Or, The Island, the Witch, and the Woman
Circe by Madeline Miller
There are things we think we know until a woman finally gets to tell her side of the story.
That is the particular magic of Madeline Miller’s Circe (2020, Little, Brown). In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is the beautiful witch on the island who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs. A memorable bit of mythology, certainly.
But Miller asks the more interesting question: What happened to Circe before a crew of starving men washed up on her shore?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Miller takes this famously minor character and gives her an enormous life…
…loneliness, jealousy, love, motherhood, rage, regret, and, most importantly, the hard-won discovery of her own power. Circe does not inherit her strength in the way the gods inherit everything else. She earns it. She learns it. She works for it.
And that may be the most human thing about this immortal woman.
Which brings me to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I loved the movie—the scale of it, the sweep, the sheer audacity of bringing Homer’s ancient world roaring onto the screen. But I confess: when we arrived at Circe’s island, I found myself thinking, Well. This is a bit much.
The men. The pigs. The transformation. The general…ooziness of it all.
Nolan gives us the spectacle of Circe. Miller gives us Circe herself.
And that distinction matters.
Because Circe is not really a story about turning men into pigs. It’s a story about what happens when a woman stops waiting for someone else to tell her who she is.
The mythology is ancient.
The voice is hers.
And suddenly, the whole story is different.
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Kyla Merwin 