When I Was a Broken Thing

In the time since I could be called a “young adult,” the books given that label have gotten…rougher. Take Hatchet, for instance. I remember Brian Robeson eating turtle eggs and making a raft. Fast forward to today, where Circe’s protagonist is taunted by her sister as she cuts into her womb to fish out a voracious monster.

Even with this apparent maturation, I’m still apt to dismiss the genre as juvenile. That’s how I understood the set-up to Circe–all teenaged angst against impossibly-cruel adults. With its enormous stable of petty and deathless characters, Greek mythology seems like fertile ground for tapping into omnidirectional adolescent rage.

An unfair oversimplification like that should be expected from such a badly-aging thirty-something as myself. My background is specifically suspect because of how I first learned Circe’s story: as an impressionable teen being pushed through The Odyssey by an all-boy’s high school. If you’d asked me about Circe prior to reading Madeline Miller’s novel, I couldn’t have mustered more than “the witch who messed with Odysseus.” It’s with these biases in mind that I started the novel, hoping to give it a fair shake.

Even a literal reading of Circe is entertaining enough to warrant the effort. There’s the shocking brutality, sure, but that’s generally as upsetting as it is thrilling. You’ll also find sharp dialog, surprisingly-vast (for an ostensibly-imprisoned hero) adventure, and plenty of impressively-relatable thoughts on experiencing time as an immortal. Circe’s lifespan and fame allow her to reflect on the telling of her own story, and Miller goes for it:

Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hit, yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling. I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud which undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling woman seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

It can be a little on-the-nose, but after millennia neglected as a one-dimensional goth lady, it’s only fair that the character should get a chance to speak for herself about representation.

Miller is generally more subtle in her messaging, though; it just takes a bit of familiarity with the source material to recognize some of her handiwork. In imagining Circe’s sympathy for Prometheus, the novel her pays her tribute by simply considering her adolescence at all¹ and glorifies her by suggesting her altruistic side. Circe’s relationship with Hermes is amusing on its face (a coy romance that could conceivably survive millennia²), but on a deeper level, it legitimates a woman’s enjoyment of a lifestyle often reserved for men in contemporary times: physical intimacy without commitment. Speaking of which, Miller considers Circe’s love for Odysseus far more deeply than Homer ever did. The modern author paints it neither as a fulfillment of male power-fantasy nor as an irredeemable infidelity. Instead, it’s a mutually-fulfilling relationship among adults who understand each other intimately³.

What’s that, you say? All my examples of Miller’s modifications to the legend concern Circe’s interaction with men? Maybe that’s on me, or maybe it’s the author’s acquiescence to a patriarchy deeply entrenched in the mythology…

Except those are just the revisions! If Miller is criticizing the traditional stories by drawing attention to all the ways they lack empathy for this goddess, then her critique is actually the strongest when she’s simply developing the established events. Circe is wracked with guilt for destroying the life of a family member, with doubt while raising a child on her own, and with loneliness as she outlives her loved ones. These are not experiences I would have expected from “the witch who messed with Odysseus.”

For my money, though, the novel is most valuable as an allegory for LGBT solidarity: a critique of those who hold too tightly to their outmoded moral code (even at the expense of their own family), and a celebration of those who survive adversity to find a place with a chosen family (even when it means rejecting everything they’ve been raised to value). And maybe on the most metafictional level, it’s a reminder to give grace to the inimical. Everybody’s dealing with something.