{"id":28573,"date":"2019-06-06T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=28573"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:18:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:18:33","slug":"madeline-miller-on-circe-mythological-realism-and-literary-correctives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/madeline-miller-on-circe-mythological-realism-and-literary-correctives\/","title":{"rendered":"Madeline Miller on \u201cCirce,\u201d Mythological Realism, and Literary Correctives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madeline Miller is a Boston-born writer who currently lives in Philadelphia. Her degrees include a BA and MA in classics from Brown, and her first novel, The Song of Achilles<\/em>, won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her 2018 novel, Circe<\/em>\u2014critically acclaimed and a fixture on the New York Times<\/em> best-seller list that year\u2014is a sort of Odyssey <\/em>from the side. It begins as the story of a few of the women who have crucial parts to play in Odysseus\u2019s rambling, manly road trip, but as the novel goes on, we realize that its \u201cmythological realism\u201d is polyphonic, satirical, and, in the best sense of the word, upsetting.<\/p>\n

In planning the first few episodes of Recall This Book<\/em><\/a> (a new podcast partnered with Public Books<\/em>), we quickly put Miller on the top of our must-interview<\/em> list. Below is an edited version of our conversation with her. You can listen to the whole thing, which includes Miller reading two wonderful passages from Circe<\/em> and her recommendation of related books, here<\/a>, or by subscribing to Recall This Book<\/em> on iTunes<\/a>, or Stitcher<\/a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.<\/p>\n

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Madeline Miller<\/strong> (MM):<\/strong> I was born in Boston, but when I was about a year old, my parents moved to New York City, so I grew up in Manhattan, close enough that we could go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was a huge part of my upbringing. My mom would take me at least once a month; we would go and look at the Greek and Roman collections and the Egyptian collections, as well. Those were my favorite. My poor mother: I think she always wanted to go look at the impressionists, but I was very insistent.<\/p>\n

And then we moved to Philadelphia, for high school, and that was where I found my wonderful Latin teacher who taught me Homeric Greek. He saw that I was completely obsessed with these stories and took me aside, and said, \u201cI can have you reading the Iliad<\/em> in the original in about a year.\u201d I said, \u201cSign me up.\u201d So, he did this small group meeting with me and a few other students. We met on early morning Saturdays and before school. For a teenager, that\u2019s a really epic amount of effort, but it was all worth it.<\/p>\n

Gina Turrigiano<\/strong> (GT):<\/strong> That makes me wonder what besides the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em> inspired this story about Circe. There are only a few lines about her in the Odyssey<\/em>, yet you\u2019ve spun this wonderful, rich, deep story.<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> Well, there are four major sources about Circe, and that\u2019s pretty much it. One is Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>; another is Ovid. In the Metamorphoses<\/em>, she\u2019s the Goddess of Transformations\u2014and that was the source of the love triangle between Scylla, Glaucus, and Circe. I\u2019ve shaped it a little bit. Ovid is really interested in her power and her magic and her anger. He\u2019s not really interested in her psychology in the same way. He makes her a very pathetic figure: she\u2019s always falling in love with the wrong guy, and then she gets angry and lashes out. So, I wanted to give her much more of a psychological reason for doing what she does, for making this terrible mistake, and then, more importantly, I wanted to make her live with it.<\/p>\n

The meeting with her niece Medea\u2014the other great witch in ancient literature\u2014comes out of the Argonautica.<\/em> Jason and Medea really do show up on Circe\u2019s island looking for absolution from their various crimes. Medea does veil herself, hiding herself from Circe as she does in my book, but the meeting between them is totally imagined by me\u2014the dialogue and all of that.<\/p>\n

The fourth piece that I was using doesn\u2019t even really exist; it\u2019s lost to us. It\u2019s from an ancient epic like the Iliad <\/em>and the Odyssey<\/em>, but we only have it in summary. It\u2019s called the Telegony<\/em>. It\u2019s the story of Telegonous, Circe\u2019s son with Odysseus, growing up on the island of Aeaea, going off to find his father, then accidentally killing his father, and bringing his brother, Telemachus, and Penelope, Odysseus\u2019s wife, back to the island of Aeaea. Getting to animate that, and imagine this meeting between Circe and Penelope, was incredibly exciting.<\/p>\n

So, those were the four myths that I had. Everything else was me just kind of trying to figure out who this character was and who she would be, and there were some details within those texts that ended up being very important. Homer describes her as being \u201cthe dread goddess who speaks like a human.\u201d He doesn\u2019t really explain that at all\u2014what it means to speak like a human. That was incredibly important to me in imagining her character: she doesn\u2019t quite fully belong to the world of gods. She\u2019s standing with a foot in two worlds. Also, there is a very quick line in Ovid where he describes her as having an ingenium<\/em>\u2014a temperament\u2014that is more fitted for love. He means romantic love, but I took it to mean something more like empathy, which most gods (who today would be sociopathic narcissists) cannot experience.<\/p>\n

John Plotz (JP):<\/strong> Did you feel you had to be in concert with those four texts? Or if you needed to flip some of them, was it okay to do that?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> I absolutely felt like I could flip some of them. In fact, there\u2019s another story about her turning this guy named Picus into a woodpecker, in Ovid, but I just left that out entirely. It didn\u2019t fit, didn\u2019t speak to me. I was not interested in it at all. I did flip the Ovid a little bit\u2014when she [Circe] falls in love with Glaucous. I think The Odyssey<\/em> actually gave me the invitation to do that [rearranging], because the Circe section is not only contained within kind of the traditional male heroic model but is actually one of the parts of the Odyssey<\/em> that is narrated by Odysseus himself, telling the story to the Phaeacians. If you look at it [in] that light, it becomes an incredibly self-serving story. Here\u2019s Odysseus: he shows up on the island of this terrifying witch; he defeats her; she throws herself on him, and falls in love with him, and invites him to stay! It\u2019s a story designed to make him look really good. So, I felt like I could push back. Actually, the ending of the novel is a huge pushback against mythology, because the Telegony<\/em> ends with Circe, Penelope, Telemachus, and Telegonus all becoming immortal: she makes them all immortal, and they live as gods on the island of Aeaea. Again, that felt very uninteresting and unsatisfying, and I knew from the beginning that that was not the arc I was following. I felt like this is my Play-Doh, and I can do with it what I want.<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Helen DeWitt, Hand to Mouth<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Lee Konstantinou <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

GT:<\/strong> Yeah, I find that arc really interesting. There\u2019s a contradiction there, in that Circe is the only immortal who actually evolves and changes and learns, and the evolution of her understanding of the world and herself seems completely in contradiction to what the gods are like. They\u2019re static. They never change. They have powers that were bestowed upon them that they didn\u2019t have to discover, or learn to use. In your telling, she is moving towards mortality, even though she already has that property that makes mortality so interesting and beautiful. Why did you see it as important that she takes the last step?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> I really wanted her story to mirror the Odyssey<\/em>. In the Odyssey<\/em> [there] is this longing for nostos<\/em>\u2014the Greek word for homecoming. Odysseus is searching for his homecoming. Even once he gets to Ithaca, he still sort of has to find a way to defeat the suitors, and reestablish control over his household, and reestablish his relationship to his wife. I think Circe also spends a lot of the novel in her story longing for nostos.<\/em> I wanted her to be looking for her family\u2014her real family, her found family, and a sort of home, but she doesn\u2019t know where it is. It isn\u2019t like Ithaca. It doesn\u2019t exist geographically; it\u2019s something she has to decide and create. In that sense, I think she has all these qualities, but she doesn\u2019t have a community. In order to have those qualities, she has to live entirely alone. So, the one thing she still lacks is connection.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/strong> Do you call your work \u201cworld-making,\u201d or \u201cretelling,\u201d or \u201crediscovery\u201d? How do you think about it?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> I think about it as literary adaptation. Sometimes, I call the genre I write in mythological realism<\/em>. Even though I said I feel very free to make changes, the truth is I really like to write closely to the text. For instance, even just little moments like when Circe is described in the Odyssey <\/em>as having this beautifully braided hair, and it\u2019s the moment that\u2019s meant to make her seem very attractive and powerful and sexy. Therefore, the fact that she wants to sleep with Odysseus increases his status, as well. I wanted to sort of take those moments and transform them, and think, Well, why would her hair be braided<\/em>? Maybe it\u2019s because she\u2019s constantly in the woods and tromping around, and that\u2019s just practical. It would be coming from her perspective.<\/p>\n

So, I like interacting with the text that way, and kind of taking little moments and trying to interrogate them, examine them\u2014why they happen or what brings them together. Like the fact that, in the Odyssey<\/em>, Circe is the one who tells Odysseus how to get past the Sirens. She\u2019s the one who suggests that he tie himself to the mast, and leave his ears free. That was an incredibly telling moment for me: she understands him. You know, that is exactly the sort of person he is. Of course, he wants to hear the Sirens\u2019 song, and then go home and tell everyone about it, because he\u2019s the great storyteller.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/strong> Is the adaptation a corrective or a rebuke to previous versions, or augmentation?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> I do feel like it\u2019s a corrective in the sense that it\u2019s a balancing, that the text has been so bottom-heavy and pulling really strongly in this one direction. So, not a corrective in the sense that I want to supplant the original, of course, not that I could even do that if I did want to, but I never want to supplant the original. I love these stories; I really cherish them. But it feels important to bring balance to the perspective\u2014to say, \u201cOkay, we\u2019ve had three thousand years of the male-hero tradition; can we just pull on that a little bit and bring the female voices up?\u201d<\/p>\n

JP:<\/strong> Can I ask why you cherish them? I mean, given the things that you\u2019ve revealed about them, like the bottom-heaviness of them, why not just toss them out? One of the things I appreciate with Le Guin is that desire to say, \u201cWell, maybe we have been caught in the wrong dream for three thousand years\u2014so, what if I proposed a different dream?\u201d<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Muses Explain Things to Me<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Lindsay <\/a>\n \n L. Gibson <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

MM:<\/strong> I love that Odysseus and Achilles are complete disasters as heroes; they made terrible mistakes. They\u2019re incredibly proud and angry. They reign destruction down on the people around them\u2014the people that they love, not just their enemies. Achilles\u2019s name\u2014there are a couple different etymologies for it, but likely it comes from grief to the people<\/em>. Odysseus\u2019s name is related etymologically to the word that means to be hated<\/em>. So, Achilles, or Odysseus, is not who you would chose as an ideal hero, you know? Neither is a hero in the way we talk about heroes today\u2014as moral exemplars. They are these larger-than-life figures who make terrible mistakes\u2014like we all make mistakes.<\/p>\n

In seeing their mistakes, we connect with our own humanity and flawed nature. I connect to all the characters\u2014male and female\u2014and characters who are different from me. I guess I would say that I do want it to be a corrective\u2014in that I want it to be out there as another strong version of the story.<\/p>\n

GT:<\/strong> I read the new translation of the Odyssey<\/em> a few months ago and was struck by exactly that. Some aspects of their relationships with the gods are hard to relate to, yet there is also the familiar human aspect of their vanity, frailty, uncertainty, stupidity, their longing for connection with their families. It speaks to you through these many, many thousands of years, right? I also remember the first time I read the Odyssey<\/em> as a kid and being so disappointed that you only got these little glimpses of these stories through Odysseus\u2019s boastful storytelling. I wanted to know more about these characters, like Circe and Polyphemus. So, I wonder: Can you imagine wanting to tell more of these stories?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> Absolutely. I love the Emily Wilson translation [of the Odyssey<\/em>], and I think she, too, is trying to provide a corrective to some of the traditions of interpretation as well as to the original. She titles the Polyphemus chapter \u201cA Pirate in a Shepherd\u2019s Cave\u201d\u2014a real reversal of the way we look at this dynamic. I was looking at a similar thing with Odysseus, one of the most beloved heroes [today]: there\u2019s James Joyce, and there\u2019s the Tennyson poem, and we see him as the smart one. But the ancients thought he was a very difficult and problematic character. Usually, he was the villain in most of the ancient pieces, the Odyssey<\/em> excepted. Sophocles made him the villain, and he showed up as a very negative, deceitful, corrupt character in a lot of the stories. I wanted to bring in some of the darkness of his character, which I think Emily Wilson also brings out. She doesn\u2019t soft-pedal some of his more violent and frightening moments.<\/p>\n

GT:<\/strong> Right. The two faces of the trickster character.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/strong> Maybe that\u2019s a good context in which to go back to your term \u201cmythological realism\u201d? The Virgil example is really interesting, because, obviously, if you\u2019re thinking about Virgil, you\u2019re thinking about the story world Virgil is creating about Aeneas and the founding of Rome. Are you also thinking more like the Robert Graves, I, Claudius<\/em> world: that is, the actual Rome in which Virgil was writing? Is your writing, your mythological realism, inhabiting both those realms\u2014the historical as well as the story world?<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Translators and Other Icons<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Lily <\/a>\n \n Lily Meyer <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

MM:<\/strong> I always want it to be inhabiting as many worlds as possible, and I think these stories are very political and connected to things in history. I came out of a tradition as a young person [that involved] reading a lot of magical realism. I loved magical realism growing up, not just mythology. I loved Isabel Allende and I loved [Gabriel] Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Julia Alvarez and all these sorts of magical realist writers. They were books that I read again and again. It just felt very natural to have those [mythological] components in the story, and I think they\u2019re really doing something very interesting in the original. You know, Mary Renault does the opposite. She takes [the mythological elements] out, and I think that can be interesting, too. For me, I always wanted them in, because I think (like Ursula K. Le Guin said) those dragons can really serve us, you know?<\/p>\n

JP: <\/strong>That\u2019s totally fascinating, because I was thinking about how Renault pulls the mythology out. Or Rosemary Sutcliff\u2019s gritty Roman Britain stories: everyone very, very dirty, very, very cold. Do you think of yourself as following along the same belief paths of the original poets or writers who were creators of the story? Do you understand yourself as doing the same things that the original poets also did? Do you think they, too, were consciously crafting stories in which they put in supernatural explanations? Or do you think they were just telling the world they saw?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> For Homer, I think it\u2019s really hard to tell; but in Virgil\u2019s case, he was an Epicurean. He definitely did not<\/em> believe in the gods as he wrote them. In fact, I think that he uses the gods really as stand-ins (he alludes to this in the Eclogues<\/em>) for political figures who have all this power; [compared to those political figures we\u2019re] just ordinary mortals who are at their whim.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/strong> So, can you imagine writing mythological realism of the present day? I\u2019m not saying Percy Jackson, in which the gods go to summer camp, but could you imagine contemporary mythological realism?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> Absolutely, I also almost don\u2019t think you need to even do that. I mean, I think we\u2019ve had narcissists popping up and making things all about them for millennia. Stories about abuse of power and wanting to draw all attention to yourself and define the narrative are [all] things the ancients understood. You could absolutely translate it to modern times, but I think that it\u2019s all there in the original, too.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/strong> Did you have a vocation moment\u2014a \u201cRoad to Damascus\u201d moment?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> Yes, I did. When I was 13, I had this bizarre experience where my wonderful eighth-grade English teacher read us, I think, the last chapter of The Once and Future King<\/em>. It was like electricity was running through my brain. It was the last class of the day, and I ran home and wrote a time capsule for myself to open 25 years later. I closed it up, and I didn\u2019t look at it. Then, 25 years later, I opened it; it was just a couple years ago now. It said, \u201cI want to be a writer; I\u2019m going to be a writer.\u201d But I had hidden that from myself.<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n The Return of Homer\u2019s Women<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Eleanor <\/a>\n \n Eleanor Johnson <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

JP:<\/strong> Circe<\/em> has made an immense impression on readers. [When you meet your readers], do you think it\u2019s the book\u2019s contemporary dimension that people are responding to, or do you think they like the distance that it creates?<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s both. I think I hear from readers who are experiencing it both ways, which makes me really happy, because I wanted it to interrogate the original but also say, \u201cLook how it\u2019s still us; it\u2019s still people struggling with the same things.\u201d I\u2019ve always seen these stories as intensely modern, because I think that they are about human emotions and human life, even in very little ways. This is a really silly example, but there\u2019s a beautiful scene in the Iliad<\/em> where Hector and Andromache, his wife, are talking: she doesn\u2019t want him to go fight, and he has to fight. [Then] their little son Astyanax sees Hector with his big war helmet on and starts crying, because his father\u2019s wearing this big scary war helmet, and he doesn\u2019t recognize him. The other day I was with my husband and our little daughter, and he put on this baseball cap for the first time. She had never seen it before, and she just lost it. It was like he became a monster to her, and I thought, This is that moment, this is that domestic moment<\/em>! We know that Astyanax is going to be killed. We know that Andromache is going to be taken, so it has a much darker [element]\u2014but Homer also understands those very sweet, simple family\u2013person interactions. I love that, and I always want to bring those moments out.<\/p>\n

This article was commissioned by Kelley Deane McKinney<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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