Madeline Miller's Circe As a Feminist Revisionist Myth
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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 12573191 Date of Submission: June 25 2020 Laseter 1 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. Laseter 2 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 Laseter 3 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). Laseter 4 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 Laseter 5 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. Laseter 6 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.