Relationality Reimagined: Madeline Miller’s Circe As Revisionist Myth

Abstract

Circe, by Madeline Miller, introduces readers to a reimagined version of the Greek goddess who hosted Odysseus for a year on her island. Miller affords rare authority and agency to a female protagonist, creating a nuanced study of power, value, and perception absent from other portrayals of female characters in heroic epics. Further, Circe’s inner world is mirrored in her relationship with nature, and in this way Miller’s novel offers insights instructive to our current era, the Anthropocene. Circe serves not only as revisionist myth, but as an ecofeminist cautionary tale and cultural corrective that speaks to the urgent issues of our time.