Helios’ daughter, Circe, is described in the tenth song of the Odyssey as the “blond-haired beauty”, the goddess of nature and wild animals. Due to the ups and downs of her existence, Circe lives alone in a house in the center of the island of Eea, surrounded by a forest that makes her independent and wise and therefore strong for survival. Carmen Estrada explains in Odiseicas that it is therefore “absolutely dangerous to the mentality of many.” Thus, Kirke has historically been a magician who turns people into animals with a drink, deviant to the timid and generous to the brave.
According to Estrada, Circe and Penelope are the most manipulated and misinterpreted characters in the Odyssey by later literature. With Ovid, who associates him with black magic, notoriety comes to Circe, and soon he will become not only a magician, but also sensual and jealous. In The Odyssey, Circe pretends to be a witch when she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, but later turns them back into human form. But she provides the trick for Ulises not to hear the sirens sing and helps her walk when she feels like it; she even advises him to support his journey: as Tiresias must go to Hades to seek his prophecy, Circe tells him the best path and sacrifices he has to offer and how he will survive the next chapters.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Circe is the subject of chapter 15, and Joyce, as befits his reputation, sets the scene in a brothel at midnight; The art represented here is magic, the symbol is the prostitute, and the technique used is hallucination evoked by drug ingestion or magic. The scene of the episode is so chaotic that it turns into a Walpurgis night, an extreme carnival, and thus the scene where Bloom unleashes her most obscene thoughts. When Bloom takes to the street, she is surrounded by deformed creatures, painted women and violent men in a filthy environment and in the middle of the fog. This is a decidedly negative portrait of Circe that European Modernism has inherited.
Lourdes Ortiz will pay attention and give voice to this in the story Los motivos de Circe, published in 1991. In the titled book, Ortiz describes, among others, what the two wives of Ulises, Penelope and Circe, were feeling; How the legitimate woman can bear to wait in front of how she experienced Circe’s departure; Circe, who shared with him all those nights, many memories of his wars and travels, many whispered stories between hugs. Ortiz also speculates on the reasons why Circe might have to turn every man who approaches her island into a monster.
As early as 1974 Margaret Atwood humanized Circe’s motifs in her poetry collection Circe/Mud Poems. And in prose it will be Begoña Caamaño who amplifies the voice of the character in Kirke or the taste of the blue. Caamaño reproduces the correspondence between Circe and Penelope during Ulysses’ time in Eea, and highlights the importance of a lineage of powerful women, queens, demigods, and goddesses. Circe talks not only about herself but also about the fate of her niece Medea, and Penelope does this about her cousins Andromache, Clytemnestra and Helena. She is individualized because they all talk and feel like human beings.
classic epic
There are three different levels of expression in Caamaño’s novel: what both women say, think and write. This transforms the text into an intense reading in complex and often poetic language and an analysis with various aspects, including intimate, social and political. Circe and Penelope explain letter by letter reasons and polish what we give as facts in the classic epic. From the point of view of women trapped in a highly restrictive role, family and affective relationships come to the fore and reveal the emotional world. Thus, Odysseus, whom Penelope briefly knew as his father, is a pure extra in the novel, while their son Telemachus gains importance because of his mother’s love.
Circe explains to Penelope, who believes she is cruel to men, that she does not turn them into monsters for cruelty or fun, but simply gives them the physical appearance that corresponds to their behavior. Showing their ferocity, their incontinence, in short their lack of control in human relations, as the sailors of Ulysses did when they arrived on the island, Circe gives them the way they are; in this case, pigs.
Encouraged by Circe and feeling more secure in a newly recognized sisterhood, Penelope dares to make decisions as queen of Ithaca. He scolds the impulsive Telemachus, maintains a relationship with his father-in-law, and enacts laws that support women, such as “preventing their husbands’ land from being taken from widows.” Therefore, Circe, who is responsible for Penelope’s transformation from a woman in waiting to a woman in action, achieves this not by any magic, but by the magic of words.
In 2018, American Madeline Miller also analyzes the personality that may be behind the character in her novel Circe. Miller brings together the myths known about Circe, brings them together and holds them together through the doubts, fear, anger, and love she may have felt. Circe is already a strong hero for literature, full of nuances and flaws, but human and real.