English Studies – Literary Option Bachelor
15 Credits
Spring Semester 2021 Supervisor: Asko Kauppinen
Rewritings of Circe:
Representation, Resistance, and Change in Feminist
Revisionism
Abstract
This paper analyses the feminist revisionism of the Circe-myth in the rewritings by Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, and Madeline Miller. To that end, the paper first examines three different ways of discussing rewritings: Jeremy M. Rosen’s genre of minor-character elaboration, Linda Hutcheon’s take on postmodern parody, and Alicia Ostriker’s feminist revisionist mythmaking. Then, after positioning itself with the feminist revisionism, the paper conducts a brief reading of the myth as it appears in the Odyssey, followed by readings of the three rewritings: Welty’s short story “Circe,” Atwood’s poetry cycle “Circe/Mud Poems,” and Miller’s novel Circe. Through the reading of these works together, a pattern emerges of criticising former representations, exploring why they are problematic, and resisting them in order to create change.
Table of Contents Abstract ... i 1. Introduction ... 1 2. Rewriting Myths... 4 2.1. As a Genre ... 4 2.2. As Postmodern Parody ... 7 2.3. As Feminist Revisionism ... 9 3. Rewritings of Circe ... 12
3.1. The Myth: Homer’s Odyssey ... 12
3.2. (Anot)her Perspective: Welty’s “Circe” ... 14
3.3. Parodying the Passive Woman: Atwood’s “Circe/Mud Poems” ... 18
3.4. Resistance and Change: Miller’s Circe ... 23
4. Conclusion ... 29
1. Introduction
Circe has been an image of a powerful mythic woman since before she was pinned down in writing in Homer’s Odyssey. She is perhaps known foremost for her ability to transform men into pigs, utterly changing their bodies while their consciousness remains the same. Odysseus lands on her island of Aiaia with his men, and after he overcomes the challenge she poses to his quest, Circe invites them all to remain on her island for a year. During this year, she becomes Odysseus’ lover and offers him and his crew her hospitality, allowing them to live in plenitude and to recuperate before they continue their journey home to Ithaca.
Although Circe is commonly identified with her powers of transformation, she has gone through many transformations of her own since her first appearance in the Odyssey — which is the focus of Judith Yarnall’s Transformations of Circe: The History of an
Enchantress. Yarnall explains, for example, how Christian allegory stripped the Homeric
image of Circe of its positive sides, turning her into a symbol for the “Christian doctrines concerning the nature of women and sexuality,” painting her more like “a kind of Eve raised to a higher power, a demonic figure personifying the linkage between the feminine, the natural, and the deadly” (79). Later, during the Renaissance, Circe emerged as a “stereotype of the seductive, dangerous, controlling woman”, and as such became a popular “dark muse for many European poets” such as Milton and Calderón (Yarnall 99). The image of Circe, Yarnall argues over the course of her book, only became misogynistic well after Homer’s
Odyssey because it was “consistently and grossly misread for centuries”, something that can
only be explained through “persistent, pervasive, and unacknowledged biases” (195) against women. Madeline Miller claims in an interview that “[i]n the Odyssey, Circe is very clearly the incarnation of male anxiety about female power—the fear is that if women have power, men are getting turned to pigs” (Wiener), and as we learn from Yarnall, the picture did not
get prettier with time. Circe has thus been a prevailing symbol of female power and, moreover, male fear of female power.
With Eudora Welty, the myth of Circe is for the first time told from the goddess’ perspective. In the short story “Circe,” first published in the collection Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), Welty retells Circe’s part of the story, from the point of Odysseus’ arrival to his departure, and offers insight into Circe’s own thoughts and feelings regarding the events that transpire on Aiaia. Margaret Atwood similarly captures the story of Circe from the goddess’ point of view in her poetry cycle “Circe/Mud Poems,” which first appeared in her poetry collection You Are Happy (1974). Atwood’s poems, in their postmodern nature, are a blend of commentary and criticism on many issues, one of which being the portrayal of women in myth. Both these writers adopt Circe’s consciousness and viewpoint and offer a female version of the myth. So, too, does Madeline Miller in her novel Circe (2018). However, the format of the novel, as compared to the short story and the poetry cycle, allows Miller to do more than retell the episode on Aiaia from Circe’s perspective. What Miller creates is something of a bildungsroman, or the goddess’ own fictional autobiography, where we follow Circe from her birth at the court of Helios to well beyond Odysseus’ departure from Circe’s island.
The rewritings of Circe by Welty, Atwood, and Miller have previously been explored separately, with the notable exception of Yarnall who examines Welty’s “Circe” and
Atwood’s “Circe/Mud Poems” together. Separately, Welty’s short story has foremost been explored for its theme of what makes humans different from gods, and Circe’s inability to understand and relate to the mortal men who arrive on her island. Atwood’s poetry cycle has received a more varied response, for which the interpretative nature of poetry as well as the postmodern mix of images and references are no doubt responsible. The work on “Circe/Mud Poems” covers, for example, the island as a postmodern setting and symbol for both the myth
and Canada’s colonial condition, anxieties about the future, and feminism and gender arrangements. Miller’s Circe, quite recent as it is, has not received as much attention. It has however been explored through the lens of the chronotope, and as a subversion of the male narrative.
What has not been done, however, is a comparative reading of the three works as rewritings of the Circe-myth, which is the topic this paper will concern itself with. To that end, it will first give an overview of three prominent ways of discussing rewritings: as a genre, as postmodern parody, and as feminist revisionism. For rewriting as a genre, the paper will turn to Jeremy M. Rosen’s discussion of minor-character elaborations; for postmodern parody, it will consider Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism; and where feminist revisionism is concerned, it will turn to Alicia Ostriker’s discussion on revisionist
mythmaking by women writers. Despite shedding light on the dangers of doing so, this paper will then position itself quite close to feminist revisionism, insisting that while it is difficult— if not impossible—to speak of a female self and a collective female experience, to retell old stories and myth from a female perspective still does important work. The paper will then provide a reading of the works by Welty, Atwood, and Miller, aiming to explore their
respective portrayals of Circe. It will examine how these portrayals question and critique past representations of the goddess—and by extension some of the common stereotypes of women found in myth—as well as if they appear to offer a solution on how to break with these stereotypes.
2. Rewriting Myths
Rewriting, straight-forward as though it may seem, is not always discussed in the same way, and this chapter will therefore examine three prominent ways of discussing rewritings, highlighting some of their similarities as well as conflicting viewpoints.
2.1. As a Genre
According to Jeremy M. Rosen, rewriting is a genre, and a flourishing one at that. In his paper “Minor Characters Have Their Day: The Imaginary and Actual Politics of a Contemporary Genre,” Rosen examines at length what he calls minor-character elaboration: “a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical works into protagonists” (139). This genre, Rosen argues, is often expressed in the terms of “giving voice to the silenced,” a choice of words which implies that “[s]omeone . . . has been granted agency, autonomy, the freedom to speak” (141). Rosen is, however, highly critical of this celebratory status often given to individual works belonging to the genre of minor-character elaboration, arguing that it creates an imaginary politics; no one is actually being liberated from oppression or reclaimed from history, seeing as stories and their characters are not reflections of the real world and its people (143). The real politics of the genre, Rosen claims, is instead found in the transformation “of a formerly minor character into a
narrator-protagonist” and the subsequent “assertion of the unique subjectivity of every individual and consequent insistence of a plurality of perspectives rather than any single truth” (143). These are the main two parts of Rosen’s argument, but to fully understand their implications, a closer look at each of them respectively will be necessary, beginning with individual subjectivity.
While the influence on reality and history—and, in turn, the liberation of real people and their voices—of rewritings is highly questionable, Rosen claims that “[m]inor-character elaborations are, at root, committed to equality of vision. They ask us to see differently, to see
characters for who they are, as conveyed through their unique interiority or authentic voice” (158). They do this through the transformation of minor characters to narrator-protagonists, a move which insists that while “not all characters have been created equal . . . each has the potential to be a protagonist, because each is endowed with a distinctive individuality” (157). It is not so strange, Rosen argues, that one character takes centre stage while others get sidelined; as an explanation of this, he paraphrases Alex Woloch: “[B]ecause narratives have limited space, one character’s development happens at the expense of other characters, a parceling out of attention that minor-character elaborations seek to redistribute” (156). This insistence that all characters have the potential to be protagonists, to have fictional worlds centred around them—brought forth by the way we are encouraged to think of characters as having their distinctive individualities—is one part of the genre’s importance, with
perspectival pluralism making up the other half.
Rosen explains the perspectival pluralism in part through the Rashomon effect: “the notion that different observers will perceive an event differently and produce conflicting accounts of it, thus demonstrating that meaning is contingent on a given subject position” (160). The effect takes its name from Akira Kurosawa’s 1950s movie Rashomon (in turn based on two different short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa), which convincingly presents an incident as either murder or suicide depending on who gives their testimony, and thus never settles on one singular truth at the end. Rosen furthermore claims that this
perspectivism is what “underlies the reorientation of narrative, the point-of-view shift foundational to the genre,” something that becomes explicitly visible in texts emphasising that there is always more than one side to a story (161). This goes hand-in-hand with the “skepticism toward received narratives” conventional to postmodernism. However, while the minor-character elaborations may challenge the presumed truth of the former narrative, they do so by mimicking the same process and “thus perpetuate the epistemological problem that
they endeavor to solve” (Rosen 162). In other words, to challenge the truth of the former narrative, they present another version we are to believe is more truthful, which may in turn be challenged in much the same way. Together with the liberal subjectivism, then,
perspectival pluralism emphasises the importance of the genre of minor-character
elaboration. “[L]iterature might perform radical work,” Rosen claims, but “it performs its work by constructing representations, not by liberating people or by recovering history” (169). Naturally, Rosen’s view of rewriting is not the only one. One that is related to, but different from, it is the take on rewriting as a postmodern practice.
2.2. As Postmodern Parody
In The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon gathers together what is “often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality” under the umbrella term
parody (ch. 4). Hutcheon argues that although parody is commonly thought of in accord with
the “eighteenth-century notions of wit and ridicule”, we have more to gain from thinking of parody as having “a wide range of forms and intents – from that witty ridicule to the playful ludic to the seriously respectful” (ch. 4). Postmodern parody does not simply mock, but instead seeks to question the notions of ownership and originality where art is concerned, as well as to contest old representations; parody then re-represents them, and thus draws
attention to the separation between past and present, allowing us to view things differently in retrospect (Hutcheon ch. 4). Furthermore, Hutcheon argues, while postmodernism is often thought of as “a value-free, decorative, de-historicized quotation of past forms”, this is not entirely accurate; she suggests we rather think of postmodern parody as a
“value-problematizing” recognition of the past and its representations (ch. 4). “Postmodern parody,” she claims, “is a kind of contesting revision of rereading of the past that both confirms and subverts the power of the representations of history” (ch. 4). It creates something of an exhibition of representations, past and present, using different lighting to emphasise and question different aspects of them while never pointing to one of them as the true one.
A connection is often drawn between postmodernist methods and feminist ones, which is explained through how “[p]ostmodern parodic strategies are often used by feminist artists to point to the history and historical power of . . . cultural representations, while ironically contextualizing both in such a way as to deconstruct them” (Hutcheon ch. 4). Hutcheon makes sure to emphasise that “there is today no clear cultural consensus in feminist thinking about representation”, and therefore speaks of feminisms in the plural rather than a singular feminism (ch. 6). She argues that while there are similarities between the methods of
postmodern parody and feminisms, they are not the same. Where postmodern parody wants to put something in the light and scrutinize it from different angles, criticizing and
problematizing it, the feminist strategies are ultimately ones of change and resistance (ch. 6). In other words, feminist artists are interested in resisting and challenging the old
representations to create new ones; and on that note, we turn to rewriting of myths as feminist revisionism.
2.3. As Feminist Revisionism
Much like Hutcheon’s argument for feminisms in the plural, Rita Felski claims in
Literature after Feminism that feminist criticism is “like any other field, . . . a mixed bag, and
not all of its claims are equally worthy or defensible” (5). Felski’s argument is that despite the—not uncommon—thought that feminist critics “read books with pinched, disapproving lips, zealously scanning the pages for the slightest hint of sexism” (1), feminist literary criticism is a diverse field with many differentiating opinions—some of which are, naturally, finer than others. Literature after Feminism traces the history of feminist criticism,
highlighting some of the main occurring trends and arguments—conflicting as they
sometimes are—and pointing out their respective strengths and weaknesses. It is a defence of feminist literary criticism as well as a critique, angled towards showing how wide and varied the field is. Perhaps one of the most important points to keep in mind when discussing feminism and literature, however, is that “many feminist critics nowadays are wary of any general claims about women, femininity, or the female condition” (Felski 2), and that they are likewise “nervous about making any general claim about women and literature” (Felski 4). It becomes clear that there is no one-size-fits-all scenario, and, really, why would there be? Felski quotes Judith Butler’s claim that “if one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is” (qtd. in Felski 4), to argue that it “sums up the tenor of much contemporary feminist work” (4).
Despite the impossibilities of speaking of all women as one collective, however, one way of discussing rewritings by women writers is with the notion that they shed light on female experience. On that note, an explicitly feminist take on rewriting is presented by Alicia Ostriker who, in her paper “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” explores what she calls “revisionist mythmaking” (72). Ostriker argues that because myth comes prepacked with a wealth of male figures cast as “conquering gods and
heroes”, and female ones who are either “sexually wicked” or “virtuously passive”, myth may “seem an inhospitable terrain for a woman writer” (71). However, when the woman writer does turn to myth and uses it for different end goals, it becomes revisionist, and as such it “ultimately mak[es] cultural change possible” (72).
One of the main aims behind the act of revisionist mythmaking, Ostriker claims, is “the project of defining a female self” (70). Of course, the possibility of defining such a self is much debated even within feminist scholarship, as we have seen argued by Felski. Equally debatable is Ostriker’s notion that, in these mythical revisions by women writers, “the old stories are changed . . . by female knowledge of female experience, so that they can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy,” and instead become “representations of what women find divine and demonic in themselves; they are retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered” (73). Apart from the well-founded doubts concerning a collective experience of women—and that this also is something the lone woman writer has access to—these claims give rise to the question of a “collective male fantasy” as well. We could ask, then: What is this collective male fantasy? What does Ostriker presume feminist revisionist mythmaking can do to counter it? And how can it, in turn, make cultural change possible?
We may take this collective male fantasy to mean the stereotypical portrayals of women found in myth that Ostriker describes—the roles which makes woman “either ‘angel’ or ‘monster’” (71). With the risk of overemphasising, the “angel” is thus the “virtuously passive,” the good and unthreatening; the “monster,” on the other hand, is the “sexually wicked,” the threatening evil. “[T]he core of revisionist mythmaking for women poets,” Ostriker writes, “lies in the challenge to and correction of gender stereotypes embodied in myth.” This is done, she goes on to argue, through “hit-and-run attacks on [the] familiar images and the social and literary conventions supporting them” (73). For Ostriker, then,
revisionist mythmaking is about modern women poets (and it should not be a stretch to include women writers who express themselves in other genres) who take the old stories and transform them in order to express women’s experiences and suffering, historical and present.
By questioning and responding to the prevalent stereotypical portrayals of women found in myth, Ostriker believes that “[w]ith women poets we look at, or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission” (87). When the “sacred” mythical images are revised from the female perspective, we can learn to see and be critical of these images, we can stop assenting to them, and Ostriker’s proposed cultural change may become possible. Although the claims against lumping together all women and speaking of a distinctly female experience hold firm ground (seeing as this “collective” experience does not take into account
differences of, for example, race, class, and sexuality), there is still real value to be found in pinpointing and questioning the way women have been portrayed in myth. While the
revisionism cannot pretend to speak for all women, it can still illuminate how some ways of representing women have brought much feminist criticism on itself.
3. Rewritings of Circe
This chapter contains a brief examination of Circe as she appears in the Odyssey, as well as a reading of three rewritings of the Circe-myth by Welty, Atwood, and Miller: three women writers who have chosen to retell the Circe-myth from the goddess’ own perspective.
3.1. The Myth: Homer’s Odyssey
Circe first appears in writing in Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, which, in Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation, is titled “The Winds and the Witch” (259). Contrary to the conception of Circe as a sexually wicked witch, however, she is not referred to as such apart from in the title. Emily Wilson’s translation rather equips her with the epithet goddess, and on one occasion she is referred to as “the enchantress Circe” (274). As previously noted by Yarnall, Circe has gone through many transformations of her own over the millennia since she was first put in writing by Homer (whether that refers to one person or many). Where Homer’s version is concerned, however, Yarnall claims: “To interpret Homer is to embark upon an enterprise fraught with risks, chief among them the possibility of distorting with one’s own cultural and personal biases a myth that is complete and compelling as presented” (17). This, we may argue, holds true for every reading of works created in circumstances different than our own; to be able to entirely step away from one’s own biases seems like an absurd idea. Despite the difficulties in interpreting Homer, however, a brief reading of the
Odyssey will be necessary for comparative purposes where this chapter is concerned.
When Odysseus arrives with his crew on the island of Aiaia, “home to the beautiful, dreadful goddess Circe, / who speaks in human languages” (135-136), half of his men are lured into her home with the promise of food and respite—thus tricked and subsequently transformed into pigs. With the help of Hermes’ warnings and the magic-resistant plant Moly, Odysseus outwits her through his own trickery. Fearing for her life as Odysseus draws his sword on her, Circe offers her body to him with the words that “[t]hrough making love, /
we may begin to trust each other more” (335-336). Still fearful of her powers, however, Odysseus makes her pledge an oath not to use them to harm him or his men, and not until she has taken the oath does he agree to share the goddess’ bed. Through the newly formed trust between them, Odysseus convinces Circe to reverse the transformation of his crew, and she offers her hospitality to them all, bathing them and offering them food and wine. The crew remain on Aiaia for a year, living in plenitude, and when they wish to leave, Circe tells Odysseus, “you need not / remain here in my house against your will” (489-490). She offers him advice on the dreadful journey to Hades that awaits him, and when he later returns one last time to her island (at the beginning of Book 12), she provides him with further
instructions on how to survive the upcoming encounters with the Sirens, the six-headed Scylla, and Helios’ cattle.
Homer’s Circe is not simply one of the many monsters Odysseus encounters on his journey home; she is not just an obstacle in his way. While she initially appears as such, and he does have to trick his way past her powers, she eventually assists him more than she thwarts his progress. As such, the image of Circe provided by Homer is not as one-sidedly stereotypical as one might first believe. This does not mean that the representation is unproblematic; the image of a powerful woman forced into submission, only to become a pleasant hostess for her now-guests, is not the most flattering one. There is, of course, much more going on in the myth than can be analysed through this simplified overview, but it should serve as a sufficient ground for the following exploration of the three rewritings by Welty, Atwood, and Miller—the main focus of the paper.
3.2. (Anot)her Perspective: Welty’s “Circe”
In 1955, Eudora Welty published the short story “Circe” as part of the collection
Bride of the Innisfallen. “Circe” is the first work to retell the Circe-myth from the goddess’
own perspective, and even Michael Gleason—whose paper “Circe and Language: What Welty Took from Joyce” has little interest in the female version of the myth—begins by stating that “[t]he most obvious fact of . . . ‘Circe’ is that the author has reversed the Homeric perspective, thereby granting a voice and an inner life to the title character in contrast to an unbroken tradition of male authors ranging from Virgil to Milton to Calderon” (71). However, to simply state this fact might draw to memory Rosen’s wary critique of the celebration voice, and—to state another fact—tells us little about Welty’s story or her Circe. Of more interest, and value, is what Welty uses Circe’s voice to say.
As far as the plot is concerned, Welty sticks fairly close to the Odyssey. Some of the major differences, however, involve the initial meeting between Circe and Odysseus. Odysseus arrives together with his men, rather than later, and he is the only one not affected by her magic. At this point, Circe reacts strongly: “I spun round, thinking, O gods, it has failed me, it’s drying up. Before everything I think of my power. One man was left” (483). From the insight into Circe’s thoughts, we learn that her power is at the forefront of her mind, the most important thing to her. Suzanne Marrs comments on this in “Place and the Displaced in Eudora Welty’s ‘The Bride of the Innisfallen.’”: “Welty’s Circe is confident of her power and values her own work” (651). “Circe’s broth”, Circe herself states, is something “all the gods have heard of . . . and envied” (Welty 483), and she furthermore lets us know that the “moment of transformation—only the gods really like it! Men and beasts almost never take in enough of the wonder to justify the trouble. . . . What tusks I had given them!” (482-483). There is a sense of awe and pride in Circe’s thoughts regarding her own transformative work. Nevertheless, Odysseus resists her power.
Contrary to the events in the Odyssey, Odysseus neither draws his sword on Circe, nor makes her take the oath not to harm him and his men. Instead, Welty’s Circe recognizes that “[i]f a man remained, unable to leave that magnificent body of his, then enchantment had met with a hero”, and that this heroic quality and the accompanying prophetic inevitabilities render her efforts futile: “I know those prophecies as well as the back of my hand—only nothing is here to warn me when it is now” (482). The emphasised role of the male hero is a reminder of why Ostriker claims myth is inhospitable ground to women writers, and on a similar note—with the risk of speaking of characters as people—inhospitable to the female characters who inhabit these myths. When her power is proven ineffective, Circe has little choice but to accept the situation. Then, we can presume, although Welty’s language is less straight-forward than Wilson’s translation of the Homeric poem, Circe invites him to her bed: “I took the chain from my waist, it slipped shining to the floor between us, where it lay as if it slept, as I came forth. . . . He fell among the pillows, his still-open eyes two clouds stopped over the sun, and I lifted and kissed his hand” (482). Despite the differences, the situation largely ends the same way as in the Odyssey, although, it might be said, on a note of acceptance rather than complete submission.
Welty’s Circe is not, however, as calmly accepting of the events that follow. Odysseus “would not dine with [her] until [she] would undo that day’s havoc in the
pigsty. . . . He wanted his men back” (483). It is begrudgingly that Circe transforms his men back—insistent that “the pigsty was where they belonged” (484)—and she even tries to spoil the happy moment of their reunion. Furthermore, while she still offers them her hospitality for the coming year, she is angered by their ungratefulness: “[T]ell me one now who looked my way until I had brought him his milk and figs” (484), she states, and when they leave “they loaded the greedy ship. They carried off their gifts from me—all unappreciated, unappraised” (486). Neither is Welty’s Circe as happily accepting of Odysseus’ departure as
she appears in the Odyssey. After learning that they will leave the following day, Circe spends the night alone, tormented by her feelings of abandonment: “I swayed, and was flung backward by my torment. I believed that I lay in disgrace and my blood ran green, like the wand that breaks in two” (485). Then, at the end, when Odysseus’ crew leaves her island the next day, Circe claims knowledge of the dangers that await them, but neither appears to share that knowledge with them, nor does the knowledge bring her any consolation, seeing as “foreknowledge is not the same as the last word” (486). Thus, while Welty’s short story does not change the course of the events, the first-person narration lets us know that this Circe is anything but happy with being cast into the role of a domestic, housekeeping woman who is eventually abandoned—her hospitality taken for granted.
One of the more frequent themes that has been explored in “Circe” is the difference between gods and humans. The inherent difference between woman and goddess is
illuminated by both Yarnall in Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress and Andrea Goudie in “Eudora Welty’s Circe: A Goddess who Strove with Men.” Yarnall juxtaposes the goddess and the mortal woman, the former being what Welty’s Circe is and the other what she yearns to be: as a goddess, she is powerful and immortal, but as a mortal woman she would be able to grasp the mysteries of love and grief (183-184). Similarly, Goudie argues that as a goddess, Circe is fundamentally different from mortals; she is doomed to never be able to understand them or be able to “cope with human emotions— things she cannot feel” (489). Goudie furthermore claims that “Circe’s power neither permits her to be weak and frail nor to understand weakness or frailty” (486). In a sense, this division likely makes Welty’s Circe a poor example for the common female experience (if such a thing exists), and this is perhaps not so strange if we consider that Welty wanted to “insure that the story’s greatest emphasis would fall not upon a female version of myth but upon the unresolvable mystery at the heart of human identity, the mystery that distinguishes men and
women from gods and goddesses” (Marrs 650). However, Marrs also points out that Welty’s Circe “does not see herself as one who must manipulate men. Unlike Homer’s Circe, she does not see her sexual allure as a weapon” (651). Thus, it could be argued that by removing the sexual allure from Circe’s arsenal, a step is taken towards the correction of a stereotype— something that has not been paid as much attention to as the unbridgeable gap between the immortal and the mortal. Despite the ways in which she is different from humans, Circe is, after all, also a woman. Perhaps we ought to remember Butler’s claim and make our peace with Circe as a woman as well as a goddess.
Circling back to the beginning, Welty has indeed given a voice to Circe. Instead of celebrating this fact, however, we can examine what that voice is saying about female experience (collective or not). From there, we can also see how merely giving her voice changes little for Circe. The story is still the same, and Odysseus still leaves her at the end of it. What the voice tells us, however, is that not even a goddess—for all that she is different from humans—is comfortable in being expected to simply serve men, without recognition for her kindness and effort, nor that she will happily wave them off with a smile once abandoned at the end of the story.
3.3. Parodying the Passive Woman: Atwood’s “Circe/Mud Poems”
Margaret Atwood’s rewriting of the Circe-myth comes in the form of a poetry cycle. “Circe/Mud Poems” was first published in the poetry collection You Are Happy in 1974 and consists of 24 poems (the same number as the Books that make up the Odyssey). As is the case with poetry, it is open to many interpretations, and the form may go some ways in explaining why “Circe/Mud Poems” has been understood differently by different scholars. To Nicola Leporini, as discussed in “The Transculturation of Mythic Archetypes: Margaret Atwood’s Circe,” the poetry cycle represents the colonial condition. To Gordon Johnston, it is about time and anxiety about the future, which he explores in “‘The Ruthless Story and the Future Tense’ in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Circe/Mud Poems’.” And to Ostriker, it is, of course, an example of revisionist mythmaking. Ostriker claims that Circe, “who throughout Western literature represents the evil magic of female sexuality, is transformed in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Circe/Mud Poems’ into an angry but also quite powerless woman” (78). At the core of this reading of Atwood’s text is the understanding of Circe’s resistance to old representations as passive, rather than active; and it is this notion of Circe’s passivity that the following analysis will elaborate on.
Like Welty, Atwood retells the Circe-myth from the goddess’ own perspective, with Circe as the speaker of the poems. The one Circe addresses in most of the poems is
presumably Odysseus himself, although in some of them she refers to him as “he” rather than “you.” One of the starkest differences between Welty’s version and Atwood’s is the latter’s emphasis on Circe’s prophetic powers; in fact, these prophetic powers are of more
importance to Atwood’s rewriting than the goddess’ powers of transformation. Furthermore, Atwood creates a link between Circe’s foreknowledge and the myth, told and retold
throughout time. The first and last poems of the cycle are printed in italics and function as a frame for the ones in between. In the opening poem, a boat approaches the island: “you land
on the dry shore // You find what there is” (201). What is there is what has always been there
in the myth, and Circe is well aware of this: “[i]t’s the story that counts. No use in telling me this isn’t a story, or not the same story” (221). However, she worries about the future,
because “[i]n the story the boat disappears one day over the horizon, just disappears, and it doesn’t say what happens then. On the island that is” (221). Atwood’s Circe knows how the story will play out, but she is blind to what lies beyond it—her own future after Odysseus leaves her—seeing as it is not part of the myth. All she can do is allow herself to dream, to imagine, which we learn in the closing poem:
There are two islands
at least, they do not exclude each other
On the first I am right,
the events run themselves through almost without us,
...
The second I know nothing about because it has never happened; (222)
In this reading, the islands become metaphors for the stories—the story Circe knows, and the story she can only imagine. On the first island, in the first story, the one we know well through its many reiterations, the events and Odysseus’ eventual departure are foretold. But on another island, in another story—one that remains untold—anything may happen. The notion that they do not exclude each other disturbs the impression of the first one as the “true” one, and this is one of the ways in which Atwood’s rewriting can be viewed as postmodern parody.
Atwood is no stranger to postmodernism, nor to revisiting Greek myths, and it comes as no surprise, then, that it is possible to spot strategies of postmodern parody in her
rewriting. On that note, it is also possible to argue that Atwood’s representation of Circe is a parodic (although not in the sense of ridicule) one, emphasising through exaggeration the notion of woman as passive object in the story. When Odysseus arrives to Aiaia, Atwood’s Circe states, “I made no choice / I decided nothing // One day you simply appeared in your stupid boat” (205). Moreover, she claims that the transformation of men into pigs “was not [her] fault”, she did not
add the shaggy
rugs, the tusked masks, they happened
I did not say anything, I sat and watched, they happened
because I did not say anything. (203)
She passively watches the story unfold as she knows it will, and because she does nothing, says nothing, it happens. This exaggeration makes Atwood’s Circe far more explicitly passive than Homer’s, and as such a parodied representation. Circe does, however, seem to question the inevitability of the prophecies. At one point she argues:
There must be more for you to do than permit yourself to be shoved by the wind from coast
to coast to coast ...
those whose deaths have been predicted and are therefore dead already? (206).
She cannot change the story, as long as she remains only a passive participant in it, and while she does question the inevitability of it, she ultimately believes in it, too, as seen in the aforementioned quote: “It’s the story that counts. No use telling me this isn’t a story, or not the same story” (221), she claims shortly before Odysseus leaves to continue his journey. The poem then concludes on a bitter note: “Don’t evade, don’t pretend you won’t leave after all: you leave in the story and the story is ruthless” (221), and whatever hope Circe might have had during the earlier poems is gone.
The most explicit imagery of woman as passive is the poem about the mud woman. Circe recounts the tale another traveller told her:
When he was young he and another boy constructed a woman out of mud. She began at the neck and ended at the knees and elbows: they stuck to the essentials. Every sunny day they would row across to the island where she lived, in the afternoon when the sun had warmed her, and make love to her, sinking with ecstasy into her soft moist belly, her brown wormy flesh where small weeds had already rooted. They would take turns, they were not jealous, she preferred them both. Afterwards they would repair her, making her hips more spacious, enlarging her breasts with their shining stone nipples. (214)
At the end of the poem, Circe asks: “Is this what you would like me to be, this mud woman? Is this what I would like to be? It would be so simple.” The image of woman as object could not be clearer, especially considering Circe’s use of ‘what’ instead of ‘who.’ It would be simple to be this mud woman whom men take from, she says, and in context with the other poems, we can begin to understand what she might mean. She would not have to make the
decisions; she would not have to take responsibility; she would be able to continue being a passive observer—one that hardly even thinks to question.
Circe thus remains a passive participant in the unfolding events because she does not believe she can change them. The old, established story is the “true” one, and it will remain as such if action is not taken. The belief that no change can be found leads to passivity, and by remaining passive, all hope of change is lost. We do not know if Circe could have changed anything if she had tried; the answer to such a question remains outside Atwood’s narrative. What Atwood’s rewriting does, however, is show us that with passivity nothing can change at all; by remaining passive, all one can do is dream, while permanently stuck in a desolate reality.
3.4. Resistance and Change: Miller’s Circe
Whereas Welty’s Circe expresses the unfairness of her role, and Atwood’s Circe is caught in her passivity with only dreams of a different story, Miller’s Circe takes her fate in her own hands. The point should also be made that, just like poetry is a form that allows for many different interpretations, the novel allows for a much more detailed narrative.
Moreover, the expanded narrative allows for a world outside the boundaries of Aiaia,
effectively removing Circe’s status as the only woman in the story. Miller’s Circe reads much like the goddess’ fictional autobiography. It not only retells the events featured in the
Odyssey but builds on its extended reference points—such as the lost epic Telegony, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ping)—to create a story that begins with Circe’s
childhood at the court of her father Helios, and ends well after the prophesized death of Odysseus. Miller tells a story where Circe grows into her will, and consequently her powers, and makes her life her own.
The novel opens with the line: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist” (1). At the onset, then, the problem is posed as what Circe is, and it is the central question she struggles with throughout the length of the novel. A witch, Miller’s answer seems to be, someone with the power to transform the world around her—a world full of the stereotypes and suffering of women. Women, in the world of Miller’s novel, are not of equal standing to men. That much becomes abundantly clear already in the opening chapter when Circe is still believed to be a nymph like her mother and countless aunts and cousins. “That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride” (1), Circe narrates, highlighting how a nymph is only worth
something to their parents to trade in marriage for treasure. The more we learn of nymphs, the bleaker the image becomes: “I had heard by then the stories whispered among my cousins, of what [mortal men] might do to nymphs they caught alone. The rapes and ravishments, the
abuses” (26); “[i]f anyone came, I would only be able to scream, and a thousand nymphs before me knew what good that did” (70). It is repeated many times throughout the novel how terrible nymphs are at getting away, and such is the fate for these women: to be used and abused or sold like property between men who only see worth in their beauty. Among these nymphs, there are two who are worth a closer examination: Scylla and Circe’s sister
Pasiphaë. Before turning to Circe herself, they will serve as examples of the roles and experiences of women as problematized by Miller.
After Circe has transformed Glaucous—the mortal man she falls in love with—into a god, she is devastated by his rejection of her in favour of Scylla, “one of the jewels of our halls,” wanted by both “river-gods and nymphs . . . and she liked to raise their hopes with a look and break them with another” (44). Yet, in her jealousy, Circe transforms Scylla into the six-headed monster that settles by Charybdis to feed on the sailors who dare to pass between them—the very act that leads to Circe’s solitary banishment. What Circe believes to be a punishment for Scylla, however, Circe’s brother Aeëtes believes to be the opposite: “Even the most beautiful nymph is largely useless, and an ugly one would be nothing, less than nothing”, he tells Circe, “[b]ut a monster . . . always has a place. She may have all the glory her teeth can snatch. She may not be loved for it, but she will not be constrained either” (61). To simply turn Scylla ugly, Aeëtes argues, would have been the worst possible punishment; what little worth she had as a nymph would be lost with her beauty. To be a monster, this view suggests, is preferable to being the epitome of sexual objectification of women.
Pasiphaë, much like her siblings, also possesses the power of witchcraft. Before such is revealed however, she is married off to King Minos of Crete, mortal son of Zeus, as part of the political power game between Helios and Zeus. We are told that “[i]n Crete, Pasiphaë rules with her poisons” (57), but reality turns out to have an ugly backside, as we come to learn when Circe is invited to Crete to assist with the birth of the Minotaur. When Circe
learns the truth behind the Minotaur’s origin, she “dismissed [Pasiphaë’s] coupling with the bull as some perverse whim, but she was not ruled by appetites; she ruled with them
instead. . . . So the creature must somehow serve her ends” (117). What these ends are, we learn soon thereafter from Pasiphaë herself:
Tell me, what do you think would happen if I did not make monsters and poisons? Minos does not want a queen, only a simpering jelly he keeps in a jar and breeds to death. He would be happy to have me in chains for eternity, and he need only say the word to his own father to do it. But he does not. He knows what I would do to him first. (128)
To breed monsters, to be a monster although not in the shape of one, is the only way for Pasiphaë to be in charge of her own life, to be more than an object for men’s desires. Much like Scylla’s transformation into a literal monster, the implication is that a life as monster is preferable to the positions women are pushed into by the patriarchal society they live in; to be a threat, to be a monster, is better than to be robbed of one’s agency.
Following her banishment to the island of Aiaia, Circe encounters the Olympian god Hermes, and he becomes her lover. He tells her stories of the outside world—the only connection to it Circe has for a long time—and at one point she asks him what happened to Scylla after she was transformed. As Circe learns the truth of how many sailors has fallen victim to Scylla, she narrates: “Hermes was watching me, his head cocked like a curious bird. He was waiting for my reaction. Would I be skimmed milk for crying, or a harpy with a heart of stone? There was nothing between” (86). At that point, Circe chooses to be “[a] bitch with
a cliff for a heart” for the story he would no doubt spin of her (86). She is reminded of the
question again when facing the decision of whether to extend her invitation to Odysseus or not, although at this time she thinks that “[t]hose could not still be the only choices” (183). At the first occasion, her choice is what we would expect a witch to be, part of the monster
ensemble of women who are not conforming to the expectations thrust upon them. The problematization here, however, is that the other side of the coin is as much part of the expectations as the virtuous and passive; the patriarchal society offers two alternatives for women, a simple way of camouflaging the sorting of women into piles of good and evil as the women’s own choice. At the second occasion, however, Circe creates another alternative for herself; she does not have to choose between being “a desperate thing, ready to fawn over anyone who smiled at [her]” or “a fell witch, proving [her] power with sty after sty” (183). Instead, she invites Odysseus as an equal.
Circe’s refusal to accept the fixed options is a repeating pattern throughout Miller’s novel. It begins after her encounter with Prometheus—awaiting his sentence for gifting fire to humans—who tells her that “not every god need be the same” (18). The sentiment becomes something of a mantra to Circe, and in her refusal to be like her family and relatives she— after her transformations of Glaucous and Scylla—chooses to confess her crimes, thinking, “What would they not do?” (53). With her will to resist, Circe’s powers are born and
strengthened, and in her would-be prison of Aiaia, she grows into them fully; it is where she decides she “will not be like a bird bred in a cage, . . . too dull to fly even when the door stands open” (71). Confinement is thus turned into freedom for her, if only a temporary one.
What Circe and her powers are capable of then reaches its peak with the birth of her son Telegonus. Prophesized to be the one to cause Odysseus’ death, Telegonus is targeted by Athena—who favours Odysseus—with the intent to kill him. Athena eventually attempts to bargain with Circe, to promise to send her another man to father her another son, one that will be blessed and favoured by Athena for as long as he lives (219). “I will pass over the fact that you think me a mare to be bred” (220), Circe answers Athena, and makes it clear that she will not agree to Athena’s terms and play the part expected of her: “I had said I would do anything
for [Telegonus], and now I would prove it and hold up the sky” (223). Thus, through her love for her son, Circe chooses to defy a god of Olympus, an act that is unthinkable.
Despite all her powers, the most remarkable thing about Miller’s Circe is her strength of will; and, indeed, it is through her will that her witchcraft is born and strengthened. “What makes a witch, then?” Penelope asks Circe at one time, after Circe has confirmed that it has nothing to do with being a goddess (292-293). The answer Circe gives is simple, yet
powerful: “I have come to believe it is mostly will” (293). It is the will to transform the world around you when the choices open to you are more constraints than possibilities, to instead open new paths where there were none before. This is further emphasised when Miller’s Circe, in the end, chooses to transform herself into a mortal, to live her life instead of being forever locked away on her island, where nothing but her is eternal. In a similar fashion, Miller herself rewrites Circe’s story to change it, instead of doing what so many have done before her and follow the same old inevitable narrative. In this sense, Miller’s novel is perhaps the most feminist revisionist out of all of them.
It may seem strange to insist that it so, seeing as this analysis has done little to compare the events we know well from the Odyssey, as well as Welty and Atwood’s rewritings. Perhaps this paper should have put further emphasis on Circe’s comment that “years later, I would hear a song made of our [her and Odysseus’] meeting. . . . I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. . . . As if there can be no story unless we [women] crawl and weep” (181). However, one of the points of this analysis is to show that the strength of Miller’s feminist rewriting is that she problematizes and resists the old myth. Whether it is for better or for worse, or imaginary political or not, is another discussion entirely. And on that note: whether it makes real cultural change possible (or if such a thing can be done at all) is not the most important thing to ask of Circe. The novel’s strength and value lie in its insistence that
no change at all can be grasped without action, and that no action can be taken without the will to create change.
4. Conclusion
It is difficult to argue against Rosen’s claim that there is little merit in celebrating giving voice to silenced characters or that this should somehow liberate them. Circe remains a fictional character and, as such, rewriting the story has no direct effect on the emancipation of women. However, this does not mean that the endeavour of rewriting old stories is altogether void of value, and not only because of the process’ insistency that the truth appears different depending on the viewpoint. A pattern emerges from these readings: a pattern of pointing to a problem (Welty), exploring why it is a problem (Atwood), and insisting that the only way to solve the problem is to act in resistance (Miller). It is not the quest for a female self, the debate on whether it is possible to speak of a collective female experience, or even the hit-and-run-attacks on stereotypes that emerge as of foremost importance. It is the consistent and persistent argument that there is something problematic in the way women have been
represented in myth, as well as in the many re-representations of the myth over time. Obvious as though it may be, the fact that it keeps being repeated shows that there is still more work to be done.
This paper is, of course, a very limited exploration of feminist rewritings of myth, and there are many more works out there interested in the same undertaking. As Rosen claims, minor-character elaboration is a flourishing genre. The concern of this paper has been limited to three major rewritings of Circe alone, and while a pattern does appear through this reading of them, it may be reinforced or contested by analysing other works aiming to rewrite myths from the female lens. What these works collectively do, however, is what is communicated through the emerging pattern: they question, they criticize, and they actively resist past representations. If the message is that change only happens through resistance and action, and rewriting myth is understood as an act of resistance, then feminist revisionism can perhaps make cultural change possible after all.
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