Circe by Madeline Miller and the strength of forgotten women
Updated: 3 days ago
"It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did." This quote from Madeline Miller's novel Circe captures the journey of a sorceress who defies convention, embraces her humanity, and breaks free from the shackles of perception.
Circe's appearance in Homer's Odyssey spans just 15 pages in Emily Wilson's 2017 translation. Miller takes that narrative gap and builds a full story out of what was once a minor character. I'm no expert on the Odyssey, and I only know the story superficially, but the idea of rescuing a character from the background and giving her a whole interior life has stuck with me ever since.
Other authors have done the same for other silenced women of Greek myth. Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls retells the Trojan War through Briseis, a woman Homer mentions mostly as a prize passed between men. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad lets Penelope speak for herself instead of being defined by her waiting. Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Shipsgoes further still, giving a voice to nearly every woman touched by the war, named and unnamed. Through these retellings, women like Penelope, Briseis, and Circe stop being background details and become full people.
What strikes me most is also the mundanity of it all. In the original myths, women are usually seen only from the outside: as obstacles, prizes, or warnings. Retellings give them an inside. We get their doubts, their boredom, their anger, the small domestic details no epic poem would bother with. That shift, from being looked at to being the one who looks, allows for this tenderness that comes from a female perspective.
This same instinct for vindication shows up outside literature, too. Reading Circe made me think of FKA Twigs' 2019 album Magdalene which reclaims Mary Magdalene from centuries of being reduced to a symbol of sin. In an interview with NPR, Twigs explained that the album relates to the unpaid, unacknowledged emotional labor women perform every day, and how she wanted to image Mary Magdalene as a full person.
I think, for me, it relates to the unpaid and unacknowledged emotional labor that women put into the world on a daily basis. Certainly ever since I was young, I was taught to nurture, and taught to be aware of myself socially, and aware of my emotions and [to] mother.
I've also been watching Tony McNamara's The Great (2020) which does something similar for a woman history remembers mostly as a footnote to her husband, Peter III. Catherine the Great is usually talked about in connection to scandals and rumors, but the show (subtitled "an occasionally true story") reimagines her as sharp, ambitious, and furious at being underestimated. It's not interested in getting any of the facts right so much as getting the feeling right: what it might have actually been like to be a woman with real intelligence and drive, trapped in a court that had no use for either. Elle Fanning, who plays Catherine, mentions in an interview for Elle how they wanted to make her a complex figure as well.
[With] shows about women, I think people want a 'strong female character!' I'm allergic to that. Catherine doesn't always have the right answer. Sometimes she's not the strongest or bravest person in the room.
I think these completely different formats and mediums all share one thing in common, something that touched me deeply: the idea of revisiting misunderstood, forgotten, and often ignored women in history. But it’s done in a subtle way, just looking and imagining who they could have been. These works flesh these women out in different ways but they flesh them out nonetheless. They are real, vulnerable, and human.
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