“The truth is, we live like bats, labor like beasts, and die like worms.”
A long winded analysis of femininity in Madeline Miller’s Circe:
Circe is a goddess. And she is a witch. And a mother and a daughter and a sister and a lover. But she is also, and most importantly, a woman. And that is the most striking thing about Miller’s characterization. Her womanhood is neither an insignificant piece of her character nor the only part that matters. She is not a great character despite being a woman nor is she a great character merely because she is a woman. She is a well-rounded (and well-written) character in her own right with femininity intricately woven through each one of her steps and stumbles and never thrown in your face as a show of diversity, as false proof of equality. She has both vivid strengths and fierce flaws and neither are written to appeal to the male gaze. Her faults are not attached solely to her femininity, but are instead fleshed out and complex and difficult to understand. They sneak up on us like a shadow, looming in the back of the reader’s mind, always present but never truly seen. Glimpsed through a window clouded with fog. But Miller never lets us evade the truth, forget the fact that existing as a woman is hard. There is no easy way out. Be too strong and too independent and the world will prove to you how weak you are. Have too many flaws, make too many mistakes and they will laugh in your face to say we told you so.
There is also, I think, this aspect of surviving as a woman in a world that would wish nothing more than to see you bleeding on the ground. Pasiphaë highlights the destructiveness of playing the games of men, the ones intended to take a woman’s voice and feed it to the wolves before letting it be heard. Circe refuses to play along, and ends up under the boots of men anyways. We are consistently reminded that there is no escape from the whims and wishes and wars of men. The men in Circe’s story are self-absorbed and dismissive and cruel, and even the half-decent ones are shaded grey by most of her narrative. Miller knows that existing as a woman means there can be no redundancy, the price will always be too steep. Because redundant means not needed and not needed is as good as dead. You must be beautiful and useful and obedient and silent, and for many of us that story becomes exhausting. We survive in spite of men, and the resulting resentment turns men into pigs.
Reading Circe was a complicated experience for me. The prose, the plot, the characterizations, they were each of them stunning, and I think everyone should read this work of art. But it also left me with a profound sense of grief. I felt absolutely gutted by the end. This was not the grief of TSOA, that familiar, mournful empathy. This was somehow deeper, like all those things I already knew had been reinforced with a stark reality that felt … brutal. Thousands of years after the fact, hundreds of translations later, and Circe is the witch in Odysseus’ story. Medusa’s head is proof of Perseus’ bravery. Helen is the most hated woman in Greece for a war waged in her name by men. Women are beaten and raped and bought and sold and murdered in story after story written by men to be read and used by men to prove the inferiority of our humanity. And this is why Miller’s emphatic declaration of Circe’s womanhood is both beautiful and painful at once. Even as we read line after line of strength and resilience and unapologetic womanliness, we can’t escape the knowledge that it will be used against her, that it has been used against her. That it has been used against us.
Circe is more than a woman and that is crucial to the telling of her story, but the fact that she is irreplaceable as a woman cannot be ignored. It matters, to the story and to the readers. To readers like me, who know that her narrative is filled to the brim with pieces of my own, with pieces of my mother’s and sister’s and every woman’s, everywhere. To exist as a woman is a singular experience, and Madeline Miller has captured it expertly in these pages. Cavendish‘s words have never felt more applicable than to this story of a woman who lives like a bat and labors like a beast, but in the end, refuses to die like a worm.
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