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

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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

Laseter 7 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”

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(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

Laseter 9 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, reclining on their purple couches. I poured their wine and smiled

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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

Laseter 11 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)

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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

Laseter 13 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

Laseter 14 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

Laseter 15 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

Laseter 16 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.

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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

Laseter 18 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

Laseter 19 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

Laseter 20 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, pharmaka. It was not a look I knew well, among the gods. But I ​

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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:

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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)

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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 becomes more and more in tune with her body as she works, manifesting that feminine natural

Laseter 24 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.

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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

Laseter 26 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

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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)

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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’

Laseter 29 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

Laseter 30 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

Laseter 31 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, or attempted revolt. They stumbled upon the magic of herbs by

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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.

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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

Laseter 34 physical transformation: “My gaze seemed brighter, my face sharper, and there behind me paced my wild lion familiar. I could imagine what my cousins would say if they saw me: my feet dirty from working in the garden, my skirts knotted up around my knees, singing at the height of my frail voice” (Miller, 76). She has physically transformed into her new role, her body reflecting the work she has had to do to become a witch and to become in tune with her powers. But her new sense of identity and power will be tested in every interaction she has with non-animal beings, any interactions where the other person sees her as a woman first.

4.1 Circe & Medea

Circe flourishes in Aiaia, learning to control her powers and feeling like she escaped the oppressive world of the patriarchal dynamics of the immortals - yet every time she encounters another being, mortal or immortal, they serve as a reality check that she continues to exist as a woman first and a pharmakis second. Her role of woman will always trump her role of witch.

One of the most famous tales from Ancient greek mythology, the Argonautica and the relationship between Medea and Jason, features Circe in a crucial role. Medea and Circe are often studied together as they are the two most famous pharmaki, witches, of Greek mythology. Bracke ​ ​ writes,

As these modern adaptations reveal, the ancient stories about Circe and Medea are open to constant modification in order to make the two figures fit into and reflect the altering socio-cultural context in which they are placed. The essentials of their depictions, however, have remained largely unaltered since the Hellenistic period. Circe and Medea are fundamentally represented as women at the margins of society, associated with destructive sexuality and, above all, with powerful, harmful magic. (Bracke, 97)

These two women dare to have power men do not have access to, and therefore they are seen as dangerous. Miller uses them to show the reality of the two ways they can exist in this world as women with power, either trying to constantly hide it and exist in society, using it for a man, or

Laseter 35 to instead keep it for themselves but hide away from the world. They are almost always related to each other, no matter which translation or story; in Miller’s Circe, Medea is Circe’s niece, the ​ ​ daughter of her brother Aeetes. In The Argonautica by Apollinus Rhodius, Medea falls in love with ​ ​ Jason at first sight, struck by Hera with love for the hero. Jason was in search of the Golden

Fleece from Medea’s father Aeetes, and when he requested it from the king, Aeetes allowed

Jason to have a chance to win the fleece whilst secretly plotting how to kill Jason with his own pharmaka. Medea knows what her father is up and worries, “For in her love for Aeson’s son many cares kept her wakeful, and she dreaded the mighty strength of the bulls, beneath whose fury he was like to perish by an unseemly fate in the field of Ares” (Apollonius). Medea snuck out to Jason and his crew,

“Save me, the hapless one, my friends, from Aeetes, and yourselves too, for all is brought to light, nor doth any remedy come. But let us flee upon the ship, before the king mounts his swift chariot. And I will lull to sleep the guardian serpent and give you the fleece of gold; but do thou, stranger, amid thy comrades make the gods witness of the vows thou hast taken on thyself for my sake; and now that I have fled far from my country, make me not a mark for blame and dishonour for want of kinsmen.” She spake in anguish; but greatly did the heart of Aeson’s son rejoice, and at once, as she fell at his knees, he raised her gently and embraced her, and spake words of comfort: “Lady, let Zeus of Olympus himself be witness to my oath, and Hera, queen of marriage, bride of Zeus, that I will set thee in my halls my own wedded wife, when we have reached the land of Hellas on our return.” Thus he spake, and straightway clasped her right hand in his; and she bade them row the swift ship to the sacred grove near at hand, in order that, while it was still night, they might seize and carry off the fleece against the will of Aeetes. (Apollinus)

She calls herself “hapless one”, when in reality she is the only reason even in the original myth that Jason is able to defeat Aeetes’ tests and win the Golden Fleece. He promises her love and fidelity, but Euripides later writes the story of their return and his betrayal of her for another woman the infamy of what she did to help Jason win his crown became too public for him to

Laseter 36 continue to be associated with it. In the original written myth, Apollonius repeats a number of times that Medea was not acting of her own accord but rather was enchanted by Hera to love

Jason so that Jason would survive the trials. In Circe, Miller writes Medea as having significantly ​ ​ more control over the situation, arguably making her story all the more tragic. In Miller’s version,

Circe encounters the young lovers as strangers, two hooded figures who come to her island in search of “the oldest rite of our kind. Katharsis. The cleansing by smoke and prayer, water and ​ ​ blood” (Miller, 142). Circe agrees to help them, to cleanse their souls of the “foul, seeping contagion” from their “unpurified crimes, from deeds done against the gods and from the unsanctified spilling of blood” (Miller, 142). She performs the rite without knowing who these people are or what crimes they have committed. When they reveal themselves, she realizes

Medea is related to her and is not only a demi-god, but also a witch. She listens to Medea tell the story of Jason’s “heroic feats”, the way she actually used magic to help the man she loved win her father’s golden fleece and escape Colchis. She demeans herself in the retelling of the stories to tricks performed by a lovesick princess, as Circe listens: “Now that I knew who she was, such meekness looked absurd on her, like a great eagle trying to hunch down to fit inside a sparrow’s nest. Simple, she called that draught? I had never imagined a mortal might perform any magic, let alone such a powerful charm” (Miller, 145). Circe realizes Medea’s power, and is dismayed she is using it for the benefit of this hero who absolutely is not acknowledging or appreciating it, assuming “a demigoddess saving him at every turn was his only due” (Miller, 146). After she drugs Jason so she can have a real conversation with Circe, Medea becomes much more honest and stops playing the part of the meek bride. She reveals the truth of her ambition to Circe, how she was willing to kill her brother to escape her father and catch herself a prince. Marrying Jason and becoming his queen was the motivation she needed to kill her younger brother while her father watched, and she feels absolutely no remorse. When Circe asked Medea if she had shared

Laseter 37 the true extent of her ability with her now husband, Medea responds: “Of course he does not, are you mad? Every time he looked at me, he would think of poisons and burning skin. A man wants a wife like new grass, fresh and green.” (Miller, 149) Medea is hiding the extent of her power and her ambition in order to fulfill the role of wife, of subject to a husband who in this case is literally a king. Circe is concerned“he is still half a child, and full mortal besides. He cannot understand your history, nor your witchcraft” (Miller, 149). Medea’s response is telling, because she is willing to lose her entire identity as a powerful witch, a powerful woman, in a patriarchal society: “He need not understand them. We are married now, and I will give him heirs and he will forget all this like a fever dream. I will be his good wife, and we will prosper.”

(Miller, 149) Medea and Circe have very different ideas about how women should access power in their society. Circe cannot understand why Medea would prioritize the role of wife over the role of pharmakis, going so far as to suggest to Medea to abandon her new husband:

‘Let him be a hero. You are something else.’ ‘And what is that?’ In my mind I saw us already, our heads bent together over the purple flowers of aconite, the black roots of moly. I would rescue her from her tainted past. ‘A witch,’ I said. ‘With unbound power. Who need answer to none but herself.’ ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Like you? A pathetic exile, who stinks of her loneliness?’ (Miller, 150)

Circe views herself as a potential savior to this young woman, a guide into a position of power within the world of mortals and gods. Their abilities, their pharmakeia, binds the two women together and sets them apart from the rest of the world. Medea is clearly more capable at heroic deeds than her husband Jason is, as evidenced from the way she rescues him from her father

(Miller, 145). Circe believes all Medea really needs is a teacher, an immortal like herself, to harness the power she already possesses and controls. It is telling in Circe’s response to Medea that she believes herself to be above the power structures of Ancient Greek society, without a

Laseter 38 need for a husband to give her identity and as someone who need not have her power subdued by the constraints of the society she existed in. Medea provides a reality check for Circe, however, pointing out Circe only feels like she answers to no one because no one seems to care about her existence at all. She is completely isolated and almost forgotten about on the island of

Aiaia, and though she has been able to harness and develop her pharmakeia in her isolation, it is almost irrelevant to have these powers because she still exists primarily as a failed nymph-bride in any sort of society she might encounter. Medea’s retort to Circe “stripped me to my skin, and

I saw myself now in her eyes: a bitter, abandoned crone, a spider, scheming to suck out her life”

(Miller, 150-151). Medea’s words take away the blanket of isolation and subsequent power Circe feels she possesses, and makes her back into just a woman, a female body existing in the realities of a patriarchy. To have powers like Medea and Circe only serves to make them “Other” in any world where they would have real social interaction. They cannot exist as pharmakis separately from their existence as women, and in fact being a female pharmakis makes their lives even more difficult than simply being women. Circe (rightfully, based on Euripedes’ Medea) predicts the ​ ​ people of Iolcos will call her “that villainess, that foreign witch. She carved out her own kin, what worse evils does she work even now? Cast her out, cleanse the land and take a better in her place” (Miller, 151). As Kimberely Stratton discusses in her book, feminine magic was used to further control women’s roles and access to power within the patriarchal discourse.

Discourse confers and regulates power. Once the notion magic exists, it takes on a social reality: it can operate as a form of social control through the fear of accusation. It can also exist as a new form of ritual practice: individuals can decide to do magic once the notion of magic exists and is conceived to be a source of power. The construction of the concept enables the performance. Whether it is understood to be subversive or not depends on the intentions of the practitioner, the interpretation of the observer, and the possibilities of interpretation available in that culture. Magic constitutes a discursive practice to the extent that naming someone or something magic, performing a ritual understood to be magic, or choosing to promulgate a different understanding of

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magic (as Apuleius does in his defense speech) all constitute forms of social action.” (Stratton, 18)

These women will never actually be as powerful as their magic should allow them to be, because their magic puts them at the mercy of those without magic to judge, accuse, isolate, exile and even kill them. They cannot exist within the normal realm of their mortal society because their magic is, as Stratton says, “social action” (Stratton, 18). Medea seems to know this and is choosing to remain within the societal expectations of women being a wife and supporter of her husband, relying only on faith in Jason to support and protect her once they reach his homeland.

She knows she exists within the discourse if she remains unisolated, and even in her isolation

Circe is not truly exempt from the constraints of the discourse. Circe’s isolation is her only protection from the world treating her like a woman, a female body that has not complied, and sometimes the island of Aiaia is not enough.

4.2 The Rape of Circe

Circe’s body and role as nymph places her explicitly in the role of “pre-victim” (Cahill,

52). Her position as an immortal is not enough to guarantee her safety in the world of gods and men: she was raised on stories of “nymphs ravished and abused by mortals” (Miller, 31). When she finds herself alone on Aiaia, she realizes, “if anyone came, I would only be able to scream, and a thousand nymphs before me knew what good that did” (Miller, 70). Isolated on a potentially dangerous island, Circe’s first thought of a violent attack is not someone coming to murder her, but rather to rape her. Ann Cahill discusses rape within the discource of power as a uniquely sexual and uniquely feminine assault. She writes,

What is important in this comparison is that where women are encouraged or mandated to restrict their movement for safety’s sake, the danger described is not to the body in general. That danger is almost always specifically sexualized. That is, the reason that men can travel where women ought not to is only that women can be and are raped (whereas men can be, but are not

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often), not that women can be and are mugged or beaten up (as in fact men can be, and are). (Cahill, 55)

Rape cannot be simply defined as an assault, the same as punching someone or kicking them until they pass out. Though obviously rape is something that can happen to both genders, women’s bodies are taught to be controlled by the woman from before she can even process what is happening, at an age so young she grows up only knowing what it means to attempt to protect her body from this ever present sexual threat. Cahill argues that women’s fear of rape, that it will happen, that they will be blamed for it, expresses the power dynamic which blames women for their own sexual assaults. This power dynamic also inscribes the idea of culpable feminine sexuality, which incites men to rape - women are taught to view their own body as dangerous and as threatening in that it might incite a man to rape her.

The threat of rape, then, is a constitutive and sustained moment in the production of the feminine body. It is the pervasive danger which renders so much public space off-limits, a danger so omnipresent, in fact, that the “safety zone” which women attempt to create rarely exceeds the limits of their own limbs, and quite often falls far short of that radius. Women not only consider their flesh to be inherently weak and breakable, but also violable. The truth inscribed on the woman’s body is not that, biologically, all men are potential rapists. It is rather that, biologically, all women are potential rape victims. (Cahill, 56)

Miller works into the text comments from those in positions of power their views on nymphs as potential rape victims, as is fitting of the myths of Ancient Greece. To give one example,

Hermes and Circe have an interaction about the unruly daughters that are being sent to Aiaia, nymphs who must spend some time away from the glittering halls of the immortals as punishment for not listening to their fathers.

‘Use your imagination, they must be good for something. Take them to your bed.’ ‘That is absurd,’ I said. ‘They would run screaming.’ ‘Nymphs always do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at getting away.’

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At a feast on Olympus such a jest would have been followed by a roar of laughter. Hermes waited now, grinning like a goat. But all I felt was a white, cold rage. (Miller, 158-159)

The men in this society, from the most powerful of the Olympians to any mere mortal who stumbled upon one, viewed nymphs as potential rape victims as Cahill says.

Circe has been taught from birth that she was always at risk of rape, yet when she has her first actual encounter with a group of men alone she trusts in her role of pharmakis and their lack of magic and mortality, and subsequently views them as helpless mortals rather than men who could hurt her. As in the scene with the boar, she again has been so distant from the realities of the male gaze that she has ceased to be afraid of what it could do to her. She welcomes a boat of sailors who have fallen on hardship into her house, sending away all of her nymphs and her lion so as not to overwhelm the men, and she serves them a meal, delighting in what she views as reverence when they call her “goddess”: “I could not stop smiling. The fragility of mortals bred kindness and good grace” (Miller, 161). They marvel at her house, astounded at its beauty and her wealth, loudly whispering to each other their hopes of her slaughtering a pig for their dinner. As the meal begins, they start referring to her not as goddess but as “sweet” (Miller, 162), harkening back to the reference to Helios’ comment about nymphs being “ripe” for men to consume (Miller, 51). Indeed, it is telling the shift in title goes from identifying her as a being to identifying her just as an adjective, something that is docile and pleasing. The change in tone does bring pause to Circe, but she becomes charmed by the idea, still confident in her position of “ruler” of Aiaia and her pharmakeia. She hosts the entire meal, planning her future as a welcomer of lost men and hostess to thankful mortals and relishing in the company of being with those who do not seem to fear or hate her. Finally, of course, the men of the ship need to give thanks for the meal and comforts of home she has provided them, and thanks would have to be given to the man she represents. They first ask about her husband,

Laseter 42 and then her father, then brother, trying to assess which man she belongs to, all the while Circe eagerly anticipating how they would be amazed she was an independent woman, nay a goddess, that they had been blessed to eat with. She says:

‘If you would thank your host,’ I said, ‘thank me. This house is mine alone.’ At the word, the air changed in the room. I plucked up the wine-bowl. ‘It is empty,’ I said. ‘Let me bring you more.’ I could hear my own breath as I turned. I could feel their twenty bodies filling up the space behind me. In the kitchen, I put a hand to one of my draughts. You are being silly, I thought. They were surprised to find a woman by herself, that is all. But my fingers were already moving. I took the life off a jar, mixed its contents into the wine, then added honey and whey to cover the taste. I brought the bowl out. Twenty gazes followed me. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘I have kept the best for last. You must have some, all of you. It comes from the finest vineyard on Crete.’ They smiled, pleased as such solicitous luxury. I watched every man fill his cup. I watched them drink. By then each of them must have had a cask in his belly. The platters were empty, licked clean. The men leaned together, speaking low. My voice felt too loud. ‘Come, I have fed you well. Will you tell me your names?’ They looked up. Their eyes darted like ferrets to their leader. He rose, the bench scraping on the stone. ‘Tell us yours first.’ There was something in his voice. I almost said it then, the spellword that would send them to sleep. But even after all the years that had passed, there was a piece of me that still only spoke what was bid. ‘Circe,’ I answered. The name meant nothing to them.” (Miller, 163)

She knows the moment she has lost the assumed protection of a male relative, if that would have even been enough to save her. She has been conditioned her entire life to be wary of men and what they will do to her body, so much so she literally drugs them with a draught that could render them all immobile and therefore powerless. She uses her hands to create the tangible part of her pharmakeia, the potion the men need to consume, and she goes as far as to trick them into drinking it. Circe seems to know what is coming here, is fearful of the rape which does

Laseter 43 occur, though the reader must wonder if there is something else going on. This is a retelling of the past, of an event that will go on to completely alter Circe’s psyche. Cahill writes,

The typical reactions of a rape victim, marked by overwhelming guilt and self-loathing, are the reactions of a person who should have known but temporarily forgot that she was always at risk, that in fact the risk followed her everywhere she went, that it was inescapable. To have believed for even a moment that she was not in danger, for whatever reason, is felt to be the cause of the attack. (Cahill, 60)

This is exactly what is going through Circe’s mind in the retelling of her traumatic experience.

Cahill argues women’s fear of rape, that it will happen, that they will be blamed for it, expresses the power dynamic which blames women for their own sexual assaults. The reader can hear the anger she holds towards herself for not stopping it, when she knew what was coming. Circe sits ​ ​ exactly within the discourse as a woman who was raped and even in her own story, her own narrative, cannot allow herself any sense of forgiveness. Her sense of self and her sense of power are forever shifted as a result of this violence. Foucault, in an interview, said,

Mastery and awareness of one's own body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics, exercises, muscle-building, nudism, glorification of the body beautiful. All of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of one's own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies. But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one's own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counterattack in that same body. (Foucault, 56)

Circe felt she had mastered her magic, her body, her island. She assumed the possession of any kind of power marked her as safe from those who wished to do her harm, especially from men.

But this horrific trauma brutally brought back the reality that she had not escaped the power

Laseter 44 structures of her society, she had merely been hiding from them. These men felt ownership over her body just because it was a female body. They only hesitated when they thought a man might already have ownership over her body, and when she felt freely admitted she was a woman alone, she truly became a woman alone. Cahill argues the difference between assault with a penis and with any other part of the body, as Foucault argues there is no difference, is actually based not on the bodily phenomenon of rape, but also on the social production of the feminine body.

Her overall argument is that redefining rape as simply a physical assault would hide aspects of the crime which directly impact women’s experiences and bodies, therefore “constitute the current phenomenon of rape itself in important ways” (Cahill, 46). Foucault argues that power does not emanate from one position of authority, but rather power produces social bodies and realities and thus is diffused not from one place but from social structures (Foucault, 60). “In this model, what is significant is not only who has power over whom, but how power has produced the specific and characteristic moments of a discursive reality” (Cahill, 47). Power is a subtle, creative force that seeks to influence decisions on an identity creating level, and thus the body is the site where this is manifested. Circe already was existing in the world as a “pre-victim” of rape, destined to live her life as all women do. (Cahill, 52) This act will transform her sense of self and her inhabiting of her body and the world forever.

The effect of Circe’s rape is that her sense of self and her confidence in her power has been fully cemented as living within the patriarchal power structures, and her choices post trauma are a direct reflection of the sexual violence done to her body. Circe’s voice is only powerful when she exists in isolation on her island; when she has to enter back into society in any capacity, even on her own island, men can eliminate her voice and erase the power she learns how to wield with an attack on her body. When Miller goes on to describe the attack itself, she focuses on the violence perpetrated against Circe’s body and more specifically, against her voice.

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The captain blocks her throat, rendering her unable to speak the words that would awaken her pharmakeia, though he was unaware of this and only did so because, “I had said there was no one on the island, but he had learned not to take chances. Or perhaps he just didn’t like screaming” (Miller, 164). There is a disruption of the essence of her power here; Circe’s body has become the vessel through which she can perform her magic, the tool for her to wield in making draughts and searching for herbs. But the sap of the flowers that runs through her blood, the agent for her magic, is only awakened through her mind and her voice. When she is silenced, she almost ceases to be a witch, and loses her position of power. She recounts thinking, “I am only a nymph after all, for nothing is more common among us than this” (Miller, 164). Not only has her sense of peace and power been ruined, but in her trauma she again thinks of the powerful male gods of Olympus and wonders if they will acknowledge what has occured to her. Just like when she seemed desperate to be punished for her transformation of Scylla, she craves an acknowledgement from her father about what has just happened to her and what she has done in return:

My aunt Selene’s chariot had been full all night, her light strong in the sky. By the brightness of her face I had dragged those monstrous carcasses down to the boat, struck flint and watched the flames leap up. She would have told Helios by now. My father would appear any moment, the patriarch outraged at the insult to his child. My ceiling would creak as his shoulders pressed against it. Poor child, poor exiled daughter. I should never have let Zeus send you here.

The room turned grey, then yellow. A sea breeze stirred, but it was not enough to push away the stink of burnt flesh. My father had never spoken that way in his life, I knew it. But surely, I thought, he would still have to come, if only to reproach me. I was no Zeus, I would not be allowed to strike down twenty men in a moment. I spoke out to the pale edge of my father’s rising chariot. Did you hear what I did? (Miller, 167)

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Her first desire is for comfort from her father, but within the context of him believing that her rape was a slight against his child, almost as an extension of him. It is not the harm done to her body as an individual but the fact that he is a great god and that to hurt one of his offspring is to hurt him. Possibly she knows this is the only way her father views her, and any chance of comfort would only come this way. And in the face of no outrage on her behalf, she wants instead for him to acknowledge and punish her for what she did to these men in return. Her rape is not enough to garner anger from the more powerful immortals, but she wants Helios to be angry at her display of power and her recklessness of killing these men. Circe still views herself as worthy or unworthy, powerful or not in the light of how her father and the other male gods react to her choices. She lives within this society, though she spent her time on Aiaia thinking she had escaped it.

Circe’s magical retaliation to her assault exposes the truth of these men’s characters, and is an act that many women reading this novel would relate to on a visceral level. In the immediate moments following her attack:

Convulsively, I swallowed. My throat clicked. I felt a space open in me. The sleep-spell I had been going to say was gone, dried up, I could not have cast it even if I wanted to. But I did not want to. My eyes lifted to his rutted face. Those herbs had another use, and I knew what it was. I drew breath and spoke my word. His eyes were muddy and uncomprehending. ‘What ---’ He did not finish. His ribcage cracked and began to bulge. I heard the sound of flesh rupturing wetly, the pops of breaking bone. His nose ballooned from his face and his legs shrivelled like a fly sucked by a spider. He fell to all fours. He screamed, and his men screamed with him. It went on for a long time. As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all. (Miller, 165)

In raping her, the men silenced Circe and made her only a female body, there for their sexual satisfation and without any sort of singularity of her own. In her revenge, Circe uses her magic to disembody them, removing all humanity and all bodily forms from their being and reducing

Laseter 47 them just to the most disgusting phallic symbol.. In his piece “Kirke’s Men: Swine and

Sweethearts”, Brilliant writes,“the imagery of men as ‘pigs’ has an arresting power due, no doubt in part, to the piggish behavior of pigs, gluttony and lust being their salient characteristics”

(Brilliant, 165). They become only their screams, and she relishes in the fact that they are not ​ ​ silent as she was forced to be. Circe “actualizes the swinishness of men” (Brilliant, 168). Her slaughter of the men as pigs is intriguing and is a bodily violence. But rape remains a female experience, as Cahill writes: “For the male subject, the threat presented is one of the destruction of the body; for the feminine body, the trenchant threat is one aimed at their sexual being and freedom.” (Cahill, 55) The men’s bodies have been destroyed, but Circe is the one who has to continue living in a body that has been violated and her sense of power disrupted. It is a vindictive character, and one easily recognizable from the original myths, but in this story she is justified. Her acts of magic are no longer senseless and evil, but actually a way of administering justice. She cannot escape her female form and the legacy of rape, but she can dole out vengeance in a way many women would find comforting.

Circe’s rape awakens her to the knowledge that she exists within the patriarcihial power structures as a woman first, and she uses this knowledge to push back against the discourse with every group of mortal men who arrive on her island. When she realizes the gods, her father

Helios and Zeus and the like, do not even consider her enough to punish her for the deaths of twenty mortals, she decides to push back on the expectations of her power and what she should do with it regarding the mortal men who keep coming to her island. If she cannot become powerful enough to disrupt the immortal power structures as a pharmakis, she is going to use those same powers to disrupt the belief of mortal men that she is a woman before she is a witch:

“Let them see what I am. Let them learn the world is not as they think” (Miller, 169). Circe is most famous in the original Homeric epics for her antics of turning men into pigs, seemingly for

Laseter 48 no reason. Miller gives her rationale, justifies the way Circe tricks men and ends their lives, making the argument that the world is actually a better place when Circe transforms them into their piggish realities. Miller is clear in noting Circe does not do this to every group that comes automatically, that there were some who genuinely were “so grateful for my help. A few of these, so few I can count them on my fingers, I let go. They did not see me as their dinner.” (Miller,

169) But Circe begins to relish in the test, waiting for “the next crew to come, so I might see again their tearing flesh. There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. He had a cold eye and a coiling tension” (Miller, 169). And what woman reading this, or the millions of women who came before the publication and who will come after, does not have a memory of seeing that look in a man’s eyes, and feeling the knowledge that there is a cruelty in that man, a knowledge her body was in a specific kind of danger that binds women around the world and throughout time together? She lures them in with her singing, testing the groups again and again to see if they will try to hurt her. Because they think she is just a woman, the men do not have any thought to what powers she might hold. Her human voice, which gave the first group of men who raped her the confidence she was nothing but a woman to be taken and not an immortal, now uses said voice to lay traps for the men who will make the same assumption. Only now Circe is armed with the traumatic knowledge of what men will do, they will not be successful. Bracke argues Circe is different from Olympian gods,

for they always venture among mortals in disguise, and inevitably take on the voice of whichever person they imitate, whether it be, for example, that of an old woman or of a young man. Circe, however, shows herself in her own shape to the Greeks, and therefore, they also hear her own voice. This renders her more menacing, as there is no barrier between mortals and Circe’s divine identity. (Bracke, 92)

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Aeetes had been the one to reveal to his sister that her voice was not just unpleasant to other gods, but rather it was the voice of a human. He told her “if you are ever among men, you’ll notice it: they won’t fear you as they fear the rest of us.” (Miller, 82) In the wake of her rape

Circe begins to use the lack of fear men have of her to lure them to her island, preying on their assumptions that she is simply prey. Circe wants to be known to the mortals because she knows she can only be powerful as a witch over a mortal, never as a woman over a man. Circe is relishing the power she holds over the mortal men in her knowledge she will not just become another victim: “the men watched with bright eyes. They wanted the freeze, the flinch, the begging that would come. It was my favourite moment, seeing them frown and try to understand why I wasn’t afraid. In their bodies I could feel my herbs like strings waiting to be plucked. I savoured their confusion, their dawning fear. Then I plucked them” (Miller, 170). Circe has pushed back on the expectations of what a woman should be by becoming the perpetrator of fear, taking the role of violator from the men. Helene Cixous writes, “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. To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process.” (Cixous, 880) Knowing she has the pharmakeia flowing through her veins, and she was able to drug the men without them becoming aware, flips the script and puts her in the place of the men’s usual position. One cannot read these scenes without comparing them to a modern context, thinking about men in bars slipping drugs into a woman’s drink and waiting for her to lose the ability to fight back. But even as she takes on the role of violator of bodies, Circe still does not hurt the men in a sexual way. Rape remains a female violation, and therefore she remains in the role of female body first and foremost and within the power structures always. Perhaps one could argue that she has a

Laseter 50 masculine satisfaction, that her magic becomes stronger and more powerful as she channels more and more of the same violent feelings that first ignited her pharmakeia in the first place. Her ​ ​ anger became her fuel, and she lived in this space of her sickness with men that after decades and decades, “I did not wait any more for them to stand and come at me” (Miller, 173). Circe’s magic is again not just transformational of its objects, but expositional both of the object’s true nature and of her own true desires. She reveals the all consuming anger she has towards men and the oppressive patriarchal systems that perpetuate masculine assumptions of ownership of female bodies. Her magic, instead of being liberating and centered around her, stays centered around men’s actions.

4.3 Conclusion

I have argued in this chapter that Circe is unable to exert her magic and potential to the fullest extent in the world outside of Aiaia because she is always situated as a woman, and specifically I have looked here at how she is always either a “pre-victim” or victim of rape.

Medea, in some capacity a mirror for Circe’s quest for power, refuses to join her in creating a sisterhood of witchcraft and prioritizes her own place as bride in the patriarchal society of

Ancient Greece. Medea diminishes Circe’s position of pharmakis because she pities her isolation, bringing Circe to the realization that she only has power in a limited way. Miller also reexamines

Circe’s most infamous deeds, turning men into pigs, and justifies her anger through a traumatic rape backstory. She places Circe as victim, someone who is violated in the most patriarchal way and in the rape is not only violated in her body but literally silenced from exerting her power.

Circe remains in the legacy of her unprocessed trauma, motivated always by the actions of men.

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Chapter Five: Revisionist Mythmaking - Limitations of the Body of Work

The goal of revisionist mythmaking is to reappropriate a male space for female empowerment. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes defines myth as “a system of communication, that ​ ​ it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (Barthes, 107). Myths refer to the false representations and invalid beliefs prevalent in the society which we accept as “natural.” Barthes suggests myths not only reflect and explain perceived reality of their time but also convey powerful messages about how this reality should be and how people should behave, providing an ethos of sorts for the society the myth belongs to and all those who continue to study it. Myths are constructed in such a way that they legitimize certain perspectives of culture, history and society. Revisionist mythmakers look to criticize this legitimization. Adrienne Rich, in her essay

“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, writes “Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction-is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” (Rich, 18). Revisionist mythmaking is defined as such: when the author repurposes the original tale for their own original creative purpose. There is something classic and true recognizable within the original myth, and this typically archetypal connection gives the reader an immediate knowledge basis, therefore allowing the author to subvert the original themes and ideas to further develop their work (Ostriker, 72). Alicia Osriker’s article “The

Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking” analyzes how female writers can use revisionist mythmaking to reclaim historically male dominated language and myth for a feminine gain. She argues using myths reinforces the fact that myths themselves create the truths

Laseter 52 of our society because of their repeated use, but by reclaiming this repetition it allows for a new truth to be subverted, especially for traditionally female language such as flowers, water, and earth (Ostriker, 71). As discussed earlier, Circe’s power comes from her selfish use of the Earth, and is ignited in the Glacos episode by her rage, a typically masculine emotion. Miller’s novel follows this line of thought through her development of Circe’s power and her voice, drawing on the original Homeric epithets of the witch as well as using Ovid’s Metamorphoses to explain her ​ ​ jealousy of Scylla and the awakening of Circe’s powers. In her article “When We Dead Awaken:

Writing as Re-Vision”, Adrienne Rich compares the work of two female poets who were working within the framework of mythmaking and says this:

It strikes me that in the work of both Man appears as, if not a dream, a fascination and a terror; and that the source of the fascination and the terror is, simply, Man's power-to dominate, tyrannize, choose, or reject the woman. The charisma of Man seems to come purely from his power over her and his control of the world by force, not from anything fertile or life-giving in him. And, in the work of both these poets, it is finally the woman's sense of herself-embattled, possessed-that gives the poetry its dynamic charge, its rhythms of struggle, need, will, and female energy. (Rich, 19)

Miller’s Circe absolutely finds its energy Circe’s search for herself in a world controlled by Man. ​ ​ Within the framework of revisionist mythmaking, Circe does develop into a woman with relative agency and a sense of self, and reading it alongside with The Odyssey or other original myths ​ ​ absolutely allows the reader to see a 21st century woman. Miller does a beautiful job painting a picture of a woman who experiences a very real bodily trauma and the subsequent repercussions, a desperation for power and acknowledgement from her society - all truths that any female reader today would identify with over the almost stock character of the ancients. As already examined, Miller gives many of the female characters in her novel agency and a development of character significantly more nuanced and interesting and real than anything the ancients would

Laseter 53 have ever bothered writing about a woman. Medea is aware of her own power and what it means to give up her magic for the power of being a wife and queen, Scylla’s monstrosity comes from an internal character that manifests as a murderous beast. But while the novel does give a feminist heroine to the world of the Olympians, being stuck within that same world means that it cannot really push itself out of the patriarchial expectations that have to exist in the story for it to be recognizable as an ancient Greek myth. Spaeth wrote “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” (Spaeth, 47). This symbolism of the witch can be applied to the process of revisionist mythmaking - the female witch, when written to overthrow the expectations of what it means to be a woman in the world of the myth, inverts the laws of the patriarchy that wrote the myth and chaos can erupt as it stops being recognizable as the myth at all. Therein lies the dilemma of rewriting myths: can the marginalized characters from these stories be given autonomy, agency and power when they have to still be written recognizably as the original myths? Should writers be focusing on subverting the canonical patriarchal works, or writing new stories unrecognizably liberated from these binds? Rich ends her piece with the following:

Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society. They must go on being tapped and explored by poets, among others. We can neither deny them, nor can we rest there. They are our birth-pains, and we are bearing ourselves. We would be failing each other as writers and as women, if we neglected or denied what is negative, regressive, or Sisyphean in our inwardness. We all know that there is another story to be told...We can go on trying to talk to each other, we can sometimes help each other, poetry and fiction can show us what the other is going through; but women can no longer be primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut out for us. (Rich, 25)

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The myths are built into society, and they contain the reality of many female experiences woven into their stories. The Homeric epic poems are foundational to Western society, and arguably the most globally canonical works read in literature classrooms around the world. There is something empowering and important about going in and rewriting these stories to give marginalized groups that were written out or written harmfully a place in this foundation, but as

Rich says, there is a balance to strike. The process of rewriting within the body of works already existent limits the potential growth historically oppressed groups can exercise, but at the same time exploring their stories of oppression and giving them agency within an oppressive structure is crucial to do with stories that have fundamentally shaped Western society and literature.

Miller’s Circe is limited within the novel because she does remain a woman first and foremost, and in the stories of Ancient Greece can not escape that role and the significance of inhabiting that form. Within the confines of the patriarchal myths Circe does triumph as a woman who emerges with a sense of self and a sense of her own power, but Miller herself cannot write Circe out of the mythical world.

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Conclusion

In this thesis, I have investigated the way Circe and the novel itself are stuck within a body - Circe’s own female one, and within a patriarchal body of mythological works. I have studied Miller’s novel examining the way Circe’s bodily designation of nymph, or bride, explicitly ​ ​ sets her as an object for possession by the male individuals of her society. Born to be possessed, she is the lowest of the low as the least desirable of the nymphs due to her physical and her human voice. She’s taught from a young age that her body is something to use for performance, to attract the attention of men, not to manifest her own individual desires, as examined through the lens of Young’s article. Living in the patriarchal society of the gods, she will always be a female body first, and her potential power as a pharmakis cannot overcome her womanhood in the dominant power structures. When forced into isolation on Aiaia as punishment for seeking out power that was not supposed to be hers, she is able to finally escape the male gaze and expectation for her own body and utilize it to develop her powers - really encompassing the practice of witchcraft. Her magic, the pharmaka she discovers inside of herself pushes her to take ​ ​ ​ ownership of her abilities, yet when she speaks up to the patriarchal powers that be her throat is literally forced ablaze by her father, silencing her claims to power. Within the magic discourse, women and minorities who have claimed power through magic have been vilified and seuxalized, particularly women. Miller’s portrayal of Circe examines this process, as she is unable to exist both as a woman and a pharmakis in the mythological world. She has to be isolated in order to use her voice, and it is only when she is alone that she is able to fully realize her potential. Every time she comes into contact with the patriarchal society, she is unable to prioritize her voice and abilities and is reduced to her body once again. This occurs with Medea and with the sailors who come to her island; even when Circe is attempting to celebrate her own power, it remains in the confines of the patriarchy. She stays isolated on Aiaia in order to be powerful, and her

Laseter 56 interactions with the outside world are encompassed by the legacy of her traumatic rape. The character Circe is pushing back against the world she is stuck in, but no matter how much she pushes and becomes a singular female pharmakis that is feared and remembered, she is always stuck as a female pharmakis. This is the same problem the book as a whole finds itself in - as a revisionist myth, it can push against the patriarchal stereotypes of Ancient Greek mythology, but at some point it cannot push out of the discourse because it has to remain recognizable as the very same myth.

Circe’s power is intrinsically tied up with her body throughout this novel. Her body is both the singular barrier to power wherever she goes, though it is also the vessel of her power; her voice activates her magic, yet is dependent on her body’s ability to speak in a male dominated world where a woman’s body can be forced to be quiet. Miller develops the question of the female body as both liberator and prison for the woman who embodies it through her exploration of Circe’s narrative. Circe’s power to transform, her “pharmakeia, such arts are called, ​ ​ for they deal in pharmaka, those herbs with the power to work changes upon the world” (Miller, ​ ​ 57) comes from within her female body, yet her body is transformed throughout the entire text; her body’s power is reactionary to the way power is inflicted upon her body by men. In keeping with themes from the original Greek myths, men continually render her unable to speak, as her voice is the source of her power. Circe’s witchcraft, this meeting of knowledge and body, is enacted through her voice. Only in isolation, a utopian ideal where no men nor other women exist, only one goddess in nature, is she able to live a completely whole life. The main issue with

Miller’s novel, and with her heroine, is that it exists within a patriarchy - within a society that must remain a patriarchy in order to be recognizable as the society it was. Within the framework of revisionist mythmaking, Miller begins to explore a nuanced set of female characters who are monstrous and powerful in their own ways, using the symbolic voice to send a message to

Laseter 57 readers about the ability to speak up for oneself and tell your own story. In the world of

#metoo, this seemed like a crucial reworking of an ancient truth. A woman’s body was violated and she had to learn how to live with that trauma. The world of Circe seemed barely different from the world of the 21st century, so a woman pushing boundaries and searching for her own power in that framework was celebrated. Pharmaka and the discourse of magic seemed to be the perfect meeting place of the body and the mind, and a particular type of ability that required hard work and no assumed power. But the novel has to remain noticeably mythological, and the world of the myths does not really allow a complete and total feminist reworking. Access to magic began to feel like access to power, and a way out of the traditional roles of being a nymph and simply a female body in the immortal hierarchy, yet throughout the novel she remains within the patriarchal discourse. Miller’s novel does the same. That is not to say it should not be read and examined as a counterpoint to the original myths, because it absolutely should. The novel, and Circe’s, place in the patriarchy and its struggle for recognition and voice resonated with readers for a reason, and gives a glimmer of hope for some sort of acknowledgement of a female force to be reckoned with in our own world.

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Works Cited

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Brilliant, Richard. “Kirke’s Men: Swine and Sweethearts” The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in ​ Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Beth Cohen. Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 165-175 ​ ​ ​

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Euripides, Diane Arnson Svarlien, and Robin Mitchell-Boyask. Medea. Indianapolis: Hackett, ​ ​ 2008.

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Ovid, and Henry T. Riley. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. H.G. Bohn,, 1858, ​ ​ http://hdl.handle.net/2027/msu.31293101935405.

Quinn, Annalisa. “Circe' Gives The Witch Of The Odyssey A New Life.” NPR, 11 April 2018. ​ ​ https://www.npr.org/2018/04/11/599831473/circe-gives-the-witch-of-the-odys

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