain to Circe directly, not just as the one Glaucos happened upon but as one who did intentionally seduce him away from Circe. Circe sees within Scylla a “viper heart” (Miller, 48) She does not believe she needs to turn Scylla into a monster because she already is one, and it is her desire just to expose the reality of her character to the rest of their world. Circe believes that transforming Scylla will just make her into an ugly nymph, rendering her useless, but in making her as a monster she actually
disembodied Scylla.
The society these two nymphs existed in would not give any acknowledgement to Scylla as a monster if she were just an unattractive nymph, because they would not give her any thought at all. Miller’s decision to explain the change in Scylla as Circe’s desire to expose rather than transform shows that monstrosity cannot exist in their world as a woman because that
would give women too much power in their own bodies. To be transformed into a monster that Circe believed she was, Scylla had to lose her female body. Scylla is transformed not into an ugly nymph but rather into the horrific monster from The Odyssey, barking and murderous in her cave above the strait. She is not made useless to the world she occupied, she becomes a horrifying monster who “always has a place. She may have all the glory her teeth can snatch. She will not be loved for it, but she will not be constrained either” (Miller, 61). The nymph can only be made powerful when she is taken out of her nymph body. Circe turns Scylla into something terrifying and deadly instead of another beautiful bride for another god. The lack of a human female body allows Scylla to live forever as this horrific being in the eyes of mortals and gods, and she becomes powerful and singular instead of a forgettable woman. Miller’s rewriting of this myth is intriguing, because she almost places a reverence on Scylla’s new position of monster, yet by doing so also juxtaposes Circe’s failure to gain any recognition of power. She drives the point home that Scylla is a force to be reckoned with, but only when she ceases to be a woman. In her transformation of Scylla, she exposes the limitations of her own power.
This moment also exposes Circe’s selfishness and capacity for her own monstrosity, especially when she begins to want credit for it. When she transforms Scylla and sees what she is truly capable of, she wants her world to know who turned Scylla. Circe imagines telling her father, and what he will do to her - what is intriguing here is the inclusion of a punishment by the “more powerful” gods. She has been continually ignored by these gods her entire life, as she was not able to fulfill the role of nymph for them the way she ought to. She is almost excited here for a public acknowledgement of her newfound power, even if it is in the form of punishment. It is almost as if there is a struggle inside of her - she should not be able to access these powers because she is simply supposed to be a nymph, and she believes she should be punished for doing so. Yet by making her punishment public she dreams of cementing her powers and status
in the world of the immortals. Her desire for power is at odds with her beliefs about whether or not she should be able to have it. Derrida writes about pharmakon’s power to “take him out of himself and draw him onto a path that is properly an exodus” (Derrida, 430). Circe’s wielding of
pharmakon is what she needs to take herself out of the role of nymph and into the role of witch,
attempting to rise on the ladder of power in the world of the immortals.
Circe also begins an internal change with this event, though stuck in the physical form of a woman. Her brother’s validation of her magic puts her back into the body her father punished not as a nymph, but rather as a pharmakis. Aeetes says, “I was beginning to think maybe you weren’t a pharmakis after all.’ It was not a word I knew. It was not a word anyone knew, then. ‘Pharmakis,’ I said. Witch” (Miller, 58). While Scylla is alone in her new form, powerful and not female, Circe remains female. Though she is the same as her brother in terms of their new status of pharmakis, yet different, and this difference is singularly based on their sexes. She is avoided and gazes are cast away from her out of fear, isolated and alone. “Aeetes laughed. ‘You will get used to it. We are ourselves alone now.’ He did not seem alone. Every night he sat on my grandfather’s dais with my father and our uncles. I watched him, drinking nectar, laughing, showing his teeth” (Miller, 59). His power as a man is made more powerful by being a pharmakis, but Circe is even more isolated from their society because she is something unknown, a female body not attractive enough to become a bride yet capable of violent
transformations. When Helios is determining the fates of his four children with Perse, the four new pharmakis in the world, this gender divide becomes even more apparent. Helios decrees to the assembled gods,
Perses [male child] lives beyond our boundaries and is no threat. Pasiphae’s husband is a son of Zeus, and he will be sure she is held to her proper place. Aeetes will keep his kingdom, as long as he agrees to be watched...each of them has sworn besides that their powers came unbidden and unlooked for, from no malice,
accident...Each of them, except for Circe. You were all here when she confessed that she sought her powers openly. She had been warned to stay away, yet she disobeyed...she defied my commands and contradicted my authority. She has turned her poisons against her own kind and committed other treacheries as well...she is a disgrace to our name. An ingrate to the care we have shown her. It is agreed with Zeus that for this she must be punished. She is exiled to a deserted island where she can do no more harm. She leaves tomorrow.’ (Miller, 62-63)
The other female pharmakis is to be controlled by her mortal husband, because she is a wife before she is a witch. The two sons are allowed to maintain their powers and the sovereignty they have gained for themselves, though they have these dangerous powers as well. As long as there is some illusion of power over them, they can occupy whatever spaces they want. But Circe is punished for her abilities, because she sought them out, she wanted power beyond what she was given as a nymph. She disobeyed her father, and this rejection of his authority is the real root cause of her exile. To be a woman while having this power is problematic for Circe, and she cannot exist both as nymph and as pharmakis within the power structures she had been occupying. In her essay “From Goddess to Hag: The Greek and Roman Witch in Classical Literature” Barbette Stanley Spaeth writes “the witch can illustrate the consequences of inverting the ‘natural’ order. When the female witch inverts the laws of Nature, all the boundaries that order the world are dissolved, and chaos results...the witch can also express men’s fears of what might happen if they do not maintain their own traditional male role of dominance, but rather sink to effeminate submissiveness” (Spaeth, 48). Circe’s newly realized magic, and her refusal to obey her father in public, is the disruption of the gods’ natural order. Her continued
embodiment of the female form with her new powers is her downfall. Where Scylla has found singularity and infamy in her monstrous disembodied form, Circe is forced out of sight and into isolation.
Chapter Four: Heroes & Pigs: Encountering the Patriarchy
In this chapter I will argue that Circe will always have limited power because anytime she encounters the patriarchal system of her world outside of isolation, she is viewed as a woman first and her magic is disregarded. The first moment where her power is really tested is within the isolation, but not with another god or human being. Rather, she comes face to face with a boar:
He stamped, and the white foam dripped from his mouth. He lowered his tusks and ground his jaws. His pig-eyes said: I can
break a hundred youths, and send their bodies back to wailing mothers. I will tear your entrails and eat them for my lunch. I fixed my gaze on his.
‘Try’ I said. For a long moment he stared at me. Then he turned and twitched off through the brush. I tell you, for all my spells, that was the first time I truly felt myself a witch. (Miller, 75-76)
This encounter is rife with Freudian symbolism, is it not? It is telling that Miller made the boar male, with white foam dripping. His tusks are explicitly discussed: could they be anything other than a phallic symbol, one ready to do her body harm? (Freud, 246) Circe stares down these masculine eyes and challenges their power and ability to harm her body. Circe’s first embodiment of her new identity occurs in this moment, and she is powerful enough to tame a literal wild beast. Here it is important to note the thoughts of the creature, the threat against the body that he stands for. The boar is on the surface threatening assault just to her body as an individual, the same way he has the potential to kill boys and men. Yet Miller’s picture of the boar makes his bodily threat to Circe symbolically sexual. In her first test of Circe versus the violence of man, she embodies her new position of power as a witch before she is a woman, and the
confrontation goes her way. She has been away from the true male gaze long enough that she no longer fears it, and is willing to stare it down and own her place. Circe’s initial time in isolation has given her the confidence she needs to truly become a witch, this “other” role that is out of the realm of gods and mortals. She relishes this internal transformation, and it is highlighted by her
